The women were subdued, and Dora caught their mood. They were counted three times. There was no order to the numbers, and there couldn’t have been more than seventy here. No wonder the Germans were muddled. They had been standing for two hours. She was tired, too, with a headache. She hadn’t eaten for twenty-four hours.

They carried the meal from the kitchen to the dormitory. A slice of black bread. Dora swallowed hers, swilled it down with foul brown liquid.

‘What is this place?’ she said to the woman sitting next to her, an emaciated creature, her face lined. Gaps in her teeth. Her name, Dora learned, was Collette.

Collette coughed, a deep phlegmy caagh.

She could have TB, Dora thought, she’s thin enough.

‘You haven’t guessed?’ Collette said, adding, ‘It’s a brothel. For the soldiers. A Soldatenbordell.’

Dora swallowed. This was what Knackfuss had in mind. To be forced. Over and over.

‘Who are you all?’

‘Nous sommes prostitués,’ Collette said, added, ‘from France, mainly. What you English call “tarts”.’

Dora didn’t let on she wasn’t English.

Collette’s eyes grew round and she smiled, a grin wide enough to crack her fragile skin. She must once have been beautiful, Dora could see, with her clear cheekbones and high forehead. Two soldiers were standing in the doorway.

‘Uh-oh,’ Collette said. ‘Nearly time.’ She was still smiling, gums raw and bleeding. ‘How come you’re here?’

‘I was caught,’ Dora said. ‘Nursing a sick man.’ She added, ‘A runaway. From the OT.’

‘Nursing?’ Collette said. ‘Are you a nurse?’

Dora nodded. ‘Midwife. Une sage-femme.’

‘That will be handy,’ Collette said. ‘I’d rather you fix us up than the cow in the Revier.’

It took Dora a moment to register what Collette was saying.

‘You get pregnant?’ Dora said. Her period had been due when she was arrested, but it hadn’t come yet. It was being here, the shock and stress of it all. She knew the biology, the hypothalamus gland couldn’t cope, closed down, ceased producing the hormones.

‘Of course,’ Collette said. ‘You’ve never done this before, have you?’

Dora shook her head. Collette placed her hand on Dora’s arm.

‘Courage,’ she said. ‘Don’t think about it when they’re going at you. Be someone else, somewhere else, in your head, when it happens. And laugh, inside. Oh,’ she added, ‘and listen. They think you can’t hear, but if you keep your ears open, you can learn a lot. That way you’ll survive.’

Dora’s legs grew weak. ‘I can’t,’ she said.

‘You can,’ Collette snapped. ‘If you want to live.’

The soldiers were banging their batons on the door frame and the women began to push themselves up from their bunks or the floor where they had been sitting.

‘Why are you here?’ Dora said. ‘What did you do?’