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‘You have to blend in from the first moment; that’s the most important – and the most difficult – thing.

No matter how shocked or frightened or lost you feel – and you will feel all of those things – you can’t show it.

There are informers inside the ghetto as well as outside, people who will do anything and sell anyone to stay alive.

And if this is the only trip you make in there – if you don’t want to go back or stay – no one will think the worse of you for it. ’

Their guide – another in a long line of men whose name they didn’t know – shook his head as Noemi and Matthias both tried to answer him at the same time.

‘I don’t need declarations – your bravery isn’t in question. I’ll see you, hopefully, back here tomorrow night and we can revisit your roles in this then.’

He stepped back into the shadows, leaving the two of them to carefully slide the heavy manhole cover clear and drop down into the sewer system which ran like a web underneath the Warsaw ghetto. The stench was atrocious. Once Matthias pulled the metal disc back into place, the darkness was complete.

This is a mistake. I can’t be down here; I can’t do this. I have to get out and go back.

Adrenaline surged through Noemi’s body, priming her for flight.

It was all she could do to stand still, to hold her stomach down and stop herself scrambling back up the ladder to the surface.

Her courage had been forged on mountaintops, not in dark, stinking drains.

She was a creature who needed the light.

Reach for the next foothold; take the next step. Don’t worry about the ones which come after. Breathe and move forward and you’ll get there.

Pascal was in her head – she could almost feel his hand reaching for hers.

Guiding her the way he’d done the first time he’d taught her to climb up inside the vertical gaps in a rock face that mountaineers called chimneys.

She’d hated that first attempt: she’d hated how narrow it was, and the sense of confinement and the unexpectedly grimy conditions.

She’d put her hand into a spider’s nest halfway up and felt their bodies scattering over her skin.

Muck and gravel had fallen from a ledge above her and down onto her face, blocking her nose and temporarily blinding her.

But she’d kept going, and she’d beaten the spiders and the dirt.

I hated it, but I did it. And the next time we went up, I wasn’t scared at all.

Matthias was beside her, breathing deeply, gathering himself up, getting ready to move.

She almost yelled, It’s not your voice I need , when he asked her if she was ready, and his words pushed Pascal’s away.

She reined that impulse in too; she let her anger with Pascal bury it.

He might have helped her to escape, but he’d hadn’t chosen her.

His guidance was no use to her now; Matthias had to be the man she trusted.

‘Yes, I’m ready. Let’s go.’

She shifted her body, feeling the weight of the guns and grenades and the bullet-loaded magazines tied round her waist and filling her pockets.

This is why we’ve come pounded through her head, driving her on through the filthy water as they counted the steps which the crudely drawn map had promised would lead to a second ladder and an exit.

Warsaw had been Matthias’s choice as their destination once they had to leave Prague, but it had also been their only logical option.

The city was part of the network which had linked Rabbi Mendel to Lüdek and moved them safely out of Munich.

Now Lüdek had given them the name of the Warsaw link in the chain.

The Jews there were living under terrible danger; they desperately needed help.

So Noemi understood why Matthias had chosen Warsaw as the next place where they could make a stand for their people and fight, and she shared his convictions.

But a sense of purpose was one thing and reality was another, and they’d completely underestimated the nightmare they walked into.

‘It’s so beautiful. My mother always said it was as lovely as Paris. And I know the Nazis have been in charge there for years, and there’s a ghetto in the city now, but – even with the damage the initial occupation must have caused – I doubt it’s changed all that much.’

The closer their long journey took them towards Warsaw, the more animated Matthias became. And the more lyrical he grew about the delights of the city he’d been born in. The only time he stumbled was when he mentioned his mother, and he only did that once.

‘Wait till you see ?azienki Park. Forget the temple and the tower in Munich’s English Garden, there’s half a dozen palaces there, including one on a lake that will take your breath away.

And the Bristol Hotel, oh what a place. I went there for dinner on my sixteenth birthday and the chandeliers nearly blinded me, the crystals were so bright.

And Ujazdów Avenue on a Sunday, that’s a treat too, with everyone dressed in their finery and parading about. ’

He conjured up such a wonder-filled place, Noemi wanted to believe it existed unchanged almost as much as he did. Unfortunately, that bubble burst the moment they exited the train station.

‘They’ve decimated it.’

Their instructions had been clear and no different to the ones they’d followed in Prague or Munich.

Don’t loiter. Go straight to the safe address you’ve been given.

Don’t draw any kind of attention. But Matthias was rooted to the spot, trying to make sense of a cityscape which had shifted beyond every reference he knew, and Noemi couldn’t move him.

When she finally shook him hard enough to get a response, he stumbled through the streets as if he was in a trance.

Nothing was as he remembered. Every building he tried to find in the centre was gone or reduced to a broken shell; every square had been renamed.

As for the ghetto, the scale of it defeated them both.

The red brick wall surrounding the enclosure was easily ten metres high. Fierce shards of glass and coils of barbed wire covered the top. The sign on the heavily guarded main gate read, Entry Forbidden: Plague Zone . It would have been easier to walk into Dachau.

Matthias tried to trace his way round it, but the circuit was endless.

The perimeter had turned once busy thoroughfares into dead ends; it had cut houses in two.

In the end, Matthias stopped saying, ‘But I should be able to reach Saxony or Sienna Street this way.’ And stopped asking how anyone could carry on living a normal life in the midst of the rubble and in the shadow of the hostile, towering walls which had effectively smashed up the city.

When Noemi asked him if he wanted to break the rules and go to his parents’ house first to try to find some news of them – although she had no hope they’d be there now she’d seen the ghetto for herself – he shut down.

He didn’t speak again until they finally located Lüdek’s contact, then he couldn’t stop.

‘I knew about the ghetto, although I’ve been trying not to think about it, or the very real possibility my parents and grandparents are somewhere inside it.

I certainly didn’t expect it to be so huge.

And I don’t understand why the city is still in such a terrible mess so many years after the occupation. Why hasn’t anyone cleaned it up?’

‘Because the Nazis won’t let us. They don’t want us to forget that they won and they’re in charge, as if their constant presence and their flags aren’t enough.

The rubble and the ruins and the headless statues are there to remind us we lost. Everything in this city is a warning of what they can and will do to break any attempt at resistance. Including the ghetto.’

Szymon was a lean and wiry and exhausted-looking man. Unlike the others they’d been handed over to since Rabbi Mendel sent them on their path out of Germany, he was also Jewish. And like them, he was utterly committed to resisting the Nazis and didn’t care where that led.

‘I grew up in this city, like you did. Or perhaps not quite like you.’ He glanced at Matthias and nodded to himself.

‘You’ve a German father, haven’t you, and you said your mother inherited the family jewellery business?

So I’m guessing you grew up in Stary ?oliborz?

’ He nodded again as Matthias agreed, and turned to Noemi.

‘That’s a pretty neighbourhood, a little oasis full of elegant villas and wealthy Jews.

Or it was. I, on the other hand, grew up in Powi?le, which, as he will tell you, was crime-ridden and poor and full of thugs with knuckle-dusters for brains.

I learned to fight hard there; I’ve been fighting ever since. ’

It was clear he was trying to establish his credentials, even if the comparison was a clumsy one. But their different backgrounds wasn’t what Matthias was focused on.

‘You said, or it was . What’s happened in ?oliborz, Szymon?

You’re right that I was brought up there, but I left it in 1935, and I’ve had no word from my parents or my grandparents since the war started, which has been…

’ He fumbled for the word but couldn’t find it.

His body shrank. ‘I’ve been trying to convince myself they’d have escaped the round-up and the ghetto.

I’ve been holding on to a picture of them quietly getting on with their lives. But now I’m here and I’ve seen it…’

He stopped; turned in on himself. Noemi reached for his hand, but he didn’t notice and didn’t take it.

I don’t know him half as well as I think I do. He keeps so much of himself hidden.

Matthias had talked about his parents so frequently, Noemi had started to feel as if she knew them, as if she was involved in his life. But everything he’d told her had stopped at 1935; he hadn’t let any darkness in.