The elderly lady on the bunk beneath hers sagged against one of the metal supports, ashen-faced. With speed and dread Hester remade her bunk for her. The speed was because if she were to be seen doing so, punishment would follow. The dread was because when illness claimed a prisoner she disappeared, never to be seen again. And that this fate hovered over the woman whose bed she was now making was all too obvious.

There were fifty women in the barracks and as they washed in cold water and then dressed in coarse-cotton prison dresses, none of them spoke to each other. It wasn’t allowed.

Of all the rules and regulations designed to make their existence as miserable as possible, this was the one she minded the least. What conversation could possibly make the day that lay ahead even a smidgeon more endurable?

Silently, as she ate the thin porridge that was breakfast, she prayed, knowing that, incredible as it seemed, she had a lot to be grateful for.

For one thing she was alive—and she was convinced that her being alive was due only to a bureaucratic glitch. When she had first been arrested and taken to Gestapo headquarters for questioning—and after her British passport had been burned before her eyes—she had been told that as a traitor to the state, she was to be beheaded.

Then had come confusion. There were several other women being held in cells at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, all of whom were awaiting transportation to Ravensbrück, and when they were all herded out of their cells and into a truck, so was she.

The very thought of Ravensbrück made her want to faint. Death had stalked every day of being there. It was there she had first learned what real hunger was and that there were worse fates than being executed—that there were medical ‘experiments’ carried out in what was euphemistically termed ‘the hospital wing’. Just when she was convinced she was about to be one of those selected to undergo unspeakable torture in the name of Nazi genetic experimentation, she was selected instead for cook and kitchen duties—and not at Ravensbrück, but at Sachsenhausen.

Sachsenhausen was twenty miles nearer to Berlin than Ravensbrück and a camp mainly for men. Shortly after she arrived there, so did thousands of communists, social democrats and former trade union leaders as well as nine hundred Jews. For them, the regime was just as brutal as the regime she had endured at Ravensbrück. There was excruciating hunger, slave-labour work in several adjoining factories and daily executions.

It was an existence she and the other women who carried out cooking and kitchen duties were spared. Their work was to prepare the food for the prisoners and for the SS guards and the soldiers guarding the camp. Heavy work was involved too. Carrying giant metal food containers almost as big as themselves from lorries into the kitchens.

And though they were spared many of the horrors they had endured at Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen held one that was new to them.