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I can’t be near people until this is over. Nobody and nowhere is safe.

She’d had that thought before, in the ghetto and in the ruins of Warsaw.

She’d had that same longing for silence and peace.

Now the evidence that the war might be ending, although not before the horror had turned yet another dreadful page, stretched out in front of her and she couldn’t go on.

Watching the world’s death throes and getting caught in them would make a mockery of everything she’d survived.

There’d been so many moments since the war began – since the years before that if she was honest – when fear and loneliness had been her closest companions. But she’d never felt as alone or as afraid as she did when she finally pulled herself out of the Vistula.

She’d convinced herself there would be a patrol waiting to catch her.

There wasn’t. There was nobody around at all.

No soldiers, no civilians; no running battles or bodies.

She’d huddled on the riverbank wondering if this side of the city was already dead.

In the end, she’d made her way towards a tree-shrouded park and hidden herself in the undergrowth until her clothes dried and her strength trickled back.

Those hours were a blank. She’d forced herself not to think about Matthias and how badly injured he might be until she could find help for him.

She forced herself to focus on the map she’d memorised of the streets leading away from the water, and the buildings which she could safely approach and ask for shelter.

She’d refused to dwell on the fact that if Praga was in the same shattered state as the neighbourhoods she’d left behind, the places promising sanctuary would no longer exist. She couldn’t hold on to so much fear at one time.

Luckily, Praga, although a far more poverty-stricken place than the main city, was very much alive and broadly intact.

Noemi had wound her way through dark alleyways and past peeling, dilapidated tenements until she eventually found the telephone exchange in Z?bkowska Street, where the Polish Home Army had set up its headquarters, and the place of safety she’d hoped for.

Once she’d given them her name and the details of her partisan unit, she was provided with food and clean clothes and a bed.

But there was very little time to rest. As soon as the news of her escape reached the local Soviet commander, she was taken to their compound and subjected to a series of questions about the German plans and placements on the other side of the river which demanded a level of military knowledge only a Nazi general would possess.

‘You’re not a prisoner; you’re free to leave at any time. Although we will call you back until we’re satisfied you’ve told us everything.’

Her interrogators kept saying she was free to go.

Noemi didn’t believe them, and she didn’t believe everything had an end.

After the second battle-hardened man had combed through her history and professed himself reluctant to believe that any German would fight against their own as a partisan, even a Jew, Noemi knew she wasn’t safe.

Or in a position to trade. If they’d been able or willing to provide her with any information about Matthias’s whereabouts and condition, she might have stayed and carried on co-operating, but that possibility was quickly closed down.

‘We don’t have contacts who can help discover the fate of injured partisans. We don’t have spies whose lives we’d risk for that.’

It was the same answer every time she asked for their help.

The response from the Home Army was hardly more hopeful, although they at least acknowledged him as a fallen comrade and promised to try.

A week went by with no news. Matthias didn’t come for her, but the Soviets did, and their questions grew ever more hostile.

The third time she was asked, ‘What are you really doing here?’ Noemi knew that – whether Matthias was coming or not – she couldn’t stay any longer in Praga.

And the fighters she’d taken shelter with knew it too.

‘The Soviets won’t liberate Warsaw. They’ll let it fall, and then they’ll sweep in and take it when the Nazis finally give up and run.

They want to control Poland someday themselves; they don’t want us to be free any more than the Germans did.

They won’t work with us, and they certainly don’t trust you; they can’t place you.

This isn’t your fight anymore, Noemi, and Matthias isn’t going to make it here any time soon, whatever he promised.

If there’s anywhere you can go that’s safer, if you’ve got a home waiting for you, you should go.

And if Matthias does turn up, we’ll tell him that’s what you were ordered to do. ’

Noemi no longer knew what safe meant. So many years had passed, she no longer knew where or who might mean home.

But it wasn’t Warsaw, and – although it broke her heart to accept it – it wasn’t going to be with Matthias.

Everyone else, including her, even if she wasn’t ready to admit it, had given him up for dead.

She’d let another week go past, pretending to be ill to avoid the Soviets’ demands that she return for questioning as she clung on to false hope.

Then, because she had no other real choices, she’d joined the parade of civilian refugees streaming out of the city before the Germans dismantled the last pieces of it.

The crowd she joined was as wide as the river.

It moved in a jumble of people and possessions that had once mattered to them, and it was drawn from all walks of life.

Carts rolled along, piled high with a motley collection of suitcases and mattresses, dolls’ houses and birdcages; with strings of pots and pans cresting their edges and children perched on the tops like sailors peering out from a fleet of crows’ nests.

Women walked beside her wearing flowered dresses, silk scarves and fur coats, as if they were on their way to a society wedding.

Or dressed in a mismatched selection of rags they clutched round their bodies like armour.

No one spoke above a murmur. Everyone glanced constantly up at the sky for the German planes they were convinced were coming to finish them off.

Nobody would answer her when Noemi described Matthias and asked if they’d seen him.

At night, parents and grandparents huddled round their children, and stray men and women weren’t welcome.

And too many of those who sat round the meagre campfires each night died on the road the next day.

While everybody else kept walking, even their families, because what else could they do? There was no time to bury them; there was no place to do it. There’s no certainty anyone would survive to remember them or mourn.

Noemi curled herself deeper into the nest of dry leaves she’d fashioned for herself as a shelter in the curve of a small hill on the outskirts of Dresden.

She didn’t judge her fellow refugees for that.

She was no better than the other broken people she’d walked beside.

She’d left Matthias behind her on a bullet-strewn street as if he was dead.

She’d stopped weeping for him somewhere along the endless road.

She’d become numb and thanked God for it.

Noemi had lost count of the bodies she’d seen on the long walk out of Warsaw.

Abandoned by the roadside along with the discarded furniture.

Lying scattered across open fields like tumbled scarecrows.

The retreating German armies had left a burned-out, charred world in their wake.

Even the rain smelled of petrol. She’d stopped counting and looking and detached herself from the pack very quickly – there were too many damaged and desperate souls clinging to its edges to be comfortable walking near, and too many empty-eyed children.

She’d spent her nights lying half awake and half frozen curled under branches or in deserted houses the earth had already begun to reclaim.

Where saplings reached through the holes which had once been windows lit by welcoming candles, and nettles had swallowed up the splintered front doors.

She’d avoided people as much as she could, especially the German soldiers she’d occasionally spotted wandering alone, their insignia torn from their jackets, their guns tossed away.

Deserters, or so she assumed. Too dangerous to tangle with, although she couldn’t shake herself free of them.

Matthias’s face had started to melt into Pascal’s in her dreams.

Too many ghosts have started to haunt me as if they’re trying to pull me back.

She wrapped her coat tighter against the wind’s bitter chill, glad the night was at least dry and the winter’s snowfall was past. The further she’d walked, the more the people she’d lost had come back to her.

The memories had started creeping up on her in Breslau, at the convent which had been her home and her hospital for most of December and January.

By the time she’d reached that, her body was in a state of collapse and her mind had seemed determined to join it.

She’d forgotten how to sleep for more than an hour or two.

The strangers she’d passed by and avoided had begun to turn into Frieda and Hauke, into Pascal more often than Matthias.

She’d stopped being sure what was real. Or caring.