As bombs continued to fall, the noise of explosions so horrendous she thought her eardrums were going to burst, she reflected that it was only due to his iron self-control that they weren’t lovers, for ever since the moment when he had recognized her in his factory’s corridor, he had behaved in a manner that had cut him off from meaningful contact with anyone but her.

No one else knew him as she did. In order to continue having influence with the bureaucrats at the SS Main Administrative and Economic Office and the SS commanders at Sachsenhausen and the camp from which his Ruhr workers had come, he’d had to continue acting out the part of a dedicated Nazi totally loyal to the Führer. No other option had been open to him. It meant that Ilse and Lotti and their friends—and anyone who thought like them—shunned and avoided him. He couldn’t be his true self to them and he certainly wasn’t his true self when with the Nazi hierarchy he of necessity fraternized with. Only with her could he be the person he truly was and, as she could have no contact with anyone save him, it had meant they had become utterly necessary to each other.

Another terrifying crash shook the house and she hugged her arms even closer around her chest, shamed by the knowledge that though she still loved Hugo, she could barely remember her life with him. It was all so long ago—more than six years—and so much had happened to her in the intervening years.

Suddenly, there was a piercing whistle and an explosion so tremendous the entire cellar seemed to jar and tilt. The lights went off and she scrabbled to find the emergency torch. Just as she did so, there came an even more terrible sound. The rumble and roar of falling masonry.

Panic tightened her throat so she could hardly breathe. Of all her nightmares when enduring a raid, the worst was of the house being bombed and collapsing in such a way that all exits from the cellar—even the second exit Claus had made and which surfaced some twenty yards away in the garden—were blocked and that she would be buried alive.

The terrible roaring noise went on and on. Great billows of black dust swirled down the cellar steps accompanied by such a hurricane of sound that she knew it was the sound of the house collapsing in a mountain of rubble above her head.

‘Please God, don’t let me be buried alive!’ she prayed, knotting her hands together, beads of sweat falling onto them. ‘Please God, let me get out! Please God! Please!’

Clouds of dust continued to surge into the cellar. She was coughing. Choking. It was so obvious that exit via the cellar steps was now impossible that she didn’t even attempt to mount them. Instead, uncaring that the raid was still taking place directly overhead, she made a run for the tunnel entrance.

It was so narrow and wet and dark and claustrophobic that she’d only ever used it once before, and that had been when Claus had just finished excavating it and had asked her to test it out.