She reaches around for my hand. ‘I heard,’ she says. Her voice is as lifeless as her body. I worry about her lately. She is so thin that I daren’t even put my arm around her at night; I feel as though the weight might break her.

We silently drag our bodies off the bunk, pull on our day clothes that haven’t been washed in months and go through our usual morning routines of checking each other’s hair for lice, stretching our aching bodies so that we can move without agony – and then I reach under the bunk for our bags and we start the process of packing our diminishing amount of possessions into them.

A tiny part of me remembers a time when I worried about which pretty dress to pack, how many sparkly pairs of shoes I could fit in a bag. Then it became more about how many practical clothes and mementos I could fit in one case. Now I have nothing pretty, and nothing sparkles. I have a few changes of clothes – all ragged, all filthy. I realize what a fool I was to think that those things mattered. Still, hidden amongst the clothing is my one treasured possession: the photograph of Leo, Max and me from what feels like several lifetimes ago.

While I still have this photograph, I can tell myself that the girl in it still exists. She is still in here somewhere.

We are soon gathered in the square, ready to be taken to the transport.

Today’s good thing: I don’t have the energy to feel afraid. I don’t have enough moisture in my body to produce tears.

That’s two good things. Greta will be proud of me.

Greta. She was taken – I don’t know when. It was weeks, but I don’t know how many. Time has become impossible to measure.

I stand in the cold, hardly feeling the wind on my cheeks, barely acknowledging the snow on the ground beneath my paper-thin shoes.

I am a ghost of the person I used to be.

But then we are ordered to march and, on the way to the transport, something happens that brings me back to life.

‘Elsa! Elsa!’

At first I don’t turn. I refuse to give in to the hallucination. The disappointment of it will crush me.

But then Mutti looks at me and I know she hears it too. So I let myself turn in the direction of the voice. And I see him. Like me, he is a pale imitation of the person he once was, but when his eyes catch mine and his face breaks into a smile, I know that it is really him.

Otto. My brother. He is alive.