With his attention now on the box camera, he slung the Kodak 8 around his shoulder on a strap made from a piece of string he had picked up from the ground outside the canteen. He had found the cine camera itself back in July. It was in a roadside ditch on the long walk here from the countryside between Oswiecim and Krakow, from the place where he had worked as a farm boy since 1942.

Life had been hard on the farm, but he was never beaten and, though food was sparse, there was always something to eat. The farmer’s wife was kind and the farmer himself, though morose, was fair. They had lost their own son in 1939 and so they needed Jerzy’s assistance with the chores. They never asked him if he was Jewish and he never told them. When they went to church, he went with them and tried to mouth the words. He was a quick learner and he knew better than to ever allow anyone to see his circumcised penis.

He had grown strong, but was still short for his age. At the end of the war, the farm couple wanted him to stay because they still needed him, but he simply walked away, westwards. Even at the tender age of eleven he knew there was nothing left for him in Poland. There never could be, because everything had been taken away.

He had to cut himself adrift and never try to return to the time before.

The time before . . .

The time when he had a family and a home and a name. The name he refused to remember because it would mean something inexplicable and terrible had happened.

He couldn’t explain it to himself, let alone anyone else. He remembered the cinema, of course, because he loved it. The films every week. Cowboy films and Charlie Chaplin films were the best, but he loved them all.

Now he saw the world and everything that had happened in a fractured narrative – staccato scenes, like a black and white film on the screen. He saw his mother ladling grey soup into a grey bowl, then the camera moved to his father and he was shouting at Jerzy for not shining his shoes or for looking out of the window during his English lessons. The scene changed to the narrow street and he saw his own hand holding his older sister’s as they walked together to the schoolroom. The soundtrack grew louder and the music turned to the drone of aeroplanes and the stamp of a thousand black boots.