‘No, it means I can speak his dialect and he sometimes tells me things. He told me the authorities are increasingly desperate for bricks the Allied bombing raids are having a devastating impact. Hamburg has been really badly hit, as have all the other ports in this area, plus the Ruhr cities and Berlin, of course. So the more bricks they need, and the harder we’re having to work, the more it’s a sign that the Nazis are being defeated!’

There were other benefits to having to work through the night at the brickworks. The enormous kilns meant it was warm inside in contrast to the icy conditions in the camp huts. And they received slightly better food. In the camp, their main meal of the day was brought to their hut in a large pot after the evening roll call and heated up on a gas stove. It was a gruel-like concoction made mostly from vegetable peel with the occasional chunk of rotten meat thrown in. It wasn’t unknown for them to find bits of animal carcass floating in it, sometimes with fur still attached to the skin. But if they had their main meal in the factory, the foremen would make sure they each had a piece of bread with it, which was occasionally not stale. Sometimes they’d give them raw potatoes, and when the guards weren’t looking, they’d bake the potatoes on the kilns. Prince couldn’t recall ever eating anything more delicious.

There were forty men in their hut in the camp, the majority Dutch or Belgian, plus a handful of Germans, a few French and a couple of Norwegians. The Russians, Ukrainians and Poles tended to be grouped together in other huts, often with quite violent consequences.

The atmosphere in their hut was not as visceral as it could be in others. Some of the nationalities didn’t particularly like each other, but nor was there any deep-seated hatred. The atmosphere was more one of quiet resignation: most of their time there was spent in a state of exhaustion and hunger. Just staying alive and out of trouble kept them occupied.

At the back of Prince’s mind was a constant anxiety that the Nazis hadn’t forgotten why he’d been sent to the camp in the first place. He was all too aware that he was here because another French prisoner had denounced him at Peenemünde, and he found it hard to believe that that was the end of the matter. He was convinced that sooner or later someone at Peenemünde or even here at Neuengamme would get round to looking at his file and decide to question him again.