Cabbage. Potatoes. Once or twice a sausage. Joe learned how to bake bread out of rough wheat, chalk and rye. He caught a rabbit once. Made a catapult and brought it down, but what was a rabbit among so many hungry men? He couldn’t perform miracles. The thing was, there wasn’t enough food, so the other Kapos and the guards turned a blind eye when the prisoners went foraging. Joe put his treasures in the stews, most of the time. Found a stash of wood ears growing from a dead elder tree. They called it Jew’s ear in Ireland, but he wouldn’t do that now. There was stinking onion and wild garlic, if you knew where to look. Rock samphire and nettles in the spring. He’d spotted wild carrots too. A little extra goodness, some flavour in the soup. Leftovers he smuggled back to the hut and handed round. Most of the time. A bite for Joe, first.

The SS had pigs and a cow. Joe wasn’t the son of a butcher for nothing. He’d snatch a piglet if he could. Have it slaughtered, stripped and stewed before you could say SS-Totenkopfverbände, pickle the belly, salt the back. And when the cow had done her time, he’d graze her well and make her happy and lead her into her stall with a manger full of hay and a salt lick the size of Derry. She wouldn’t smell the singe of death or listen to its bellows. ‘For that would spoil the meat,’ his daidí used to say. ‘Sweet and tender like butter itself. Not some old ox with rubber muscles.’ Though now, Joe thought, any old ox would do. Even a leather strap.

‘One day,’ Joe said, ‘we’ll feast for real.’

He and Ernst and the others. Those who survived. The numbers were getting thinner by the day. The Jews had been sent back. France. Germany. Who knew where? Even List himself. Rumour had it that some of the Jews had escaped in France, and they wanted List’s head to roll. But nobody countermanded his order for Joe to teach them boxing and he took the SS through their paces. Some of the OT guards from Lager Nordeney or Helgoland took to hanging around. Stripped to their vests and underpants, hands strapped and gloved, he had them all skipping and running, sparring and punching.

It was early June, 1944. They were sitting outside, on the step of the hut, still damp from the previous day’s storm. It was late, dark. The moon was full, but the sky was overcast, clumps of cloud blowing with the breeze. It had whipped the sea into a noisy froth. Joe could hear it slap-slapping the shore and see white horses in the flickering moonlight.

‘Sssh,’ Ernst said.