Claus was different, though. In the early years of her involvement with Hugo’s family, Claus had been as much a part of family life as Ilse and Lotti had been. His Nazi Party membership and his taking over ownership of the Ruhr steelworks and armament factories had put distance between him and Hugo, but there had never been a complete break. She knew they had always regarded themselves more as brothers divided by ideology, than as cousins divided by it.

And now she was faced with the prospect that if the factory was a House of Remer factory, Claus was responsible for the conditions in the bombed-out camp she and his other slave labourers would be returning to that evening. That there would soon be deaths among the weakened, severely brutalized Russian women was obvious—and that someone who was related to her by marriage would be responsible for those deaths was something she could barely comprehend.

The SS guards who had accompanied them from Sachsenhausen remained with them both in the POW camp they were now occupying and at the factory, and there were still beatings for the slightest misdemeanour. Talking when they shouldn’t talk, slowing down in their work output when exhaustion became too much for them.

‘But at least there are no punishment blocks here,’ Detta said to her with deep feeling one night as they lay in cramped discomfort on their narrow bunks. ‘And we’re no longer in fear of being taken out on someone’s whim and shot.’

Hester bit her lip. Being taken out and shot had never held any terrors for her. What had held terrors were rumours of the special room where prisoners were killed by a gallows adapted to hang three or four prisoners at the same time.

Over the next few weeks their lives took on a set routine. A water tap was installed in the camp. A kitchen of sorts was established, their food rations never exceeding the rations they had received at Sachsenhausen. Though the work at the factory was lighter than the work at the brickworks, the constant presence of the guards still ensured their days were full of fear and pain. As slave labourers they were completely segregated from the other workers. When the regular Remer workers broke at lunchtime and headed for the canteen, they toiled on. The toilets at the factory were forbidden to them; instead, a primitive privy was provided for their use in the factory yard, a privy that couldn’t be visited except in the company of an SS guard, a privy that was horrendously inadequate for two hundred women.

Their weakened condition on arrival at the factory, combined with the overcrowding in the barracks, the inadequate water supply, the lack of food, their intolerably long working hours, meant that it wasn’t very long before there was a death.

‘A Russian woman died today,’ Marta, who worked in a different part of the factory, said to them one evening as they shared out their paltry food rations. ‘The guards simply dragged her body to one side and left it there and the foreman raised hell. He said he was going to report what had happened to the manager—which means both the foreman and the manager will probably be in Sachsenhausen themselves by the end of the week.’