They’d put a Christmas tree up in the hallway. 1944. Dora wondered how many fires could be made from its trunk and branches, how many people would have a moment’s warmth, a cooked meal. She touched the soap in her pocket, hoping that List was safe. Perhaps he was as cut off as they were, as starving as she. Perhaps he hadn’t gone back to Germany. Perhaps he was still in Alderney. Perhaps they had surrendered, had rowed across when the sea was calm, with a white sheet blowing behind. Spare us, spare us. He’d tell the British, there is a Swedish woman. Please rescue her.

January rimed the door handles and the soldiers’ bayonets. The fuel ran out and the Revier grew cold. Dora pulled extra blankets from the store, heaped them on the patients’ beds, wrapped one round herself so the cold didn’t nip her legs beneath the flimsy frock. Still she shivered in the night, swaddling the paltry blanket tight around her in a skein of rough wool. The soldiers grew depressed with the cold and the blockade, took to staying in their barracks rather than venturing out. Many nights, the women had nothing to do.

The rations grew smaller and smaller, and they ran out of medicines. The general hospital was running out of space, so they’d commandeered the Revier. She looked through the names of the sick or wounded, at their faces, in case one was List, rescued and transported to Jersey. Oh, she’d nurse him back to health.

Her father had taken charge. Brought in the wounded French to the German field hospital in Verdun, treated them as if they were no different. Was this the same? Would he be proud of her now? She didn’t know. She wasn’t sure, anymore, what was right and what was not. Did war do that? Blur the boundaries? Or just this one? She had been in the brothel eighteen months now. Her body had been pimped and polluted, her spirit crippled and abused. She stood crooked now, the world lopsided around her. She had been a nurse, once, her father a doctor. He’d won the Iron Cross. Jewish. She pulled the coarse army-issue blanket around her shoulders. Did that make her a liar and a coward?

Agnes took to hanging round the Revier. Sat in the ward playing cards with the soldiers, making dirty jokes, turning the place into a bawdy house.

‘There are thirty-two patients here,’ Dora said.

‘Men.’

‘This is a hospital,’ Dora said. ‘Not a brothel.’

‘Cheers them up,’ she said.

‘They are the enemy.’

‘You take care of their flesh,’ Agnes said. ‘Leave their spirits to me.’ Sitting on a soldier’s bed, smirking, mouthing Kapo. Doing the Germans’ dirty business.

‘We’re two of a kind,’ Agnes said. ‘You and me.’

Perhaps we are, Dora thought. Perhaps.