‘I’m Mozes Heck. Call me Mo.’ His voice softened. ‘Where were you held, Albert? You were in a KZ, right?’

‘Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. Have you heard of it? Now if you’ll excuse me, I don’t wish to talk anymore . . .’

‘Everyone’s heard of Auschwitz, Albert. That must have been terrible for you.’

That was how it began, but not how it ended. Mozes Heck had been persistent. He had a big voice and a powerful personality that could win people over, however aloof they might be at first. Rothstein could not resist him

Over the next two days, Heck inveigled his way into Rothstein’s life. Soon they were taking meals together in the canteen and drinking beers together late into the night. Rothstein gave up his attempts to shrug off his new companion’s attentions and after a while he actually seemed to enjoy Heck’s company.

Their conversation had become easy and light. Heck made jokes, laughed a lot about the needy Amis, the raping Reds, the stiff Brits and the sexually inadequate Nazis, and slapped Rothstein on the back. Occasionally, he punched him gently on the upper arm to make a point. They talked of the cowboy film presently showing in the camp cinema and decided to watch it together. It was called Stagecoach and starred a young man named John Wayne. Afterwards, they discussed its finer points into the early hours.

They smoked cigarettes together and Heck spoke of his life before the war. He was from Amsterdam, he said, his father had been a doctor and his mother was a writer of pulp fiction, published under the name of Sam Heck, because it sounded international and helped her sales in America. He had two younger sisters, who would now be nineteen and seventeen, and a brother – the baby of the family – who would be twelve. They were well off financially and could have emigrated before the Nazi invasion, but they kept putting it off and then, when the Germans arrived, it was too late.

They had been carted away by the Nazis in the middle of the night. Heck knew from friends that they had been taken to the Westerbork transit camp in northern Holland, but after that the trail had gone cold. As far as he knew, none of them had survived. And yet he lived in hope that he was wrong, that one day a notice would go up on the Apfelwald notifications board saying that one of them was alive and was trying to make contact. It was a faint hope.

‘And how did you survive, Mo?’

Heck waved the question away. ‘Ah, that is a story for another time. But what about you and your family, Albert? Did any of them make it through the war?’

Rothstein did not seem keen on the subject, but Heck was insistent. ‘Come on, Albert, at least tell me where you are from? You’re German, yes?’

‘Yes, from Stuttgart. I was a Lutheran, but I was classified as Jewish; my mother was a Jew on both sides of her family, whereas my father was a Christian, his Jewish mother having converted. I was brought up a Lutheran, so I know little of my Jewish heritage. The prayers, the festivals, the workings of the synagogue . . . I do not know them. Nor am I circumcised. My father would not allow it.’