The film is speeding up. His mother kisses his head. They turn the corner. He runs. There are shouts in the strange language used by the men with guns and hooked crosses. He hears the crack of gunfire. He knows that sound, for he has heard it in the ghetto. He has seen what it does, how men and women crumple to the ground when they are shot. Now they are shooting at him, but they don’t hit him, because he is too fast and he zigzags, like in the films. He runs to the lane, runs down the lane and realises he is not being pursued.

He stops. The film is dark now, the buildings above him on both sides are closing in on him. He creeps back in the shadows to the main road where the people are still marching. Across the road, he sees Father and Aggie and Mother with Robert in her arms. They have been taken out of the line and are being held at gunpoint against the wall of a shop. Two men in uniform are shouting at them. Then there is a crack and Robert falls to the ground. Mother screams and then she is shot. Another shot and Aggie slides sideways. The moments tick by, a pistol is held to Father’s face. Then the trigger is pulled and blood sprays up from Father’s face and he falls on Mother.

The four of them, his family, are lying together in a heap, joined together in death. No more shouting for them, no more tears. They have died because they let him escape, as a warning to other families. He has nothing left. All he can do is obey Father, and live.

*

It was a hot day, and Heck was sweating profusely. His throat was parched and he took long swigs from his water flask. He had thought he was fitter than this after his years in the British Army, but the climb was tough in places and he was out of breath. He resolved to give up smoking. But not yet.

The route he was taking was picked from the beautiful hand-drawn map of the Alps they had found in August Jaeger’s house in Almrosen. The chart was minutely detailed, full of mountains, forests, rivers, glaciers, huts, houses, villages and tracks through the high meadows and passes of the Alps. All complete with precise contours to show altitude. The complexity of the chart and the harshness of much of the terrain only served to show how impossible it would be to locate someone without some good clue to their whereabouts.