The temperature had dropped and it had rained heavily overnight, the balmy summer wiped out in a stroke as if it had never been. Which seemed appropriate, in a way, their coach arriving at Auschwitz in the sullen grey light of mid-morning. Not all of the tour group were present. Audrey had cried off at the last minute, another five of her passengers had never had any intention of going, and Connie didn’t blame them.

The buildings seemed solid, almost prosaic, at first. Not immediately ghastly. Not until she faced the infamous glass cases of shoes and matted hair, the suitcases and spectacles. Then Connie went cold. And the silence. Queues and queues of people, hundreds probably, at any one time, filing slowly past the exhibits in the purpose-built barracks, and barely a sound to be heard.

‘You first.’ Tim stood aside to allow her to enter the wooden hut. It was freezing inside, the floor just mud, the visitors stepping across duck boards. Most of the wooden huts had been burned, but this one had been preserved: a death hut for women too ill to work, not worth gassing, just left to die. ‘And this is the summer,’ Tim whispered, shivering like Connie, although she had on her Uniqlo padded jacket, he a professional-looking anorak. ‘This happened in my lifetime, Connie … Can you imagine?’

On the coach back to Kraków no one spoke. Some of the tour had gone on to Birkenau and a chilling walk through a gas chamber; others had declined, staying in the café by the car park. But all of them were mute with shock.

The group was scheduled to eat in the hotel that night, and sitting in her seat, watching the Polish countryside slide past in a blur through the steamed-up coach windows, Connie wondered how any of them would find words to express what they had seen. Or if they would even try.

In the end, dinner had been drink-fuelled and noisy, her charges letting off steam in a boisterous manner that seemed to verge on hysteria. We just want to celebrate life, Connie thought, but was glad to reach the quiet of her room when the meal was finally over.

She took off her make-up and slipped into the light blue voluminous T-shirt she slept in on tour, took off her watch, plugged in her phone and sank beneath the soft hotel duvet with a sigh of relief. She felt properly warm for the first time that day. England, still on daylight saving, was currently two hours behind Poland, so this might have been the time to ring Devan, to share some of the horror that still clung to her, like a scab, with someone she knew would sympathize.

But, these days, she was so unsure of the reception she might receive that she couldn’t face calling. The last thing she needed right now was to talk to a husband who was either drunk or remote – or both.