They weren’t taken straight to the factory. They were taken to a badly bombed-out, empty POW camp. The barracks that were still standing were fitted with bare bunks, though not enough bunks for two hundred women. There was no visible kitchen. No toilet block as such, only urinals. No sign of any access to water.

When one of the Jehovah’s Witnesses bravely pointed out that there were not enough bunks, the guard simply snapped that the urinals would have to be used as sleeping places.

Once again Detta’s and Hester’s eyes met. It looked as if their living conditions were going to be as grim as those at Sachsenhausen.

‘But the work will be better,’ Detta whispered to her the next morning when, after a breakfast of watery-thin gruel, they were marched out of the old POW camp and the half mile to the factory. ‘And at least we’re in Berlin, even though it is a part of the outskirts of the city I’m not familiar with. Are you?’

Hester shook her head. She had never spoken much to Detta about her life in Berlin. Detta knew she was married to someone called Hugo, who, though he had a German father, had been born in England and had an English mother. She had never told Detta that the name under which she was imprisoned was her maiden name. For someone in her situation, the name Remer was best left unspoken.

The factory was large and sprawling and gave the appearance of being well run. As they were marched across the factory yard, existing workers stopped what they were doing and crowded the windows to stare down at them.

‘Well may they stare,’ Detta whispered to her bitterly. ‘We look like the living dead.’

A foreman hurried out to meet them, giving the SS officer in charge of the prisoners a hasty ‘Heil Hitler’.

‘There are two hundred of them,’ the officer said, presenting a clipboard to the foreman. ‘Have you the authority to sign or will Herr Remer sign for them?’

‘As if we were parcels,’ she heard Marta Tuja say bitterly.

Hester paid her no attention. She was too busy trying to stay upright, trying not to totter with sheer shock.

Was the Remer in question, Claus? Was the factory making use of half-starved, regularly beaten and degraded women a House of Remer factory?

Sensing that for some reason she was on the verge of fainting, Detta and Marta pressed close against her so that they were able to give her support without appearing to do so.

By the time they were marched into the factory itself Hester had recovered her balance, but her head was still spinning. Vainly, she tried to remember if Hugo had ever mentioned to her that his uncle had a textile factory in Berlin. She didn’t think he had done, but then Hugo had hardly ever talked about Josef Remer. He had never been close to him. ‘Uncle Josef is a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi’ was one of the rare things he ever said about him, and few family occasions had ever included him.