Though Hester had a profound faith of her own, she didn’t share Detta’s attitude to their suffering, for to her it didn’t make sense, not when those around them were losing their lives so cruelly. She did, however, come to admire the depth of Detta’s faith. And she especially valued Detta’s staunch, supportive friendship.

‘Don’t do it,’ Detta had said to her fiercely one day when, in freezing sub-zero temperatures, they had been forced to stand for hour after hour in the prison yard, waiting for a roll call to be taken.

Aware that Detta had been reading her thoughts, she had dragged her eyes away from the electrified fence that ran round the camp a yard or so in front of the high brick walls. It was the last resort for those unable to bear their suffering any longer and the temptation to do as they had done, to commit suicide by sprinting across and grabbing hold of it, had been nearly overpowering.

Now, as under close guard they limped and dragged themselves back from the brickworks towards Sachsenhausen’s barracks, wearing nothing but rags and roughly made clogs, Detta whispered to her, ‘I’ve heard a rumour some of the Russian women are being detailed as labour to a factory in Spandau. A clothing factory. Perhaps, with luck, they’ll include us. The work can’t be as hard as it is in the brickworks.’

They both knew they wouldn’t be able to survive the back-breaking work in the brickworks for much longer.

Not wanting to attract the guards’ attention, Hester merely nodded. Spandau was in the suburbs of Berlin, about twenty miles away. The thought of Berlin brought back such memories of her life there, memories of her childhood home in Haberlandstrasse and of the flat in Kaiseralle she and Hugo had lived in, that she wanted to weep. She wondered if Nicholas and Ilse were still living in the city, if Lotti was still sharing a flat in Lützowstrasse with her friends, if they were all still alive. And last, but not least, she wondered if they remembered her.

‘Prisoners Rödel, Dresner, Abt, Riedweg, Stangl and Tuja are to join the Untermensch labour force for Spandau,’ the guard said next morning, walking down the crowded barracks and slamming each bunk he passed with his truncheon.

Untermensch was the way the guards always referred to the Russians. It meant sub-human, dross, dung.

‘Take your blankets. You may be moving into a camp nearer the factory.’

As she folded up the thin coarse cloth that masqueraded under the name of a blanket, Hester’s eyes met Detta’s. Hopefully, this was going to be a move for the better. Hopefully, they weren’t going to find themselves travelling east, as the majority of the Jews in the camp had done two years ago. Travelling east never to be heard of again.

They travelled by train, in freight wagons. Hester estimated there were well over two hundred of them, all Slavs except for the handful of German Jehovah’s Witnesses and herself. She and the Jehovah’s Witnesses had clogs on their feet but the majority of the Russian women were barefoot, their hair shorn, their sole clothing a sack with holes for their arms and head. As she saw open festering sores on their legs and feet she knew that, hellish and degrading as her and Detta’s imprisonment had been, the treatment meted out to them had not been as bad as that meted out to those the guards called Untermensch.