The woman cleared her throat and waited until the only sound to be heard was the wind in the trees, and then she began to talk, her voice high and weirdly atonal, and she spoke so quickly that Nina couldn’t manage to unravel one single syllable from the next.

Nor, from the look on their faces, could most of the other prisoners, and the aufseherin, or whatever she was, just kept droning on, a slowly deflating balloon, oblivious to the bafflement on the faces of those she was addressing.

At last she finished, and whatever she said next seemed to be some kind of dismissal, for the guards who had carried in their supper earlier now shooed the women back to the barracks, returning minutes later with a bucket of lukewarm tea and a stack of tin cups. Once again each woman stood in line and gulped down a few unsatisfying mouthfuls of tea and ceded her place to the next woman in the queue. The brew was bitter and tannic, and Stella protested at her first sip, but Nina urged her to drink it down.

“The water in this was probably boiled,” she explained quickly, fearing the guards would push Stella aside, “and that means it’s clean. Go on.”

“But there’s a tap in the latrines,” Stella protested. “Some of the others were drinking from it.”

“Yes, and they’re the ones who’ll get sick first. I promise they will. So drink that tea. Hold your nose if you have to.”

As soon as the tea was gone and the cups were handed back, the guards retreated to the doors, but not before issuing one final round of instructions.

“We’ve got half an hour before lights-out,” Stella translated. “There’s a bucket at each end of the barracks for anyone who needs to use the latrines during the night.”

“What did that woman say to everyone at appell?” Nina asked. “I couldn’t keep up.”

“She said she is Oberaufseherin Klap. I think that means she’s in charge of the others? She said we’re here to work, and if we don’t work we’re useless to her. We need to earn our keep. We need to meet our quotas and behave or we’ll be punished.”

“Did she say what sort of work we’ll be doing?” another woman asked.

Stella shook her head. “Only that appell tomorrow morning is at five o’clock and work starts at seven.”

They found space on an upper bunk without much trouble, and soon they were settled under the blanket, which smelled of nothing worse than muddy sheep, and when the lights went out it wasn’t quite so hard to face the dark.