All those questions he had asked himself as he had come to the courtyard. The questions he’d wanted to ask a real soldier. He was that soldier. He was the man with the answers.

Of course everyone questioned themselves the first time. Of course they all hesitated. But then they remembered who they were, why they were here.

This was the moment to leave the boy behind for ever. This was how he would became a true Nazi.

He lifted his pistol.

ELSA

He knows me. He recognizes me. He won’t kill me. I know it in my heart.

The joy is overwhelming. I didn’t know that I still had the capacity to feel joy. If someone had told me yesterday I would ever know this feeling again, I would have called them a cruel liar.

And yet, here it is, filling up my heart.

All those years of surviving, and now it has led us here. Back to each other.

The guards behind him are still yelling at him. Their faces are red, eyes bulging with rage. Max ignores them. He only sees me; I only see him.

He’s walking towards me. He’s smiling.

And then the soldier beside him is saying something in his ear. Max is listening. His smile turns cold, freezes.

The air around me turns cold with it. My skin prickles. I can feel everything change and I know that I’ve lost him.

He raises his pistol. His hand is shaking.

He takes a step closer, grits his teeth.

And then—

BANG.

MAX

Max fell so hard he almost knocked her over.

Her face was a mask of shock and horror as she stared at the guards. ‘What have you done?’ she cried as she fell to her knees beside the boy on the floor.

Rolf had turned to stone. He couldn’t speak.

‘Rolf!’ Thomas hissed. ‘What have you done?’

‘I’d had enough of waiting. Someone had to kill the Jew.’

‘He was about to shoot her!’ Thomas said. ‘And you didn’t kill the Jew, you killed Max. The son of a senior officer!’

‘He – he got in the way,’ Rolf insisted. ‘He started walking towards her. I thought he wasn’t going to do it.’

Thomas looked around them, his face white. ‘Look. No one is here but us,’ he said. ‘Get the pistol.’

Max’s pistol had fallen away from him when the bullet hit him in the head. Rolf grabbed it and took it to Thomas. He already knew what the other soldier was thinking. ‘He shot himself,’ he said while Thomas curled Max’s fingers around the gun and arranged his arm so that it pointed to his head.

Elsa was still kneeling by Max’s side. ‘You’ve killed him! You’ve killed him!’ she cried, her tears flowing freely.