He is the oldest in his convoy, but not the oldest of all. The names, hailing from Algiers, Budapest, Salonika, Karlsruhe, Lyon, Kishinev and Kiev include children and octogenarians. One, Betty Ruben, from Altmark, dies at the camp in Récébédou in her ninetieth year. Another was born in 1849. The birthplaces of the Mittelsteins, scattered across Europe, track the spread of the family like tree rings: Novo Radomsk, Paris, London, Paris, Nantes.

They are recorded among the 76,000 names listed in Serge Klarsfeld’s Mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France, a kind of compendium of secret books, of lives that might have turned out otherwise.

NOTOWICZ, NIKOLAI 13.06.58 KERCH.

The mind recoils from the name in print. The record is terse. Upon arrival at Auschwitz on 23 December, 210 men were selected to receive the identification numbers 173708 to 173917 as well as 61 women (75340 to 75400). 1229 people were gassed immediately.

A tale so familiar and so strange. Sidings at dawn. Sealed stock cars opening with a rush of warmth and human smells. Guards in grey overcoats. Leafless trees. Laughter and lamplight from the windows of its headquarters. A gramophone playing ‘Stille Nacht’, the simplest and sweetest of carols, over a landscape that beggars imagination. An SS officer assigning life and death with the most casual gestures. There’s no way a man in his eighties would survive the sorting. Notovitch is getting ground up in the implacable machinery that he tried to sabotage. But the enormity of what’s happening is a terrible vindication of his gospel: if this is possible, surely all things are possible?

In those last minutes, he distracts himself from the misery around him with images of calm and transcendence: a cube of lapis lazuli from a certain mine in Badakshan, a lake in Ladakh reputed to bestow immortality, rain falling; for a tiny moment he senses the miraculous possibility of eternal life, swimmers and sinners alike, tumble-turning forever in the azure mercy of divine love.

He gazes down at his naked carcass and waits for the icy waters of history to close over his head.

Briefly these are his memories: the cubbyhole on the Derby where he slept; a crisp morning in Saint Petersburg; the sand dunes at Otrar and the sun in his eyes; dancing with his daughter at her wedding while the band played ‘Is She Not Passing Fair?’; the grey glass roof of the Vélodrome d’Hiver; holding his dying wife’s hand in the ward of the Rothschild Hospital. It is almost finished. He remembers that he too was loved. Now he goes, with all the dignity he can muster, towards the place where all stories end.

There is no body. But someone has to read the eulogy.

History – one of the powerful fictions he had little use for – in so far as it recalls him at all, considers Nicolas Notovitch a buffoon who did a grubby thing; I have come to regard him as a kind of hero.