Without hesitating for another second, he held the photo out in front of him, and threw it on to the fire.

His father put a hand on his shoulder. Max could not remember a single time in his life when he had felt his father’s touch, and the sensation made him dizzy.

‘Good man,’ Mr Fischer said.

Good man? His father had called him a man? Now he knew what true happiness was. Now he knew his real purpose in life. Now he was a soldier.

Together, they watched the flames. The photograph hissed and curled; the childish smiles melted into nothing. Max stood tall and proud beside his father as a door in his heart silently closed.

LEO

We had a new geography teacher at school today. Mrs Whitehead. And something quite amazing happened.

We each had to stand up and go to the front of the class in turn. Mrs Whitehead had placed a big map on the board and we had to point to a country and tell her something about it.

It was my turn to go up. I told myself we’d lived here over two years and there was no reason to worry. The boys no longer bullied me. Sure, we still played soldiers most of the time, and sometimes some of the things they said made me wince. But I didn’t always have to play the German nowadays. And they didn’t say ‘Sieg Heil’ and laugh at me any more.

I didn’t go out of my way to talk about being Jewish, but I didn’t go out of my way to hide it, either. Daniel had helped with that. Just knowing I had an ally, even if we never really talked about it, made me feel more normal, more like one of the boys.

So I decided to be brave.

I pointed at Austria and said that it was where I was born. For a second, it all came back. Those last months in Vienna. I’d pushed it all so far away from me, it was like remembering someone else’s life. Someone else’s mother crouched in the cupboard while shops and houses were smashed up; someone else’s father taken away by his friends. Someone else who had nightmares every single night for the first year of living in England.

But it wasn’t someone else; it was me. And while I stood there at the front of the class, I remembered that other day, when I was made to stand up in front of the whole school.

I could feel my knees about to buckle as a feeling of nausea crept into my throat. Maybe I’d been kidding myself about being normal here, about being safe. In that moment, part of me still expected the teacher to point at me and call me names and the other kids to turn and stare silently as I walked to the back of the room.