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Matthias – who was Jewish and Polish and, at twenty-two, only two years older than Noemi – proved to be a man of his word.

He couldn’t get her any information about Frieda or Hauke, but within a week of their first meeting, he’d found her the tools she needed to survive in the city, and he’d softened its dangers a little.

‘You escaped the round-up, which means you’ll be on a list somewhere, so we need to make a couple of small changes to your identity.

Noemi’s common enough, so you can keep that, but I’ve switched your last name to Denker, and I’ve moved your birthplace from Unterwald to Lenggries, which is only a couple of dozen miles away.

It’s best to keep things as simple as possible, so you don’t make mistakes if you’re challenged. ’

Not making mistakes was Matthias’s first rule.

He coached Noemi through keeping her head up and maintaining eye contact whenever she was asked to hand over her papers.

He told her to choose the most ordinary family she could think of from home and make their life her backstory.

And he warned her not to make the most common mistake and change her brown hair for blond because even purchasing the dye to do it could set a nosey chemist on her trail.

Under his guidance, Munich became a lot more manageable.

His advice and his contacts, and the veneer of confidence they gave her, allowed Noemi to move undetected around the city.

The landlady he pointed her towards in the working-class Au district glanced over her papers and asked only the most basic questions about her life in Bavaria.

Her new boss in the small brewery two blocks away had been happy to take her on when it was clear she understood the basics of brewing, something he apparently thought all country people knew.

Nobody found a reason to question her, in the same way nobody questioned the pronounced limp and weak right arm Matthias adopted in public to avoid being asked why he wasn’t at the front.

The district was a hard-working and relatively poor one, its people more focused on the pressures the war was causing for their families and their livelihoods than the possibility Jews might be hiding in plain sight among them.

Or so the Jews hiding among them thought.

‘That should make for some good entertainment – they’ll certainly be easier to spot.’

‘You hear talk all the time that there’s hundreds of them hiding in Munich, using fake papers and working alongside us. What do they call it? Going underground? Well they’d better watch out now there’s rewards for catching them, or we’ll properly put them down there.’

Everyone in Noemi’s new circle had a similar snatch of gossip to pass on.

All of it was damning; nobody was able to report any signs of concern or protest about the latest Nazi decree.

All Jews over the age of six being forced to wear a yellow Star of David badge on their chests was apparently a popular move.

The group of young Jewish men and women who – like Noemi and Matthias – had found themselves alone in the city and had taken refuge in each other to stave off the loneliness and fear normally only met in groups of two or three.

They weren’t a resistance group in the way Noemi had imagined they might be, engaged in acts of sabotage and spying, although Matthias wished that they were.

A few of them, like him, had chosen to monitor the Dachau camp and collect information about who was kept there, but most simply craved the reassurance that they weren’t alone.

And a wider meeting was a rare thing. It only happened when the Nazis shifted the ground, like they’d done with the stars, and forced one, because the risks involved were considerable.

Any large gathering that didn’t include uniforms or drinking attracted attention.

A group of slightly shabby, slightly nervous and predominantly dark-haired young people congregating together might as well have set up an advertising board.

They couldn’t use a public place or anyone’s lodgings.

Instead, they relied on a rabbi who no longer had a synagogue but had at least acquired a key to the factory where he was now forced to work and could offer them a brief place of sanctuary.

It was Rabbi Mendel who’d organised that night’s meeting – he was the only one who knew everybody’s names.

Now he sat twisting his hands in the darkened room as one after the other offered up the gossip they’d collected in Au’s increasingly outspoken cafés and pubs.

‘We’ve seen this pattern of enforced identity badges and imprisonment before, in Poland and parts of occupied Russia.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the next step is to build a ghetto the way they’ve done there.

And – as some of the talk you’ve collected has mentioned – there’s always a very generous system of rewards for bringing in anyone who’s evaded the net.

Which encourages the thugs. The whole process is intended to be?—’

‘Barbaric and terrifying?’

The Rabbi nodded as Noemi butted in. He tried to resume speaking, but she wasn’t done yet.

‘But we can’t let it paralyse us. These badges cut Jews out of German life, far more clearly than any of the Nazis’ previous laws.

You said it yourself, Rabbi: they mark us out, they make us into targets, and then they dump us into ghettoes.

And God knows what happens after that. So surely we have to hit back this time, before they get a chance to really get started? I don’t see that we have a choice.’

The room had tightened on ghettoes . It broke apart on hit back.

‘What do you mean, we’ve no choice? What on earth d’you think we can do? We’re ex-students living in hiding, not masters of guerilla warfare.’

‘Are you trying to get us arrested – or killed? Don’t you understand we’re just trying to survive?’

The voices flew from all corners, but not from everyone. Half the room was shouting at her, but half – including Matthias – was silent and waiting to hear what she was about to say next, and that gave Noemi hope, if not a clear plan.

‘I do understand that; I’m trying to do the same.

I can’t help my parents, which is why I came here in the first place, but I have to do something.

And I know the idea of fighting in any way is a tough one, especially as most people here have never handled a weapon. But the thing is, some of us have.’

She nodded to Matthias, who had spent his early teenage years in the forests round Warsaw, learning to hunt with his grandfather.

And Vitta, whose father had been an Olympic marksman when Jewish athletes were permitted to take part in sports and had passed his passion for shooting onto his daughter.

‘And none of us are killers, which is what you seem to be suggesting should be our next step. That’s quite a leap for anyone.’

Everyone turned to the rabbi. Noemi knew how much influence he had, including over Matthias.

Matthias’s German father had studied medicine in Munich before he’d met and fallen in love with a Jewish girl from Poland and made Warsaw his home.

Matthias had come to the city to follow in his father’s footsteps.

He’d told Noemi that it was Mendel who’d helped him manage his first days as a medical student in the city, when he was lonely and unsure why he’d agreed to come to a country which was increasingly hostile to Jews.

And it was Mendel who had taken him in when Germany had invaded his country and the German cousins who’d reluctantly offered him a home had finally decided he was too Polish and too Jewish to stay.

The rabbi did everything he could to bring more Jewish escapees into the fold and had a wide network of contacts to help with that, but he was a pacifist. He wasn’t a supporter of active resistance in any form.

If he told the group there was nothing to do but dig themselves deeper shelters, that’s what they would do.

And that wasn’t enough anymore for Noemi.

She turned to Mendel and began to choose her words as carefully and honestly as she could.

‘I know it is. I’ve never shot anything bigger than a rabbit.

I’ve certainly never imagined killing a person, and – although I want to find a way to strike back against the Nazis – I didn’t come here tonight intending to advocate for violence.

I need you to know that before I say anything else.

’ She gave him a moment to appraise her and to nod.

‘But the things that are being said, the hatred and the threats… They’re getting worse; they’re going to go on getting worse, and I can’t sit and wait for someone to turn me in to the Gestapo.

So I want to make some kind of a stand against them, or I want to try.

And if that involves taking up weapons, so be it. ’

‘Why, Noemi? Do you think using their methods against them will change their minds about us? Do you think an assassination, or a bomb, or whatever’s in your head, will save Germany’s Jews?’

There was nothing unkind or accusatory in the rabbi’s question – his voice was as gentle as his face. Noemi focused on that, not the tension crackling around her.

‘No, I don’t. It could lead to worse; it could lead to reprisals.

And none of us have ever planned or carried out any kind of an attack before, so perhaps it’s a crazy idea.

But what if we did try to hurt them and it worked?

What if we could prove the Nazis aren’t the supermen they claim to be?

What if we could show that they’re vulnerable, that maybe they could be beaten?

Couldn’t that help make the tide turn one day? ’