It was then that Claus knew why Todt had singled him out to speak to. As a highly decorated soldier, Todt’s opinion of industrial tycoons who had no experience of battle would always have been low, but the use of prisoners of war as slave labour was something that quite obviously offended every military principle he had ever lived by—and the House of Remer was using such prisoners in their hundreds.

He downed the brandy, understanding the contempt in Christian Todt’s eyes only too well. It was a contempt he also felt and, as his contempt was directed against himself, he wondered how on earth he was going to live with it.

After over three long years of imprisonment, Hester scarcely knew if she was alive or dead, except she knew that death would be preferable; that death would be a blessed release. For spilling gravy when serving it, she’d been savagely beaten by the Camp Commandant and banished from all kitchen duties. She hadn’t, though, been sent back to Ravensbrück. She was still at Sachsenhausen; still living in total terror.

While she had been on privileged kitchen duties for the officers and Commandant, nearly all her fellow Jews had been transported elsewhere. As rumour had it, to camps in Poland. In their place had come hundreds of Russians. As a German she was kept separate from the Russian women and her fellow prisoners were German Jehovah’s Witnesses who had been sent to the camp when their husbands had been imprisoned for refusing to use their skills in aiding the Nazi war effort or to do military service.

She was now one of the longest-surviving among the female prisoners and for that she had her time in the kitchens to thank, for there she had been able to supplement her meagre food ration and keep up her strength. There was no way of supplementing it now. The daily bread ration was 350 grams and she and the women she shared a table with had to break up the loaf given them and divide it into pieces themselves. It meant the pieces were always uneven and that there was always a largest one.

Time after time she was grateful for their devoutly Christian nature, as when Detta Rödel had wisely suggested they share the largest piece by rota.

As day after day she endured the agony that life had become and the back-breaking labour of the work she was now assigned to in the camp’s brickworks, Detta was an inspiration to her. Though she now looked to be easily sixty, Detta was only her own age. Married, with two small children, all Detta had to do to be released from the hell they shared, was to renounce her religion. And Detta resolutely refrained from doing so.

‘Sachsenhausen is a test,’ she said often to Hester. ‘Do you remember the story of Abraham in the Bible? He was told to sacrifice his son and the scriptures tell us he was willing to do it. But then our creator, Jehovah, saw that he was willing and so he didn’t allow it. He just wanted to test his faith. And that is what I believe is happening to me.’