‘Samuel. Samuel, can you hear me? You’re alive, Samuel. You must wake up. Can you hear me, Samuel? You must wake up.’

Samuel Lachmann’s eyelids flickered open as he felt himself gently rolled onto his back and his head was propped against someone’s shoulder. He blinked several times, unable to see through his left eye, which was clouded by blood. He flinched and jerked his head away from the beam of light.

‘Slowly. No quick movements.’

He lay propped against the stranger for several seconds, trying to remember where he was and what had happened. His head and his left arm throbbed with pain. He realised he was in the apartment. He could see the legs of the dining table in the low beam of the torch. Puzzled, he squinted at the person who was whispering to him in the dark.

‘It’s me,’ the voice said, and the torchlight was directed upon a face he knew well, ‘it’s me, Efraim.’

Efraim Meisell. What was Efraim Meisell doing in the apartment? Samuel was bewildered. The Meisells and the Lachmanns no longer visited each other, even though they lived just across the square. Young Naomi stole over for the occasional English lesson with Ruth, but the Meisells and the Lachmanns hadn’t visited each other for a whole year – it was too risky.

‘We need to get you out of here. They come back to collect the bodies at first light.’

They! Samuel sat bolt upright. He knew who ‘they’ were and, with sudden and horrifying clarity, he knew what had happened. He could see it. Ruth on the floor, the rifle aimed directly at her head. He staggered to his feet, clutching the dining table for support.

Efraim scrambled up beside him. ‘Slowly, you must move slowly or you’ll faint; you’ve lost a lot of blood …’

‘Ruth. They shot Ruth!’

‘No, they didn’t.’ Efraim said it with force, but Samuel continued to look at him in wild disbelief. The memory was so clear. Ruth, the rifle, then the explosion. But he could not remember anything after that.

‘They didn’t shoot her,’ Efraim insisted. Samuel had the look of a madman. ‘Naomi saw them take her away.’

Swaying unsteadily on his feet, Samuel remembered throwing himself at the SS man with the rifle. That was when he’d heard the explosion.

‘Can you walk?’ Efraim asked. ‘Lean on me,’ and without waiting for an answer, he draped Samuel’s right arm over his shoulder and clasped him tightly around the waist.

Samuel ignored the pain as they slowly made their way towards the door. ‘They took Rachel too?’

‘Yes.’ Efraim was aware that the question was rhetorical, but he knew Samuel needed to ask it and, more importantly, that he needed to hear the answer out loud. ‘They took Rachel. And they took Mannie as well.’

Confusion mingled with Samuel’s pain. His head seemed on fire. Mannie? Why would they take Mannie? He wasn’t a Jew. He opened his mouth to enquire, but they were at the front door and Efraim hushed him as he switched off the torch. Then, silently, they edged out into the darkness of the hall.

Ten minutes later, ensconced in the cellar of the ground-floor flat opposite, Sharon Meisell bathed the caked blood from Samuel’s face and, careful not to start up the bleeding, she applied disinfectant to the open wound where the bullet had splintered his cheekbone and raked an ugly furrow along the side of his head.

‘It will leave a nasty scar but it will mend,’ she announced. ‘You are fortunate you did not lose an eye, Samuel.’

‘An eye?’ Efraim said. ‘He is fortunate to be alive.’

Efraim and Sharon were accepting the inevitability of what had happened and concentrating on the present, but Samuel was not. Despite the pain which threatened to engulf him, he was barely aware of Sharon’s ministrations as he listened to young Naomi Meisell.

When the Nazis had first appeared in the street outside, it had been apparent that the object of their raid was the apartment building opposite, and Naomi had ignored her parents’ orders to go with them to their hiding place in the cellar. She had watched through the gauze curtains of the front room instead, and she told Samuel in precise detail everything she had witnessed. Eighteen-year-old Naomi prided herself on her precision and eye for detail and it had a purpose. When she escaped Germany, she had no intention of fleeing to safety with her parents; she would join the nearest resistance group she could find.

There had been five of them, she told Samuel, one man in plain clothes whom she judged to be Gestapo, and four uniformed SS. ‘One officer and three troopers,’ she said. They had marched Ruth and Mannie out of the building, and little Rachel had been in Ruth’s arms. The three of them had been unhurt, she hastily assured him. Mannie had been carrying a suitcase and he had had his arm around Ruth.

‘Mannie was protecting her, Samuel.’

As Sharon started cutting away his shirt in order to examine the flesh wound in his upper arm where the other bullet had passed through, Samuel continued to fight against the pain, seizing instead upon the shred of hope Naomi had fed him.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘That’s why Mannie went with them. Mannie will save her.’ Noticing the look that passed between Efraim and his wife, he realised how unrealistic he must sound to them. But they didn’t understand. ‘Mannie is a lawyer,’ he said, ‘a distinguished lawyer from a respected Aryan family.’

As the idea formulated in Samuel’s brain, he started to feel light-headed, possibly from his wounds, or from loss of blood, or perhaps … just perhaps … from the dizzying possibility that there might actually be hope. He felt driven to convince them of his argument.

‘When Manfred Brandauer pleads on Ruth’s behalf,’ he insisted, ‘they will listen!’

The only sound in the room was the slop of the water in the bowl as Sharon started to bathe Samuel’s arm.

They didn’t believe him, he thought, and who could blame them? He knew what they were thinking. Plead for what? There were no grounds to plead on a Jew’s behalf.

‘Ruth’s mother was a Gentile.’ He tried to sound as if he was pulling an ace from his sleeve, but he knew that his voice lacked the ring of triumph. ‘And she looks Aryan …’ he could hear himself sounding more desperate by the second ‘… that will help when Mannie makes his plea.’

Sharon stopped bathing the wound and glanced at her husband, who nodded. Efraim, too, knew it had gone far enough. Both of them turned to their daughter.

‘Mannie was wearing your coat, Samuel,’ Naomi said. ‘He was wearing your coat with the Star of David on it.’

Samuel’s hopes died in that instant. He’d known they’d been implausible, born of wishful desperation, but they’d been something to cling to. Now, with the enormity of his friend’s sacrifice, came the recognition of the inevitability of his wife’s death, and all hope deserted him. Like the hundreds of thousands before him and the hundreds of thousands yet to follow, Samuel Lachmann felt himself drowning in despair.

He didn’t leave Berlin with the Meisells, although Efraim secured him false papers. His head wound made him conspicuous, he said, and he insisted he would pose too great a threat to their safety as a travelling companion. The family had already risked far too much on his behalf, he told Efraim. In saving his life they had risked their own and he was forever in their debt.

‘You were not intended for death, Samuel,’ Efraim said, embracing him in farewell. ‘It was God’s will you should live. You are a lucky man.’

Lucky? Lucky to have lost his wife and daughter? Lucky to live the rest of his life in the knowledge that the man who had been a brother to him had died in his place? Samuel could taste the bitterness like bile on his tongue as he returned Efraim’s embrace. He wished Efraim hadn’t saved him; he wished that he’d died that night. But he allowed Efraim to believe he still cared about life, it was only fair. He would live secretly in the cellar, he said, and when his wounds had healed he would make good his escape. Then he bade the family farewell.

Samuel did not live in secret. He flaunted his existence, venturing out daily, and his enquiries about the departures from Grunewald Goods Train Station were dangerously blatant. A chain of information existed for Jews seeking loved ones, witnesses surreptitiously passing along the grapevine the names of those they had seen rounded up for transportation. It was advisable to be discreet, however: word could reach the Nazis who were always keen to identify anyone asking questions. Samuel’s lack of discretion yielded swift results and, after several days of persistent investigation, he discovered the information he sought.

Early in the morning after their capture, Ruth and Rachel and Mannie had been seen herded into the cattle trucks along with the hundreds of others who had huddled on the railway platform throughout the night, their destination Auschwitz.

Samuel decided to leave Germany.

The night before his departure, he visited the second-floor apartment across the square, his purpose not one of sentiment but practicality. He needed supplies, most importantly whatever cash he could lay his hands on, and he hoped that the meagre savings Ruth had put aside were still in the tea canister where she kept them.

The door was not locked, but then why should it be? Only he and Ruth had keys to the apartment. He turned on the overhead light, heedless that such advertisement of his presence might be imprudent. Everything remained exactly as it had been, with one exception. There was a large, dark stain on the floorboards beside the dining table. But that was all it was, just a stain. Where was the blood? Who had cleaned it up?

Frau Albrecht, Samuel thought, recalling how, several days previously, as he’d been leaving the Meisells’ flat, he’d looked up at the second-floor apartment opposite to see a figure watching him from behind the living room curtains. He’d known immediately, by the glint of sunlight on silver hair, that it was Frau Albrecht. He’d been surprised. He’d never thought of the Albrechts as pilferers, but why else would Frau Albrecht be in his apartment? War obviously made thieves of even the most respectable, he’d decided, and he hoped she hadn’t discovered the money in the tea canister.

Now, as he looked at the stained floorboards, he pictured Frau Albrecht on her hands and knees, scrubbing away with furious intent. Of course she’d have cleaned up the mess, he thought scornfully, she wouldn’t have been able to help herself. Frau Albrecht was fastidious, and pools of congealed blood were not only untidy, they were unhygienic.

Samuel had always felt disdain for the conservative, elderly couple who’d owned the other apartment on the second floor for twenty years. The Albrechts’ front door was virtually opposite the Lachmanns’, but so assiduously did they avoid Samuel and Ruth that meetings in the hall were rare, and on the odd occasions when they misjudged their timing, they would nod politely to Ruth and pointedly ignore Samuel.

‘Of course they ignore us, Samuel – they have to.’ Ruth’s defence of the couple had been vociferous from the outset. ‘I think they’re very brave,’ she’d added with that edge to her voice that defied disagreement. The Albrechts had been friends of her father’s, she’d explained, and when it had become dangerous to be friends with a Jew, they had distanced themselves. As mere neighbours it would be easier for them to plead ignorance should it prove necessary.

‘And ignorance is bravery?’ Samuel’s reply had been scathing, but Ruth’s retort had been equally so.

‘Yes, Samuel,’ she’d said. ‘In failing to report us they could be accused of harbouring Jews and sent to their deaths, so yes, their ignorance is most brave.’

Samuel had shrugged his acknowledgement, but she hadn’t convinced him. Like his best friend, Mannie, Samuel believed people should stand up and be counted. ‘Too many are pleading ignorance,’ both men agreed.

Now, as he pictured Frau Albrecht scrubbing the blood from the floorboards, Samuel wondered whether playing ignorant had proved too much for the Albrechts. Had it been the Albrechts who had denounced them? he wondered. But as quickly as the thought occurred he put it aside. He would go mad if he tried to allot blame; he and Ruth had been living on borrowed time for so long they had brought about their own undoing.

The money was in the canister. Along with the handful of coins was the neatly folded ten-reichsmark note he’d earned that last day working at Hoffmann’s Garage. The note had been crumpled and covered in grease when he’d handed it to Ruth, he recalled, and he could hear her good-natured chastisement as she carefully wiped it with a warm dishcloth and folded it into a square. ‘Really, Samuel, you are the messiest man I know.’ She hadn’t been able to clean the grease off completely, he noticed, the money was still slightly stained.

Mannie’s knapsack remained on the kitchen bench where he’d left it and Samuel took it into the bedroom. He packed some items of clothing, a torch and his penknife, and then, from the top drawer of the dresser, he lifted out a photograph of Ruth. He would have liked to have had one of Rachel too, but there were no photographs of the child. The past two years had not been a time for taking photographs. What was the point? To have them developed would have been far too risky.

The picture of Ruth that he kept in the top drawer was Samuel’s favourite. It was the one Mannie had taken on campus, outside the library. Mannie had been characteristically methodical, searching for the perfect light, the perfect angle, the perfect composition, and Ruth had made fun of him, posing and pulling silly faces, until finally she’d burst into exasperated laughter. ‘Oh for God’s sake, Mannie, press the button!’ Mannie had, and he’d captured the very essence of Ruth, which, as Samuel knew, had been his intention all along.

Samuel slid the photograph into his pocket. The picture was as representative of Mannie as it was of Ruth, for Mannie’s love was in it. Mannie had loved Ruth, Samuel had always known it. He’d even told Ruth. ‘You do realise that Mannie’s in love with you, don’t you?’ But she laughed, not taking him seriously, and he never mentioned it again. It wasn’t fair to Mannie, he thought.

He went back to the kitchen in search of food supplies, although he doubted he’d find any. He opened the bread box. Bare. He’d expected it. Frau Albrecht. But then he supposed it was sensible: the bread would have been mouldy by now. He opened the cupboards and, to his surprise, the packet of powdered eggs was there. So were the tins and, most surprising of all, the coffee. Then he noticed, beside the small brown paper bag, the money. A neatly stacked pile of coins rested on top of two ten reichsmark notes. He counted the amount. Thirty reichsmarks in all. Not a vast sum, but substantial enough in these straitened times.

Samuel had numbed his mind to everything around him from the moment he’d entered the apartment. He could not afford to do otherwise. But the money unnerved him. The sheer unexpectedness of it had caught him off-guard. He slipped the notes and coins into his pocket, and concentrated on the practical matters to hand, loading the food supplies into the string bag which Ruth kept in the top drawer, wrapping a sharp knife in a tea towel and packing it, together with several other kitchen utensils, into the side pocket of the knapsack. He must not allow himself to be distracted. Now was not the time to question the money, or the donor, or the reasons.

String bag in one hand, knapsack over his shoulder, he crossed through the living room to the front door, flicked off the light switch and stepped into the hall. He pulled the door to, hearing the click of the latch, and started towards the stairs. Then he heard the click of another latch as a door opened quietly behind him. He turned. Frau Albrecht stood in the hall, the silver of her hair shining in the light that streamed from her apartment. She looked so frail, and so very, very old, he thought. She hadn’t looked that old the last time he’d seen her, surely. The war had aged them all, but Frau Albrecht more than most.

They stood barely ten paces apart, and although not a word was uttered, Frau Albrecht’s eyes spoke to him. A faded milky blue, they appeared huge in the fragile parchment pallor of her face, and all her confusion, despair and helplessness was mirrored in them. How had it ever come to this? her eyes asked, and it seemed they were begging his forgiveness.

Samuel nodded his thanks for the money. We are all lost, he thought as he stared into the old woman’s eyes. The whole world is lost.

Frau Albrecht remained standing in the hall, watching him as he walked away.

He left Berlin the following day.

Samuel’s aim was to reach Switzerland and his father. Recklessly indifferent to capture, he travelled openly, hitching lifts, jumping trains, producing his false papers whenever necessary, anticipating exposure at every turn and sometimes even wishing for it. But it seemed he was charmed. His head bandaged, the dressing which Sharon had applied now grubby and ill kempt, he was certainly conspicuous. Perhaps people presumed he was a wounded soldier returned from the front. How ironic, he thought. Or perhaps his survival was due to the sheer perversity of life: if one didn’t care whether or not the worst happened, then it didn’t. Perhaps it was as simple as that.

When eventually he arrived in Zurich his father was elated. Having received no news of his son for eighteen months, Leonard Lachmann had assumed the worst. And over the ensuing two years, as Samuel found employment and settled into a regular pattern of existence, Leonard was relieved that his son appeared to be getting on with the business of living. In truth, Samuel was not. He was simply going through the motions.

Samuel Lachmann was a tortured man, grieving for his wife and child and haunted by the past. Above all, he was a man plagued by guilt: guilt that he had not been taken with his family; guilt that his best friend had forfeited his life for their protection; and, above all, guilt that he was alive when the three people most dear to him had gone to their deaths.

But, when the war finally ground to its conclusion and the Allies claimed victory over Germany, a fresh torture presented itself to Samuel. He was taunted by the faintest rekindling of hope.

Reports from the liberation fronts exposed the hideous truths of the death camps. But they also spoke of survivors. Among the unbelievable horrors of man’s inhumanity were survival stories which beggared description. Could Ruth be one of them? Samuel wondered. Could she be alive?

He pictured her. She would be singing to Rachel. In Italian, her favourite language, ‘the voice of Puccini and Verdi’, she would say. And, as he pictured her, he heard her. She was singing her favourite aria from La Bohème, softly, in her true, pretty voice, and Rachel was clapping her hands, out of time with the melody. Was Mannie with them? he wondered. And, as he pictured Mannie, Samuel heard his voice too. He was reading a bedtime story to Rachel. It was ‘The Snow Queen’, of course. How strange that the child never tired of hearing it, that she reacted with the same degree of fear and delight each time Mannie read it to her.

Samuel tried to haul his mind back to reality, but the images and the voices wouldn’t let him. He was becoming obsessed. Everywhere he looked he saw Ruth and Rachel and Mannie. He didn’t believe they were still alive, but the slender thread of possibility was driving him insane, and he knew there was one way only to free himself of his wild imaginings. He must learn the truth. He must explore all avenues, discover witnesses if he could. He must know how they died.

The Jewish Agency for Palestine, an organisation newly formed with the express purpose of reuniting and re-settling Holocaust victims, informed Samuel of Camp Foehrenwald, roughly fifteen miles south of Munich. Originally a village built in 1939 to house the forced labour at I.G. Farben’s camouflaged munitions plant in the nearby woods, Camp Foehrenwald now served a very different purpose. The village and surrounding area had been taken over by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and was one of the largest displaced persons camps in Germany. It no longer housed workers, but survivors. And a great number of the survivors had come from the death camps, including many from Auschwitz.

Ruth and Rachel Lachmann and Manfred Brandauer were not listed among the residents at Camp Foehrenwald, Samuel was informed over the phone, but the Jewish Agency for Palestine had compiled an extensive Survivor List at the camp, and already many families were being reunited through contacts made there.

Samuel returned to Germany. At last he had a purpose, a direction to follow, and, as the train approached Munich, he started to feel a flicker of genuine hope. His imaginings no longer seemed so far-fetched.

In the camp’s main office, he carefully scanned every name on every page of the Survivor List, but Lachmann and Brandauer were absent. In the central hall, he studied the massive noticeboard with its hundreds of names of displaced persons and its plaintive pleas of those seeking the fate of relatives. There were even several names he recognised. Louis Halpem was one. Samuel had known the Halpem family quite well many years ago in Berlin. Louis had been a friend of his father’s. Does anyone have news of my daughter Frieda Halpem? Louis’s note read. She was sixteen years old when we were separated at Buchenwald. There were many such messages on the board, and Samuel added his own. Does anyone know what happened to Ruth and Rachel Lachmann and Manfred Brandauer? They were transported to Auschwitz in July, 1943.

He asked among the residents of Camp Foehrenwald, specifically those who had been in Auschwitz, but no-one could give him any information. Most were sympathetic, wishing him good luck in his search while plainly holding out little hope of success, but several responses were quite brutal.

‘Who can say what happened to them?’ one man shrugged. ‘The Nazis didn’t keep records of those who went to the ovens.’

‘A woman with a baby?’ another scoffed. ‘No chance. They shot the babies as soon as they arrived, and usually the mothers as well.’ Having witnessed his own wife and child shot in front of him, the man saw no point in softening the blow for Samuel. ‘Young mothers of dead babies don’t make good workers,’ he said.

Defeated and depressed, Samuel was about to leave when the Agency representative, a kind enough woman but eminently practical, suggested that he should look at the record of deaths witnessed by survivors. ‘It’s not a very long list,’ she added, ‘there were not many who survived to become witnesses.’

Samuel couldn’t believe he hadn’t even thought to enquire about such a list, and realised that his newfound hope had made him naively optimistic. He had been searching among the living, when he should have been searching among the dead.

As the woman had said, the list was not extensive, but it was thorough in detail, as the Agency wished to avoid any confusion of the facts. Alongside each name was the cause of death, the place where it had occurred, the date if known or an approximation if not, and the identity of the person who had witnessed the death.

Samuel’s eyes remained glued on the papers now quivering in his hand. There was no mention of Ruth Lachmann or her daughter, nor could he see Martin Brandauer, but the name Lachmann was there. Alongside it was the identity of the survivor, a man named Ira Schoneberger. Ira Schoneberger had witnessed the execution of Samuel Lachmann by firing squad at Auschwitz-Birkenau in the month of October, 1943.

The grief and guilt Samuel had suffered in the knowledge of Mannie’s sacrifice returned tenfold as he stared at the record of his own death.

‘But why Australia? It’s so far away.’ Leonard Lachmann was aware of the answer even as he asked the question. For over a year his son had trekked throughout Europe, from one displaced persons camp to another, seeking news of his wife and daughter, and the futility of his search had all but broken his spirit.

‘A new life in a new place,’ Samuel said. ‘It’s the only hope I have. Even here in Zurich I’m too close to the past, I must leave Europe.’

Leonard was saddened at the prospect of losing his son to such immense distance, but he agreed that Samuel was right. Europe was still in turmoil, the memories of hate and horror too raw. He hoped that in Australia Samuel might find himself again, that the strength and the confidence and the buoyancy of spirit his son had always possessed might return in a new country where such qualities would be called upon.

‘Come in, mate.’

Samuel entered the office, and the interviewer from the Snowy Authority, a jovial man, middle-aged and over-weight, indicated the chair.

‘Take a seat,’ he said as he circled the desk.

‘Thank you.’ Samuel did, and the two of them sat.

‘How long have you been in Australia?’ Stan was making pleasant conversation – he liked to put migrant applicants at their ease before he started on the official interview.

‘Eighteen months. Only six months here in Sydney, though. I was in Brisbane for a year before I came south.’

‘Your English is good.’ It was, Stan thought. In fact, the bloke sounded very well educated. But then Stan had bumped into quite a few foreigners who were, surprisingly enough. ‘Where are you from originally?’

‘Germany. Berlin.’

‘Ah. Right.’

It was Stan’s theory that all Germans couldn’t be bad, and he made a habit of trying hard not to let any bias show when he interviewed one of them. The poor bastards copped enough flak as it was, in his opinion. Besides, apart from the buggered-up eye, this one looked like a nice enough bloke.

‘Well, let’s go from the top, shall we?’ He smiled his broad assurance that he wasn’t one of those who made judgements, opened the manila folder on his desk, and picked up his pen. ‘What’s your name, for starters?’

‘Lachmann. Samuel Lachmann.’

‘Right you are.’ Stan printed the name clearly on the application form. ‘Luckman, Samuel,’ he said.

Samuel watched from the other side of the desk as the pen formed the words upside down, and he didn’t bother correcting the man.

‘Luckman, eh?’ Stan looked up with another hearty grin to prove he wasn’t a bad guy. ‘Do they call you Lucky?’

The question took Samuel by surprise and he paused for a moment to consider his answer. ‘Yes, that’s right,’ he said. ‘They call me Lucky.’ And he smiled as he realised he’d said it without bitterness.