Arbitrary. That’s what Joe couldn’t take. You never knew when death would strike. A beating for nothing. Garrotting for less. Drowned in cement. Thrown to the waves. We walk in the valley of the shadow of death, Joe thought. He wished they’d shot him with Trude.

It was an Irish rain. Light and steady, soaking to the bone in a quiet polite fashion. Belied its menace. There was heather here as well, long past its bloom, squatting with the gorse and the scars where the Germans had stripped the soil. Joe’s cap kept the worst of the rain from his face, but his shirt was wet through, and his trousers too, his shoes brittle from the dirt, soles separating from the uppers so they flapped when he walked. Twelve hours a day, seven days a week. They got up in the dark, stood for Appell in the frost or the fog, worked till the winter day drew in. German hours, so the night was later, longer.

Joe had cut holes in a cement bag, head and arms, tucked the sack underneath what was left of his shirt so the Germans couldn’t see. One extra layer against the biting wind. His hands were calloused, but his arms were strong, and swinging a pickaxe or raking cement or shovelling grit kept his boxing muscles firm, even if he didn’t have the protein to build them up.

‘Only fools give in,’ Ernst said almost every night. ‘And who here is a bigger fool than the goons who run this place?’

Ernst kept Joe going, buoyed him up. Buoyed them all up, Joe thought. They couldn’t do much to resist, but they wouldn’t give in. Even their Kapo had respect for Ernst. Ernst was a gentleman, polite, considerate, though his language was sometimes blue. But who could blame him? He protected Joe, befriended him, never asked why he no longer said his prayers, slipped him a cigarette if he had one spare.

They all had coughs, thick catarrh that clogged their sinuses and filled their lungs. Or airy coughs that spat blood. Shivered and sweated at night. Died. Or left to die. The bastard cook, forgive me Lord, refused to feed the sick.

‘Orders,’ he said, his sharp teeth a warning. ‘Why waste food on the dying?’

Only that night as they queued for their meal, Joe stood next to an old man he hadn’t seen before. He wore a yellow star. The Jews were French, so Ernst said, newly arrived. The old man must have been over seventy, watery eyes and hands with liver spots that shook as he held his bowl. Joe had seen him struggle with the rest, the sledgehammer too great a weight for his frail frame. He coughed. The cook looked at him.

‘Juif,’ he said.

Went to the next man, poured the soup half in the bowl, half on his hand. The man behind him, likewise.