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The nuns had scooped her up off their doorstep where she’d fallen and taken her in.

They’d returned her body to health and given her the strength to start facing her past and how that might one day fit into her life again, although they had no simple answers to help her.

She would have stayed with them and waited out the war’s end, but the Russian army – and the frightening rumours they trailed with them – drew too close for any woman to feel safe.

The nuns had closed up the convent at the first sound of the guns approaching.

Noemi had begun walking again. But this time – perhaps because she’d found herself living as part of a community and grown stronger in it – she’d stopped walking away from places with no sense of her final direction, and started walking towards the only definition of home that she knew.

Unterwald had begun to tug at her during her quiet days in the convent.

Her parents had stopped appearing in strangers’ faces when she’d returned to health, but they’d come back to life in her head.

And perhaps in more than her head. She’d started to rewrite their story around I’m alive, so why can’t they be too ?

And the more Noemi asked herself that question, the more plausible the possibility became, and the more she longed to believe it.

She lay in bed recovering her strength and spinning happy endings.

She discounted the lessons she’d learned in the ghetto.

She discounted the death and destruction which had been the backdrop to her life for four years.

She turned Dachau, and whichever camp her mother had been sent to, into survivable places.

She turned her parents into warriors who were strong enough to overcome whatever cruelties had been heaped on them.

Into heroes who would be left standing when Nazi Germany fell.

Who would be waiting for her in Unterwald.

That thought wrapped round her with far more warmth than her thin coat.

It needed a lot of luck to come true – she was prepared to accept that.

But she’d met with as much luck as she had misery almost everywhere she’d been since the day she’d fled on the goods train to Munich.

She’d gambled with death time and again, and it hadn’t caught her.

She’d survived two ferocious battles where the odds were firmly stacked against her.

She’d crept through cities where people had been torn out of any understanding of what a civilised life meant without coming to permanent harm – including Dresden, where bands of thugs had roamed the streets, trying to hold on to the last shreds of their power and she’d decided not to stay.

She’d started to believe her luck might hold.

She could almost see her parents running towards her with their arms open. Until she heard the first plane.

The sound of the engine brought her out of the leaves and onto her feet.

But it wasn’t one plane; it was dozens, maybe hundreds.

Setting up a rolling drone which filled the night sky as if a platoon of tanks was about to burst in formation out of the clouds.

A moment or two after that, the sirens began to scream in the city below her. And a moment or two after that…

Noemi knew that – like the fires which had burned through the ghetto and through Warsaw – the lights which began dancing as she stared spellbound towards Dresden would linger on for years through her dreams. A flash of white flares came first, swinging through the darkness as if the planes had unleashed a wave of tiny parachutes.

And after that bright flurry – which she quickly realised had set up a pathway from the sky to the ground – came the bombs.

Swollen black raindrops which exploded in sunbeam darts of orange and scarlet and turned the heavens into a fireball.

Noemi fell to her knees as the weapons rained down and the fires flew up.

As the city disappeared beneath a pall of thick smoke through which the flames danced like a circle of stars.

She pressed her hands across her ears as the planes’ rumbling gave way to a never-ending chain of loud bangs which shook the hill and rattled the trees and threw up a heatwave inside a wind which seared through the air.

She clapped her hands over her ears, but she couldn’t block out the noise.

She closed her eyes, but she couldn’t block out the sight.

The fires continued to flare on her eyelids.

She sat on the hillside and watched the light show while Dresden and its people crumbled to dust. Then she crawled into her nest and cried for the death of another city full of lost souls.

The planes had gone the next morning, and the hill was a silent place.

But the smoke hung in dark bruises over its wastelands, and the fires flickered on.

Noemi tried to make herself get up and go in search of Dresden’s survivors.

She’d been in war-torn places – there was help she could give.

She tried, but she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t manage one step down the hill.

She no longer knew how to move through a world which kept doing its worst, which had lost every sense on all sides of what was decent and good.

She’d lost the last scraps of her faith in humanity.

A forest.

Even the word had comfort in it.

She looked at the scattered leaves she’d covered herself with and imagined a thick canopy of them curling over her head, forming a shield between herself and the bombs and the fires and the brutalised and brutal people.

She pulled herself slowly up, took a deep breath and tasted the charred wood in the wind.

She hadn’t had a clear plan when she’d left Breslau beyond finding her way back to Unterwald.

She hadn’t considered where that journey would take her, although she knew it would involve German cities and towns whose allegiances might not have shifted away from the Nazis as quickly as she’d hoped.

She couldn’t face any of those people or places now.

The war might be dying, but it wasn’t dead yet, and now it was Germany’s turn to suffer – or to hide.

I’m no safer than I was four years ago. I’ll be German to the Russians.

I’ll still be a Jew to the Germans. I’ll have stories to tell that shame them.

Wherever I go, I’ll be evidence of their crimes – all of us who survive will carry that with us.

The ones with blood on their hands will hunt us down as hard as they ever did.

Nowhere was safe. Everyone was a threat.

That was a horrible, isolating thought. But it could also, Noemi realised, be a blessing.

She wouldn’t stumble into danger if she faced it.

She couldn’t be fooled into thinking she was safe.

And she knew exactly what she had to do. Even better, she was trained for it.

A forest.

The word was more than comfort – it offered sanctuary in a way nowhere else could provide. It was what she needed most. A forest to disappear into. A place to wait out the rest of the war on her own – and survive.