I took his hand, as if to accept the handshake. Between our palms was a piece of card I knew so well – even without looking at it. I knew the creases and the shine and the corner that was frayed.

‘I rescued it from Canada,’ he said.

Canada: the first lie I was told here. The lie handed to an innocent version of myself, a naïve girl who had stood on a platform thinking that the nice men were going to bring us our luggage.

We never saw any of it again.

And yet, here was my one precious possession, being given to me by the very person who had taken the photo in the first place!

‘Hide it,’ Mr Grunberg had urged. ‘Hide it well.’

A moment later he was gone.

Greta had found me a week later. Two gifts in one week. Our reunion was like – I cannot even say what it was like. It was like finding part of myself again. An essential part. I have known since the moment she found me that I cannot survive a day in here without her.

I don’t know what she did but she managed to get moved to the same barrack. She is one of the three beside me now. We are inseparable. She is my twin.

When I told her about the photograph, she pursed her lips tightly.

‘Where is it now?’ she had asked.

I’d pointed at the bed. The flea-ridden, moth-eaten scrap of filthy, lumpy mattress we share each night. ‘Under here.’

‘Elsa, you have to move it!’ she had said. ‘People have been killed for less!’

A day later, she had somehow found a needle and cotton. Greta manages things like that. She never tells me how. ‘I promise, it is safer that you don’t know,’ she had said. ‘And believe me, you don’t want to have to do what I do to get these things.’

The haunted look on her face when she said that was enough to stop me questioning further.

That night, we sewed the photograph into my dress. It has stayed there ever since.

Greta is whispering in my ear now. She lies behind me in our night-time formation. Her arm lies across my body. What there is of it. ‘Body’ feels too grand a word for the walking skeletons that we have become.

‘Elsa, are you awake?’ she whispers. ‘Squeeze my hand for yes.’

I reach for her hand and squeeze it.

In an even lower voice, so quiet I have to stop breathing to hear her, she says, ‘We are escaping. Tonight.’

I have to fight every impulse in my body not to leap out of bed and scream, ‘What?’

Or I would if my body had the energy to leap anywhere. Still. I do not know how to respond, and so I lie there, silent and stiff.

‘Did you hear me?’ Greta asks.

I squeeze her hand.