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‘This is a battle to the death. Everyone who chooses to stay and fight must understand that. The Nazis have pledged to murder every Jew in here; we’ve pledged not to surrender.

But it is also essential that some of us survive.

To tell our stories, to keep our faith and our culture alive.

There might be a moment when the commander of your section orders you to get out.

There might be a moment when you decide leaving is the right thing for you to do.

There are maps of the sewers and tunnels for anyone who wants to consult them and try.

Whichever choice you eventually make – to stay or to leave – it’s a brave one. ’

Noemi counted and recounted the Molotov cocktails hidden in the dark cellar which passed for a munitions dump and wished she could conjure up more supplies.

Five days had passed since Mordechai Anielewicz – the commander-in-chief of the Jewish Fighting Organisation and a key co-ordinator in the ghetto uprising – had delivered his message and his absolution.

Five days since the ghetto’s hastily convened army had exploded onto the streets in a flaming cauldron of homemade bombs and grenades and smuggled-in bullets that had left a trail of Nazi not Jewish corpses slumped across the ghetto, and a thick pall of smoke clinging to the glass shards and the barbed wire.

The fighters who’d gathered to hear him that morning – in one of the many hidden bunkers they’d carved out of the hovels they’d been forced for too long to call homes – had expected to die en masse on that first day. Most of them were still standing.

She finished checking the gasoline-filled bottles and switched her attention to the stack of guns and ammunition which had been stored in a drier corner.

Some of the weapons were Polish, supplied by the Home Army.

Some were British and had come via Allied airdrops.

Some had been stolen from the holsters of newly dead German soldiers.

Whatever way they’d been sourced – whether by smuggling or stealing – every gun brought into the ghetto had risked a life and claimed far more.

Noemi and Matthias had made three runs through the tunnels which linked the labyrinth-like cellars to the surrounding city before they’d decided to stay and fight.

Each trip had aged them. Each one had become more frightening, not less.

But – unlike some of the equally brave fighters from other resistance cells – they’d managed to evade the Polish blackmailer gangs who lurked near the entrance manholes, waiting to catch smugglers on their way in and sell them to the Gestapo.

Or the Jewish policemen inside the ghetto, who mistakenly thought that working with the Nazis would protect them and their families, and were waiting by the exit holes to catch them on the way out.

And unlike the bodies they blundered past in the dark sewers, they hadn’t lost their footing or their way.

Noemi and Matthias and their unknown companions had brought in every weapon and weapon-making device they could carry with them.

But that hadn’t stopped the supplies running out.

‘Find me more lightbulbs that we can fill with gasoline for when there’s no bottles left. And more nails to pack into the pipes you’ve collected – pull those out of anything you can. Be careful, okay? Use the attics and the cellars to move around, not the streets.’

She said the last part mostly for herself: the children waiting to begin their next scavenger hunt didn’t need a warning.

They knew the ghetto’s warrens and its ways far better than she did.

They understood that it was a place where the rules changed daily and punishments were arbitrary and unconnected.

They’d adjusted to its dirt and its shortages and the disease and hunger which was never in short supply.

It was heartbreaking how well adapted they were to an inhuman life, not that Noemi would have told them that.

The boys and girls in her supply chain were proud of the fact that they had so many routes at their fingertips – they could switch in a second when the Nazis chose a new set of buildings to spray bullets into.

They wore their ability to dodge the ongoing round-ups like a medal.

The truth was that everybody in the ghetto – from the fighters engaged in the increasingly heavy battles, to the hundreds of civilians hiding in the maze of underground bunkers and praying for those battles to end – had the same slim chance of survival as the next.

Nobody, whatever their age, wanted to be reminded of that.

‘This is it. The SS have thrown a huge cordon round the perimeter, and they’re increasing the number of deportation trains.

They’re planning our last days, whether that means dragging us out to the forests and shooting us there, or blowing this place up.

So we’ve arrived. We’re at the moment when we fight. ’

It was Mordechai’s call to action which had kept Naomi and Matthias in the ghetto, although they could – in theory – have left.

If the danger hadn’t been so imminent, if he hadn’t been so inspiring.

Most of the bonds of trust and decency people had lived their lives by in the outside world had been smashed apart by the degradation the Nazis had cast them into.

But everyone trusted Mordechai. Everyone – including Noemi and Matthias – believed that if anyone could save the ghetto’s Jews, he could.

His fighters called him ‘The Angel’. His kindness and his determination not to shy away from the truth reminded Noemi of Hauke refusing to be cowed when Viktor singled them out on the stage.

Mordechai was as clever and compassionate as he was fearless.

He didn’t hector; he didn’t bully. He didn’t expect or demand that everyone should take up arms just because he was determined to.

Which meant that when Mordechai spoke, the ghetto listened, fighters and civilians the same.

He’d helped the terrified families clinging on to each other to keep their nerve on the day before the uprising began, when he’d ordered everyone into hiding and an eerie silence fell.

He’d helped them keep their nerve when the fighting began too, and the screams and the bullets and the terror tore at the skies and their ears.

Because they are invisible and forgotten and lost, and he’s their last hope. And there’s nothing left but madness if they lose that.

Noemi sent the children away to hunt for more bomb-making equipment, gathered up the weapons the fighters in her section would need to get through the day, and made her way back to headquarters, a gigantic bunker which ran the length of three buildings on Mi?a Street.

Like her scavenger squad, she clung to the tunnels they referred to as rat runs and didn’t take a single step outside.

She hadn’t done that in daylight since the first shot was fired.

Day one of the ghetto uprising had already turned into the stuff of myths, a David and Goliath story no one could stop retelling.

‘We blew up a tank!’ The opening would never grow dull.

The fighters had swarmed out of their hiding places, clutching their precious weapons and expecting to meet death.

Instead, they’d destroyed a tank and two armoured cars, mown down a platoon of German soldiers and delivered a shock which had caught the German authorities unawares and sent them reeling.

The Nazis had regrouped and retaliated quickly – there’d been buildings on fire and machine guns blazing within an hour.

But then darkness fell, and the Nazis – afraid of the narrow streets and the ambushes waiting for them there, or so the story continued – fell back from their guns and pulled out.

Everybody had run into the open that night to celebrate.

They’d danced and laughed and toasted each other as if freedom was only one more ruined tank away.

On the second day, a successfully detonated mine had killed at least eighty German soldiers, and the ghetto’s new army had celebrated with more homemade vodka and increasingly elaborate stories.

Since then, despite the vicious reprisals and the mounting number of Jewish casualties, the ghetto had never felt more alive.

Every day the uprising continued was another day the Germans hadn’t destroyed them. It was another day filled with hope.

And another day when that hope’s tested, while we wait in vain for the rest of the city to rise up in support and join us.

Noemi forced that thought out of her head as she re-entered the bunker.

It wasn’t easy. Five days of fighting had spilled black smoke and red sparks and the charred stink of burning wood and burning bodies into the heavens and over the walls.

Nobody could pretend it was business as usual in Warsaw; nobody was that deaf and blind.

And yet five days of gunfire and screams from inside the ghetto has produced nothing but silence from outside.

She breathed deeply, closed her eyes for a moment, tried to shake the blackness away.

She pulled a smile onto her face as she roused the rest of her troop from a much-needed sleep and they conjured up breakfast from their dwindling rations.

She spoke as if success was a certainty while they discussed their next fighting position and how best to deploy their overstretched weapons.

What mattered now was no different to what mattered halfway across a challenging cliff face when there was no going back: confidence and self-belief, whatever the odds.

Her doubts were for herself and for the brief moments she tried to share them with Matthias.

Their first day in the ghetto had been an assault wave of sights and smells they’d struggled not to sicken at, but it had been a far worse experience for him.

He’d been forced to accept that his entire family was lost, dead within the first months of their imprisonment.

She’d held him that night as he’d questioned his reason for fighting and become temporarily lost in his grief, and some of the barriers between them had fallen.

But he wouldn’t talk about his parents again.

Which is his right and his choice. And being private about his feelings doesn’t make him any less open to mine.

That wasn’t strictly true. Matthias wasn’t always comfortable around situations he couldn’t control or define.

He sometimes struggled to understand what was worrying her, or closed down if he didn’t have an instant solution.

But he never rejected her, so she sought him out as she always did, in the minutes before she had to pick up her gun and go out again.

Whatever Matthias’s shortcomings, there was no one in the ghetto she trusted like she trusted him.

‘I’m uneasy – I can’t help it. The people outside must know what’s happening in here.

They must know the Germans haven’t beaten us yet, which is a miracle by anyone’s telling, and surely a sign that beating them is possible.

So how can they act as if there isn’t a battle raging in the middle of their city?

How can they keep on ignoring us and not get involved? ’

She’d kept her voice low and looked round before she spoke. Mordechai wouldn’t tolerate what he called compromising morale . Matthias did the same as he replied.

‘You know the answer, Noemi; we both do. And – while I share your anger and frustration – it’s pointless worrying at it now. Focus your energies on staying safe; you getting hurt worries me more than what’s going on over the wall.’

His care over her was comfort of a sort, but it wasn’t the insight she wanted. His use of the word pointless had closed the conversation down.

Why doesn’t he understand that I need to talk through what I’m afraid of? Why do I need to ask him to listen to me?

She didn’t want those thoughts. They were unfair.

Nothing Matthias had said was wrong; given their situation, it was practical advice.

But the thoughts were there, and they’d let others in.

Focus your energies on staying safe had conjured up Pascal’s plea at the train station.

They’d conjured up, He always understood that I had to talk my worries out to get them under control ; he always understood what I was thinking , which wasn’t strictly true either .

She hated these moments – and there were too many of them – when she judged Matthias unfairly and by the wrong man.

The question of why nobody would fight with them was impossible – no wonder Matthias didn’t want to answer it.

She didn’t push him again; she let him go back to his men with the smile he deserved.

What could he possibly say that would help when they both knew the truth?

How can they keep ignoring us? Because we’re Jews and the citizens of Warsaw don’t care when or how or if we die. Our fate is of no importance to them. Viktor would be very at home here.

Accepting that meant accepting that no support or rescue was coming.

And accepting too that, even if the impossible happened and they won, breaking out of the ghetto would not guarantee their safety.

That there was, in fact, no guarantee of safety at all while even one Nazi was left alive and determined to kill them.

So there can’t be even one Nazi left standing, can there?

The question came to her in her father’s voice, in an echo of the bravery he’d shown when he’d stood up to Viktor on the night the Nuremberg Laws were announced.

Noemi closed her eyes. She could sense both men hovering close by her. Hauke filled with pride; Viktor, please God, filled with fear at the thought of a Jew with a gun.

This is our fight. And the world outside will stop ignoring us when we win it.

She stopped worrying about the people of Warsaw and why they did or didn’t care. She sent a kiss to her father wherever he was. Then she went back to her unit and she picked up her gun.