With a docility that had her grandfather despairingly burying his head in his arms, Gertrud left the cellar hand in hand with the young officer.

For the next hour no one said anything. Even her mother was silent.

When Gertrud returned to them she was composed, not crying. ‘His name is Andrei Koniev,’ she said, a defiant set to her slim shoulders. ‘He wants me to be his war-wife for as long as he is in Berlin.’

Her mother let out a howl of protest and Gertrud squared her shoulders even further. ‘And because I am now his war-wife, no one will now come here to rape us,’ she said to Lotti. ‘Andrei is a major and we are now under his protection.’

Her mother, who had never been forced with a sub-machine gun at her back to go up the cellar stairs and into Frau Menzel’s desecrated apartment to be raped at gunpoint, began sobbing, gasping that she now had a daughter who had become shameless, a daughter who was no better than a prostitute.

They were accusations that, to Lotti’s relief, Gertrud was indifferent to.

The incessant artillery fire had now become only spasmodic, and though none of them had any desire to leave the cellar for their shrapnel-damaged, plundered apartments—feeling far more secure when all together—they did begin to leave the cellar for forays on the streets.

‘Don’t head towards Spandau,’ Lotti said after one such expedition, fearful that her mother might be considering trying to reach Claus’s factory for word of him. ‘There’s what looks to have been a massacre at the bridge over the Havel. It’s blocked on both sides of the river with burned-out trucks and tanks and bodies, and there’s still shooting going on.’

Though Gertrud’s protector was now supplying them with food, it was never enough for all ten of them and, as there were none of their original provisions left, Lotti and Hester had taken it upon themselves to do all the necessary foraging.

It wasn’t easy, because everyone else who had been sheltering from the fighting and the storm of artillery fire was doing the same thing. Hunger was no longer the correct description for what Berliners were suffering. What they were suffering was starvation.

The gardens behind a near by bombed-out house had proved to be an excellent source of dandelion leaves and it was when Hester and Lotti were back-breakingly gathering them that they heard Ilse frantically shouting their names.

Lotti sprinted out of the garden in the direction of Ilse’s voice, vaulting a railing that still stood at its perimeter. Ilse raced to meet her.

‘A Russian has taken Mutti into Frau Menzel’s apartment!’ she shouted. ‘He’s drunk. He’s armed. There was nothing we could do to stop him. He was uncaring when we said we were under Major Koniev’s protection. I offered to go with him in Mutti’s place, but he just laughed at me…’

Lotti sped past her, running in the direction of their semi-wrecked apartment block as she had never run before in her life.