‘Down to the cellar!’ Lotti shouted over the deafening roar. ‘Take the stairs, not the lift!’

Thrusting the bottle of Jack Daniels towards Hester she grabbed hold of her mother with one hand and the suitcase with the other. Ilse grabbed hold of two of the bronze and ivory figurines and then, together, they sprinted for the stairs.

They weren’t the only ones doing so. The family who lived on the floor above Zelda, a banker’s widow and her elderly parents and teenage daughter, was also hurtling pell-mell down them. No one emerged from the floor below, for they had left the city long ago. From the ground-floor apartment a stooped figure emerged, swathed in shawls and carrying a canary in a cage.

‘Into the cellar, Frau Menzel!’ Zelda shouted at her as the woman paused bewilderedly in her doorway.

As the petrified Frau Menzel still made no effort to move, Hester seized hold of her hand, dragging her after them.

‘What happens if the building falls on top of us and we can’t get out?’ Irmgard Diekermann, the banker’s widow, asked as the cellar door clanged behind them.

‘It won’t,’ Lotti snapped, knowing it was likely to do so at any moment. ‘And if it does, we’ll just have to hope we get dug out. There’s nowhere else we can go. We can’t reach a public shelter in this firestorm.’

‘My little Pee-Wee is frightened,’ Frau Menzel said waveringly as the canary beat its wings against the bars of its cage.

‘We’re all frightened, Frau Menzel,’ Ilse said gently. ‘Pee-Wee will settle down when the noise stops.’

Lotti looked at the bags and baskets that the Diekermann family had brought with them and was relieved to see that they seemed to be stuffed with food.

‘And there’s water,’ Zelda said, reading her thoughts. ‘Josef always insisted there was a large supply of bottled water down here. It’s kept at the back of the cellar, under a tarpaulin.’

‘How long is this likely to go on for?’ Irmgard Diekermann’s father rasped, directing his question at Lotti. ‘I’m eighty-six. I don’t have good bladder and bowel control and there are no proper facilities down here. Only buckets.’

‘I don’t know, Herr Diekermann, but there will be lulls, and when there are I’m sure Frau Menzel will be happy for you to use her ground-floor bathroom.’

The lulls, when they came, were few and far between. For the most part the shelling was incessant. Time ceased to have meaning. A day passed, and then two days.

Hester, with her nightmare memory of being buried alive in the tunnel at Unter den Linden, fought down crippling panic attacks, fortified by occasional swallows of the precious Jack Daniels.

Lotti and Herr Diekermann both occasionally left the cellar, Herr Diekermann to take advantage of Frau Menzel’s bathroom facilities, Lotti to get the feel of what was happening on the streets.

‘Russian tanks are in Bismarckstrasse,’ she said tautly, returning from one such dangerous sortie. ‘The fighting is still going on, but it looks as though resistance is crumbling. I saw lots of white flags.’