When the orderlies were sent in to do their work, one of them noticed something on the ground beside the girl. He reached down into the mud.

‘What are you doing?’ one of the others asked him. ‘You’ll get whipped for that.’

‘I don’t care,’ the man replied.

He wiped the card on his sleeve and stood looking at it. It was a photograph.

The man knew this moment. He knew this photograph. He remembered the laughter of that day. He allowed himself a small luxury. He closed his eyes and let his mind wander.

He thought of three happy children, running and laughing and pointing at a city as if they owned it. And the photographer, the man who lived for other people’s smiles, who had plenty of his own to go around – did that man still exist? Beneath these tattered clothes and the body that was little more than a skeleton. Was he still in there somewhere?

‘Grunberg, come on!’ his friend urged him. ‘We need to get this done and get back before the guards start asking why we took so long.’

Mr Grunberg nodded. But still he kept looking at the photograph. His eyes misted and his throat closed over as he ran his fingers across the face of the boy on the left. His beautiful son. Was he all right? Did he get away? And the boy’s mother, his own wife, was she alive?

No. He had to stop. He could not survive such questions.

So he put the photograph in his pocket. And then he stood for a moment, saying a quiet prayer before wiping his eyes and getting back to the job they’d been sent to do.

The gentleness in his hands as he lifted the bodies felt like an act of rebellion in itself.

1945

LEO

It was nearly the end of November and one of those days when you realize that there’s nothing much to look forward to for a few months.

The war was over and after weeks of celebrating in the streets life had pretty much settled down to normality again. A dull normality that always had something missing in our case.

It had rained since I’d woken up: the first day of rain for weeks. And now, mid-afternoon, it was already starting to get dark. Mama was sitting by the fire, humming softly to herself as she knitted a cardigan. I had just got up to take another log out of the basket when there was a knock at the door.

‘Who’s that going to be?’ Mama asked. ‘Are we expecting Annie?’

I shook my head. ‘Shall I see who it is?’

Mama had already put her knitting down. ‘I’ll go,’ she said.