In the early days we lived in the coal cellar under Buxter’s butcher’s shop. The cellar was dark and cold, but the coal drew the dampness out of the air, and sometimes the butcher gave us a few bones or an offcut for our soup.

Lotte never met her father. I heard later that by the time his letters reached us he was long since dead. She never met him, so she didn’t miss him, either, which was lucky for her. We stayed in Paulstadt. There was no way back.

There was work, first in the fields, later in Frau Klausner’s sweet­ and chocolate shop, where I served the customers. I liked the work, and Lotte grew up nicely. She got a bit fat on all the broken chocolate. But she found a husband, and brought Louise into the world. Later, she left town for a job elsewhere. Louise had a mind of her own and stayed with me; and I watched her become a woman, too, and take a man who wasn’t worth the time of day.

Back then, when I walked for so many days holding Lotte by the hand, when we drew strength from one another, I from her more than she from me, when we heard the women scream at night, and saw the dead hastily buried in roadside ditches in the morning so their bodies wouldn’t be exposed to the midday sun – back then, not a word of complaint passed Lotte’s lips. She said nothing when her shoes fell apart and she had to walk on with rags wrapped round her feet; when the carts were searched and looted; when the last of our possessions – our documents, clothes, food – were carried off. She said nothing and she didn’t cry. But I cried, often, when she was asleep. I wasn’t sad about the possessions we had lost. I was crying at Lotte’s bravery.

Something happened on our journey.

The trek had to stop. For four days and four nights we moved neither forwards nor backwards. There was a fire somewhere way up ahead and they had to block the road. We waited. At night the countryside lay under the cold moonlight and the sound of the wind sweeping across the dry ground filled me with fear. I imagined I could see animals and figures creeping across the fields as soon as a cloud covered the moon. The earth we slept on was hard and cold, and Lotte’s little body shivered beneath my coat. I’d seen that there was a farm a short distance from the road. It consisted of a farmhouse, a barn and some sheds. The tenant farmer lived there. People spoke badly of him. I’d seen him a number of times, with a big black dog on a leash, driving away people who were using his field as a latrine. But it was so cold. ‘It’ll be warm in the sheds,’ I said, on the third night. ‘We’ll walk over there.’ Lotte didn’t want to. She said she didn’t want to walk across the fields, the shadows between the furrows frightened her. I dismissed this. A roof over our heads and a bit of straw under our backs would do us good, I said.