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‘If you can get out of Prague, you need to make your plans to do it now, not when the mission’s been completed and the city’s locked down. And whether you can leave or you can’t, you need to think and act at all times as if you’re going to get caught.’

Which we didn’t do in Munich, and that could have been the flaw that finished us.

Lüdek’s advice made perfect sense. But what he said next was a shock.

‘There are cyanide capsules in the basket by the door if anyone wants them. Taking them – or using them – is not a sign of cowardice. I don’t know anything about the assassins except they will certainly carry them.

If you are acting as a safe house, before or after the event, I’d advise you to do the same.

Please God we’ll all make it through this, but let’s not pretend that one capture ends with one capture. Consider that if your time comes.’

Nobody looked at the basket. Noemi knew Lüdek wouldn’t ask who wanted the tablets or check how many were gone once the meeting ended.

It was hard in that moment not to think about Vitta, and Mendel’s, Please God she’s not , when Noemi had asked him if he thought the arrested girl might still be alive.

It was hard not to imagine a cell and a torturer forcing her to spill names.

But she didn’t take the poison with her when she left.

The climber’s part of her brain, which had taught her never to look down or doubt that the rope would hold her, wouldn’t let her take that leap.

That was the last meeting Lüdek called, and they learned as little at it as they had at the rest. The operation was a tightly controlled one.

Each person had their individual tasks, but that was all they had.

Roles had been assigned in private, and no one was supposed to share the details, although Noemi and Matthias had broken that rule with each other.

And they’d also shared their frustration at how small their roles were.

No one else would listen, and no one was interested when they said, ‘But we could do so much more.’

‘We have German papers. That gives us a level of freedom to move round the city Czechs can’t rely on. We can shoot, and we’ve proved we’re as good as anyone else when it comes to intelligence-gathering – being able to speak German has helped there too. You could make better use of us.’

That may well have been true, but Lüdek had his orders and Lüdek wouldn’t budge.

They continued to be bit players. Noemi had couriered food stamps to a changing roster of addresses twice a week.

Matthias had sourced and supplied bicycles and items of clothing which were left at unmanned drop zones.

They were trusted, but they were under no illusions that Czechs were trusted more.

Despite the credentials they’d brought with them, being German, and being Jewish – which most of the resistance members weren’t and some only pretended to tolerate – pushed them down the ranks.

Being part of a key resistance operation was what they’d both wanted, and they were learning valuable skills. But it was frustrating to be on the outer rim.

Matthias – who pumped anyone he could for news of the Warsaw Ghetto but rarely got any answers beyond the fact that it was a crowded and disease-ridden place – had said more than once that he wanted to fight for his own people.

Noemi had come to agree with him, even if he defined his people as Polish as well as Jews, and she couldn’t put a country to hers.

Any role, however, was better than none; even the smallest act of defiance was part of the wider struggle they both wanted to believe was possible.

Besides, nobody knew the bigger picture, not even Lüdek.

The control centre for the Heydrich operation was in London, not Prague.

And London had made it clear that anyone asking for information regarding the identity of the assassins or their planned route which they weren’t cleared to receive – including Lüdek himself – would be treated as spies and eliminated.

He’d only revealed the twenty-seventh of May as the planned date of the assassination to give anyone who could take it time to organise their escape from the city before martial law was imposed.

And he’d warned them that date might not be true, that they could be needed for weeks to come.

True or not, Noemi and Matthias weren’t prepared to wait a day past it.

‘What’s going on? Why have you stopped? We haven’t reached the stand yet.’

Noemi craned round the man cursing at the delay. There was a policeman standing on the tram line a little way ahead of them, waving a red flag and shouting. Matthias started to get to his feet the second she whispered what she could see, but Noemi held him back.

‘Wait a minute. If we immediately start pushing towards the front, we’ll draw attention. Which is the last thing we need if…’

She didn’t need to finish the sentence. They both knew it ended in if it really is happening today .

They were on a tram which had been brought to a forced stop.

It was the twenty-seventh, the day the assassination was due to be carried out; that did not feel like a coincidence.

It was also the day they’d planned their escape for, although they hadn’t known what time the operation would start or where it would take place.

Noemi checked her watch, not that any of the guessing games they’d played actually mattered: there was only one train a day they could catch, and that left in two hours’ time at one o’clock.

It was now a little after eleven; the rest of the tram journey should have taken less than twenty minutes.

In theory, they’d left plenty of time to make the journey.

Now she remembered the speed with which the Nazis had reacted in Munich and closed down the city and wished they’d taken the first train to anywhere they could and worried about the connections later.

‘He’s coming over. Whatever happens next, we can’t look as if we’re worried or in a hurry.’

Matthias slipped his hand around Noemi’s and smiled at her as if they had all the time in the world.

She knew it was an act for public consumption, but his touch – which he’d never offered before apart from to help her over a rocky path in the mountains – was a welcome moment of reassurance.

Especially as the policeman had reached the tram while they were slipping into their roles.

A ripple spread through the carriage as he barked orders at the driver through the window.

‘Did you hear what he said? Someone’s thrown a bomb under Protektor Heydrich’s car.’

‘What was that? Someone’s tried to shoot the Butcher?’

‘Didn’t you hear him? There was a whole gang of them throwing missiles and shooting, but apparently they’ve all got away.’

The further the rumours spread through the tram, the bigger they grew, each voice amplifying the details and the speaker’s importance.

Until the reality of what an attack like that could actually mean for the city began to sink in and the voices fell as quickly away.

Heads went down as fear pushed in. Noemi reached for her bag, ready for the inspection she was certain was coming.

It was over a year since she’d carried papers marked with a J, but she couldn’t shake the feeling the red letter would have bloomed across her picture again.

‘Everyone off. Wherever you’re going, you’ll have to get there on foot.’

Her breath came back in a rush. She didn’t realise she’d been holding Matthias’s hand in a vice until he shook it out when she set him free.

Being seen to hurry stopped being a black mark as soon as they got off the tram.

The rest of the passengers dispersed with lightning speed – nobody wanted to be seen gathering or gossiping.

Noemi looked around her, squinting against the bright sunshine, trying, and failing, to get their bearings.

The last thing she wanted to do was approach the policeman for directions.

‘It’s okay, I know where we are. That’s the Invalidovna.’ Matthias nodded at the huge coral-and-cream building running along the entire block behind them. ‘I’d guess it’s about a forty-five minute walk to the train station from here, providing there’s no cordons or police checks.’

Forty-five minutes. That was no time at all in terms of the distances they’d already walked together.

It was the longest walk of their lives. It was a warm, sunny day, but the city was curiously silent, the air holding its breath.

None of the buses or trams were running.

The few knots of people accidentally coming together at newsstands turned away again the instant they noticed each other.

Noemi and Matthias kept up a steady pace and avoided everyone who was avoiding them.

They didn’t speak – there was nothing to be said except, I don’t hear any sirens yet , and that felt like tempting fate.

But when they finally arrived in front of the long row of columns which stretched across the front of Prague’s central station, they caught hold of each other’s hands again.

‘I honestly thought it would be surrounded. I thought there’d be SS or Gestapo everywhere.’

Noemi was grateful when Matthias didn’t respond by pointing out that they weren’t clear yet.

That they were too early for the train, which could easily be cancelled.

That the station could easily close. That the fact they were travelling out of the city at all could turn them into suspects.

Or tell her to act normally when she couldn’t remember what normal was.

‘He’s badly hurt, but he’s not dead. Thank God.’

‘There were two of them firing apparently; one got away on a tram and one on a bike. There were so many witnesses, please God they’ll be caught right away.’

‘It can’t only be two; there must have been dozens involved in a set-up like that. An attack on a car and a shooting? The Germans will have the city locked down by nightfall, you’ll see. Please God they pick the right ones up quickly and don’t stick us all in the frame.’

Only the last Please God sounded genuine. The other prayers were added as an afterthought when the speakers heading towards their platforms looked hastily round.

You need to think and act as if you’re going to get caught.

Now she was the one thinking, Please God.

Hoping that Lüdek and the rest of the cell had followed his advice, no matter how tiny their involvement had been.

Knowing she would probably never find out how their stories ended.

Even with Matthias’s hand on her elbow, that was the loneliest feeling in the world.

Her life was full of empty spaces. Her head was full of people she loved or admired and might never find a trace of again.

Every footstep she took towards their platform echoed with a name.

Vitta, Rabbi Mendel and Lüdek, and – loudest of all – Carina, Hauke and Frieda.

But not Pascal; she wouldn’t let his name in.

‘This is our platform. And the train’s here.’

Noemi faltered as she looked up at the sign suspended high above them in the cavernous station.

Warsaw. Another city, another country; another huge leap far away.

I want to go home and find my parents. And I want to fight for my own people .

She’d understood that impulse when Matthias had said it, in the same way she’d known she would go with him before he asked.

Her parents were beyond her immediate help, and too many people had disappeared for her to want to lose her only real friend.

And, besides, where else would I go?

She reached instinctively for her throat, forgetting for a moment that the locket was gone and she had no links left to home.

I can’t go back to Germany whether I want to or not. I can’t stay in Prague.

Those roads were closed to her for as long as war raged.

She was as sure of that as she was sure that, despite every setback and frustration and danger, she wanted to fight.

She’d stepped across a line she couldn’t retreat from when she’d fired her first bullet into the crowds at the Dachau Palace.

She knew what guilt felt like now. She knew how long the nights could be, and how hard it was to shake off the sound of the screams that had filled the dark hillside.

But she also knew far more about the realities of the Nazi machine than she had when she’d run away from Unterwald.

Concentration camps, round-ups, deportations and ghettos.

A web of hateful words that had trapped her parents and were part of her normal vocabulary now.

Where does this end?

The question kept getting bigger; the answer kept getting darker. Heydrich might be badly hurt, he might be dying, but even if he did, he was only one man. There were too many more who shared his bloodlust. Who wanted every Jew in Europe wiped out.

But every one of them we manage to get rid of could leave one of us alive.

Home was behind her, if home even existed. There was no way to find that out until the Nazis were beaten. That fight might not be possible; it might not be winnable. Taking part could lead to her death.

But I have to try, for myself, and for all the people who’ve been taken or broken and can’t.

Noemi walked along the platform wondering if this was the point where she disappeared, where her story was lost. If the loved ones who survived and might one day come looking for her would find only gaps and empty spaces too.

She let herself hold that thought for a moment, and feel the pain and the fear inside it, and then she let it go.

She was moving forward; she wasn’t waiting. She wasn’t anyone’s prisoner yet.

She climbed onto the train behind Matthias and closed her eyes as it finally pulled out of the station without the SS or the Gestapo anywhere in sight. Another city, another country; another chance to stay a step ahead, to make a mark. To say, Not me, not us, not now .

It wasn’t a lot to hold on to, but it was hope.