It was the half-light of night-time, but I could see the cage: the floor was strewn with dead women. They seemed to be everywhere, lying across the mattresses, flung on top of each other, groups of them gripping the bars, in heaps, scattered in an appalling chaos. Some were naked, the dresses of others were in tatters, they were in frightful attitudes, tormented, their mouths and eyes open, their fists clenched as if they’d fought and killed one another in the madness from which death had snatched them.

Here, the siren had gone off in the middle of the artificial night, the door was locked and the guards—of course!—hadn’t bothered to open it. The women had tried. They’d died of grief, long before hunger had killed them. Without food, furious and desperate, how many days had they spent clawing at the bars with their remaining strength, trying to prise open the lock without keys or tools, their fingers bleeding, trying to achieve the impossible—sick, crazed, lying down exhausted and then getting up again to attack the steel with their bare hands, screaming, crying, dazed, sometimes recovering their wits to contemplate their fate and flee it in fury, and now they stank, distended, putrid and green, infested with maggots that swarmed over their decaying bodies, a grotesque image of the fate that could have been ours, had it not been for an incredible stroke of luck.

Our companions joined us, the first with hasty steps, then drawing slowly to a halt. Anthea, Dorothy and I were gradually pushed back and we found ourselves lined up against the walls of the bunker, as far as possible from the cage, forty live women staring at the forty dead women. We stood there for a long time, speechless with horror, then Dorothy kneeled down and I heard her say softly:

‘Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us poor sinners …’

Later, she told us that she had dredged this up from her childhood, when her grandmother had taught her the Christian prayers without her parents knowing.

The other women also kneeled down and echoed her words, as if, in the face of horror, ancient rituals regained their meaning. The muted drone of jumbled words rose above the terrible jumble of corpses, then Rose’s voice could be heard. She sang, and at once her rich, powerful soprano filled the air. I didn’t understand the words, but the tone was so slow, sad and profound that horror turned into grief and I felt my heart contract. When she stopped, we were silent, then we left noiselessly, one at a time, and very slowly made our way back up.

That evening, Anthea explained that Rose had sung the prayer for the dead, in Latin, a language that had been dead for so long that it was only used for ceremonies. I didn’t understand, I have still not really understood what a ceremony is, but if anyone ever reads these pages, they’ll know.

That day, we stayed put. Returning to the camp, nobody was able to eat and we sat for hours without speaking. It was not until dusk that we ate a little food and began conversing again. So we hadn’t been the only prisoners. There was another bunker, exactly the same as ours. These two facts devastated us. We had no idea what had happened to us: at times it seemed as if our discovery would shed some light on things, but at others it made everything seem even more confusing. Looking back now, I can quite simply state that we found ourselves plunged even deeper in the absurd.