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‘There’s a resistance movement in Czechoslovakia which might be a good fit for you.

It’s fragmented. It operates through loose circles for safety’s sake, but if we can get you there…

I was going to say you’d be safer, but I don’t think that’s something either of you want to be, so I’ll settle for useful instead. ’

It was Matthias who had called on Rabbi Mendel’s help after the disaster of their first mission. He’d scrambled down the hillside moments after Noemi and he – although neither was aware of the other – had managed to catch the same train back to Munich.

It had not been an easy return for either of them.

They’d survived the massacre at the palace, but plenty of others hadn’t.

Their targets had lived, but two of the other dignitaries on the platform had been killed, as well as three teenagers in the crowd.

Countless more than that had been injured in the crush.

Instead of striking at the heart of the Nazis, Noemi and Matthias had struck at the heart of the city by hurting its children, and the authorities had seized on that as a victory.

They’d whipped every neighbourhood into a hunting frenzy and wiped away any association with bravery from the attack.

Neither of them knew whether their bullets or the ones fired by the bodyguards had caused the deaths, but that didn’t help: they’d started the gun battle; they carried the guilt.

That hadn’t got any lighter on the long journey which came after, although the rabbi had stuck to his word and not judged them.

‘You can’t stay in Munich, that’s a given, but I won’t pretend there’s an easy way out.

It’s a miracle both of you got through the station cordons on the first night, and we can’t take that risk again, especially now every soldier and policeman in the city’s involved in the manhunt.

Your best, and probably your only, option is to go across the ?umava mountains and into Czechoslovakia.

And you have to leave at once. Vitta’s strong, but nobody could blame her if she breaks. ’

That was the other burden Mendel had given them to carry.

Vitta’s ex-communist friend had been under surveillance for months, not that she could have known.

He’d been dragged into the Wittelsbacher prison on the first morning after the shootings, while Noemi and Matthias were still hiding from the world and forcing themselves to stay apart from each other.

The papers had called him a key suspect, the head of an organised gang.

And two days after he was arrested, Vitta had disappeared.

Mendel hadn’t downplayed the danger in that.

‘The papers are calling the assassination attempt a communist conspiracy, the last gasp of a broken opposition, because that’s what they’ve been told to call it.

The authorities will know different. Now they’ve got Vitta, they’ll know Jews are involved.

Not that a word about that will reach the public – no Nazi will ever admit Jews have got that kind of fight in them; it doesn’t fit with the narrative of cowardice and disease they prefer.

But they’ll flush out every factory and boarding house in the search, and nobody whose background and papers aren’t watertight will be safe. ’

He’d sent them off the next morning with a tattered old map of the mountain passes and a list of contacts along the route they’d been told to memorise. And no time for Noemi to plan a route or study the terrain, or worry if Matthias was up to the crossing.

The journey wasn’t one Noemi wanted to be on – it took her away from her last link with her parents with no timescale for when she’d be back.

It was also, as she knew it would be, long and exhausting and unpleasant, with sleep snatched in poorly provisioned mountain huts and sheep pens open to the elements.

Luckily, the mountains themselves were rounded not rocky and the snowfall they encountered was light.

But the route was waterlogged, and the ground was a mess of black peat bogs.

Noemi’s skin was permanently slick with rainwater and a damp that seeped in icy flurries through their coats and their boots.

The detours round the waterfalls which seemed to flow across every inch of the mountainside ate up their food stocks.

Too many of the paths marked on the maps were blocked by boulders, and landslides were a constant threat.

She’d worried for the first few days that the climb and the conditions would be too much for Matthias, who didn’t possess a quarter of her mountaineering skills.

But nothing defeated him. Whatever the obstacle, he kept moving.

And when his spirits flagged, he talked, and then he asked Noemi to talk while he listened.

They’d traded their life stories over the miles and strengthened the foundations of their friendship.

Matthias had told Noemi how much he’d loved Warsaw, where his parents had settled once his mother inherited her family’s jewellery business, and how beautiful the city was.

He’d told her how frightening it had been in 1939 to be stuck in Germany as a Pole, classified as a Jew in the second degree, living with a distant cousin who wanted to be rid of him, and with no possible way back home.

In return, Noemi had told Matthias about the café and the bakery and Bavaria’s beautiful mountains, and how happy her life had been until Hitler came to power and gradually ruined it.

She’d told him about the way her family had been destroyed by people they’d once trusted and what good people her parents were.

But she hadn’t told him about Pascal. She couldn’t find a way to work who her best friend had become into her narrative.

She hadn’t wanted to explain the tangled mix of emotions that arose with his name.

When the stories ran out or became too complicated, Matthias had taught Noemi the basics of Polish and the few words he knew of Czech.

They’d talked themselves into keeping going.

They’d talked their way over the border and into the small town of Domazlice, where they’d arrived starving and filthy on a spring day that was far fresher than they were, convinced that Mendel’s contact would be gone.

Or the townspeople would know them for Jews and fugitives and hand them over to the German authorities.

We worried about every catastrophe that could befall us and wondered if they’d be our punishment for the palace debacle, but none of the things we feared came to pass. If there’s any luck left in the world, we’ve had a good share of it.

Noemi sat back against the rough, unplastered wall and scanned the faces listening intently to Lüdek – a man she knew nothing about beyond his first name – as he relayed the contents of the latest bulletin which had been broadcast on the BBC from the Czech government in exile in London to the Czech resistance fighters in Prague who were gathered around her.

About us, without us.

The phrase the Czechs used to describe the disposal of their country in the 1938 Munich Agreement ran like a pulse through every room with a partisan heartbeat.

‘It was a betrayal – there’s no other word for it. Britain and France sold Czechoslovakia into slavery for a few months of peace. They fed the demon and then they were shocked when it turned round to consume them. There’s no pity or forgiveness here for that.’

The anger at the way the Allies had allowed Hitler to annex Czechoslovakia without that country’s involvement was still as raw as it had been four years earlier.

There wasn’t a meeting where it wasn’t raked over.

Lüdek spoke for everyone Noemi and Matthias had encountered in the underground chain which had led them from Munich to Prague.

There was no forgiveness for the countries who’d turned their backs, and there was nothing but hatred for the Germans.

‘I remember it happening.’

Lüdek frowned as Noemi turned to him, but he let her speak. The testimonial she’d come with courtesy of Rabbi Mendel’s contacts far outweighed her German upbringing.

‘The mayor of the town I was living in then was a Nazi and rotten to the core. He was in Munich when the agreement was signed, and he carried on as if he’d acted as Hitler’s personal advisor.

He organised a special meeting to “celebrate the Allies’ generosity” and laughed when he announced what had happened. ’

‘Somebody should engrave his name on a bullet.’

She didn’t know which of the men and women assembled in the cramped attic had said that, but who voiced it wasn’t important: the entire room applauded the sentiment.

Viktor wouldn’t have lasted a minute if he’d walked in.

Nobody shied from talking about revenge and how best to deliver it in Prague, which was why Rabbi Mendel had sent her and Matthias there.

Now the exiled government had asked for intelligence about the latest round-up of Czech workers – who were to be used as forced labour across the Reich – which had been ordered by Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich, and everybody wanted to help.

She didn’t know anything about the people surrounding her except their first names, but she knew she trusted them.

And they trusted her and Matthias because the chain worked.

A nameless man had taken them in and fed them in Domazlice at Rabbi Mendel’s request, and he’d passed the message up the links that led to Prague that everyone else could trust them too.

And without the rabbi and the nameless men, not one door would have opened to us.

Prague was not a safe place. There was a resistance movement as Mendel had promised, but the Nazi machinery was so well oiled that every time it reared its head to carry out even the smallest act of sabotage, it was crushed.

Matthias and Noemi had learned very quickly that life under the occupation was brutal, and not only for the Jews who’d been gathered up in their thousands and despatched to a ghetto in Moravia called Theresienstadt, which everyone spoke of as a hellhole.

Student protest leaders had been a target from the start; hundreds had been arrested in 1939 when the Germans rolled in.

They had disappeared into the Gestapo-controlled prison system, along with thousands of ordinary Czech citizens.

The gaps those young men and women left behind were intended to serve as a warning, and to plunge the country into a state of fear and anxiety it couldn’t pull itself out of.

That anyone would meet and share the contents of banned broadcasts or act as intelligence gatherers for the exiled regime was an act of bravery Noemi remained in awe of.

Particularly given the nature of the Nazi who now ruled over them.

Everyone in occupied Czechoslovakia knew Reichsprotektor Heydrich’s name and so did Noemi: he’d been one of Viktor’s heroes, which was all she needed to know about the nature of the man.

Hitler called him the ‘man with the iron heart’ and sang his praises.

He was known as ‘the Butcher’ in Prague.

Heydrich hated the Poles and he hated the Czechs and he hated the Jews with equal ferocity. He branded them all as vermin.

Lüdek had told them what to expect from him on their first night in the city; he didn’t want them to be under any illusions.

He’d described the Protektor’s first days in power in September 1941 as a blood-soaked purge.

Heydrich had immediately declared martial law and unleashed a reign of terror.

One hundred and forty-two people had been executed in the first five days; five thousand had been arrested and not yet released.

Everyone in the group could recite those numbers, although they could only guess at the scale of the murders which followed.

Everyone in the group hated the man with a passion that ran deeper than even Noemi – who’d witnessed her country’s passion for the Führer at first hand – had ever seen.

‘Where’ve you gone? Did you hear what he said?’

Matthias’s nudge forced her to concentrate again. Luckily, Lüdek – who wasn’t usually a man given to repeating himself – had heard the gasp of disbelief in the room.

‘You didn’t mishear me. We’ve had confirmation that the plans London’s been working on are finally in place.

Nobody, it goes without saying, breathes a word about that outside these walls.

Anyone who doesn’t want to be involved should leave now – there’ll be no judgement.

Anyone who stays needs to be clear that, when it happens, however it happens – and that won’t be ours to dictate – the reprisals will be swift and furious and no Czech man or woman will be safe. ’

He paused: no one moved to leave, including Matthias and Noemi.

He nodded. ‘Then let me say it again. From this moment, everyone who loves Czechoslovakia and hates what’s been done to it by the Nazis should have hope; in fact, everyone who hates the Nazis should have hope.

We’re going after them this time, not them after us.

And Reinhard Heydrich has a target we won’t miss stuck firmly on his back. ’