The sub-machine guns were trained on them now. ‘Frau, komm!‘ one of the soldiers said, indicating with a wave of his gun Hester, Ilse and herself. ‘Frau, komm!’

It was something that was to become routine over the next few days. The cellar door would be stoved in and Russian soldiers, always in groups of three or four and always with guns at the ready, would haul her, Hester, Ilse and Gertrud up the cellar steps and into Frau Menzel’s apartment.

The only way to survive was to try as hard as they could to mentally detach themselves from what was happening. It was something Hester had learned to do long ago when in Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen, and it was an ability Ilse and Lotti swiftly acquired. Gertrud Diekermann couldn’t acquire it, though.

‘It’s not your fault,’ Lotti told her time and time again as the sixteen-year-old cried and rocked herself backwards and forwards ceaselessly. ‘You’ve nothing to be ashamed of, Gertrud. It’s not your fault.’

As she held the weeping girl in her arms she often thought about Eva, wondering if Eva and her fellow nurses were also suffering mass rape, or if their uniforms were serving as protection.

As their cellar-like existence lengthened into a week and the fighting in and around Charlottenburg continued, Gertrud Diekermann’s agony came to an unexpected end. Instead of a group of filthy and bearded soldiers forcing a way in on them, a Russian officer, shaved and smartly uniformed, confronted them. There was a military decoration on his tunic and when he took his helmet off, he revealed a head of wiry fair hair.

‘Tag,’ he said pleasantly.

His eyes flicked over Helga, the injured woman they had taken in, and over Irmgard and her parents. When he surveyed Zelda, still in her flamboyant red dress with its purple cummerbund, his eyebrows rose slightly and then his gaze passed on, over Hester, Ilse and Lotti. When they reached Gertrud he spoke. ‘Fräulein, komm bitte,’ he said politely—and held out his hand.

It was the kind of opportunity Lotti had never been faced with before. The officer was alone, and though he was armed with a pistol, it was in a holster on his hip, not in his hand.

Her pistol was within hand’s reach, hidden beneath a pile of bloodied bandages. A hiding place that had, so far, served them well.

Very slowly, she moved her hand towards it.

Ilse, standing a few feet away from her, caught her eye, looked meaningfully towards Gertrud, looked back towards her again and shook her head.

Lotti, her hand on the bloodied bandages, did as Ilse was silently bidding her and looked towards Gertrud.

There was a very peculiar expression on Gertrud’s face. It wasn’t exactly compliance, but it was verging on it.

Reading the urgent message in Ilse’s eye, she drew her hand back. This wasn’t the usual situation. It wasn’t a situation calling for the use of the pistol—especially when such use could put all of them in danger of retribution.