And then, her rancorous gaze sweeping over the rest of the group, the guard switched back to German, barking out a series of orders so quickly that Nina couldn’t decipher a single word. The prisoners formed a queue, with the nasty female guard at its head and a male guard, his rifle held at readiness, at the rear, and they set off across the open ground, back in the direction of the gate Nina had passed through the day before.

No one was panicking; no one seemed particularly fretful or frightened. Perhaps it really was nothing more sinister than a work detail. The girl from the bunkhouse was there, not far ahead, walking calmly enough. She’d mentioned working in the fields. That was something Nina knew how to do.

They walked on and on, kilometer after kilometer, nearly the entire way uphill, and if there were other living souls about they remained hidden behind closed doors and impenetrable hedgerows. At last they turned onto a private drive, its gravel pockmarked with puddles and dead weeds. At its terminus was a fine old palazzo, its many windows shuttered tight, though men in uniform were coming and going from its main entrance.

The guards led them inside, into an echoing ballroom where the least movement cast up flurries of dust, and pointed at a jumble of buckets. A few of the women seemed to know what to do, for they gathered up their buckets, plucked a few rags from a pile on the floor, and filed through a door at its far end. Nina collected her own bucket and rag and followed them along a gloomy corridor to a scullery, where they each filled their buckets from a single cold-water tap. Back to the ballroom they went, and one by one they dropped to their knees, a meter or so apart, and began to scrub the floor.

It was thankless work, not least because they’d been given no soap, but Nina, thanks to Rosa, did know how to scrub a floor properly. A few of the women had no notion of what to do, or worked so slowly that they angered the guards. One poor old lady’s hair was pulled savagely by the female guard for failing to wring out her rag with sufficient vigor.

It was torture to hear and witness such things and be too afraid to intervene. Nina’s heart bled for those who were being treated so awfully, but she knew she would be beaten if she tried to stop any of it. And she didn’t think she could bear for anyone to hit her again.