So it was best to stay off the radar.

They hadn’t even told the landlord Anna was living here – as far as he knew, Daniel occupied the flat alone. The cheap metal ring Anna was currently twisting around her wedding finger was just a small attempt to stop any prying neighbours from asking too many questions.

Still, the apartment was progress, Daniel’s two jobs were progress, and maybe, just maybe, they could get through these next few years until easier times arrived. Sylvia hoped so with all her heart.

‘What was it like, growing up where you did?’ she said, to start the interview. She and Evelyne were sitting on the two chairs, while Anna sat on a cushion on the floor, her back to the wall, an arrangement Anna had insisted on.

‘It was home,’ Anna said.

Sylvia looked at Evelyne as she translated, and then frowned. She looked back at Anna. ‘Were you happy?’

‘Until Father left. But after that we didn’t really have any money, and then Mother lost her job.’ She paused. ‘I think she was very unhappy. She cried a lot.’ Anna looked down, picked at the edge of her skirt. ‘She loved us though, our mother. She loved us and she didn’t want us to go away. I don’t know why she let them take us.’

‘Tell me about what happened when the authorities came for you,’ Sylvia said gently.

Through Evelyne’s translation, Sylvia heard about the day Anna last saw her mother and older sister. The despair on her mother’s face, tinged with something else – resignation, Anna had decided after years of thinking about it. Her own confusion as the men came to the house and grabbed her and Cornelia by the arms. Cornelia spitting at them, screaming. Get your hands off me! The car ride for what felt like hours and hours until her mouth was dry and she desperately needed to pee. The road sign – Ferden – where Cornelia was pulled from her seat. The door slamming shut and the car pulling away again, going she didn’t know where without her sister.

Anna spoke about arriving at the farm where Franziska, Evelyne’s mother, showed her to a cot bed in the corner of the kitchen where she would sleep, how she’d been asked to serve the dinner to the four of them that very same night, and how Franziska had chided her when she spilt a drop of sauce on the tablecloth, and ordered her to go and wash it as soon as she’d eaten. She spoke about having to get up at 5am to milk the cows before school, and then coming home and going straight to work again, mucking out the cow shit or washing the family’s sheets.