'Forgive me. I know. I'm like an old prostitute weeping over her lost virtue. But I'll say it again: remember! Forgive me, friend…'

'Forgive you! I wish one of us were lying here like this corpse, that we'd never lived to meet…'

Abarchuk was standing in the doorway when he finished.

'I'll come and see you again. I'll put you right. I'll be your teacher now.'

Next morning Abarchuk came across Trufelev outside in the compound. He was pulling a sledge with a churn of milk tied across it. It was odd, deep inside the Arctic Circle, to see someone with his face covered in sweat.

'Your friend won't be drinking any of this milk,' he said. 'He hanged himself during the night.'

It's always nice to pass on some surprising news. Trufelev gave Abarchuk a look of friendly triumph.

'Did he leave a note for me?' asked Abarchuk, gulping at the icy air. Magar must have left a note. What had happened yesterday was nothing. He hadn't been himself – something had come over him.

'What do you mean – a note? Anything you write goes straight to the operations officer.'

That night was the most painful Abarchuk had ever known. He lay there quite still, clenching his teeth, gazing with wide-open eyes at the hut wall and its dark smears of squashed bed-bugs. He turned then to his son, the son he had once denied the right to bear his surname, and called out: 'Now you're all I have left. You're my only hope. Do you understand, my friend? My teacher, Magar, wanted to strangle me, to strangle my mind and my will – and now he's hanged himself. Tolya, Tolya, you're all I have, all I have left in the world. Can you see me? Can you hear me? Will you ever know that during this long night your father never stooped, never wavered?'

And next to him, all around him, the camp slept, heavily, noisily and uglily; the thick, stifling air was full of snores, sleepy cries, protracted groans and the sound of teeth being ground together.

Suddenly Abarchuk sat up. He thought he had seen a shadow close by in the darkness.

In late summer 1942 Kleist's Army Group in the Caucasus seized the most important of the Soviet oilfields, near Maykop. German troops had reached Crete and North Cape, Northern Finland and the shores of the Channel. The desert fox, Marshal Erwin Rommel, was eighty kilometres from Alexandria. Chasseurs had hoisted the swastika over the peak of Mount Elbruz. Manstein had received orders to train giant cannons and Nebelwerfer rocket-launchers on Leningrad itself, the citadel of Bolshevism. The sceptical Mussolini was drawing up plans for his advance into Cairo and learning to ride an Arab stallion. Dietl was advancing over the snow in northern latitudes never before fought over by any European army. Paris, Vienna, Prague and Brussels had become provincial German cities.

The time had come for National Socialism to realize its cruellest designs against human life and freedom. It is a lie that it was the pressures of the war that forced the Fascist leaders to undertake these measures. On the contrary, danger and a lack of confidence in their own power were what most served to restrain and temper them.

If Fascism should ever be fully assured of its final triumph, the world will choke in blood. If the day ever dawns when Fascism is without armed enemies, then its executioners will know no restraint::he greatest enemy of Fascism is man.

In the autumn of 1942, during the apogee of National Socialism's military success, the government of the Reich announced a series of cruel and inhuman decrees: under one of these, that of 12 September, European Jewry was removed from the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts and transferred to that of the Gestapo.

Adolf Hitler and the Party leadership had decided upon the final destruction of the Jewish nation.

From time to time Sofya Osipovna Levinton remembered her old life: her five years at Zurich University, the summer holiday she had spent in Paris and Italy, the concerts she had been to at the Conservatory, the expeditions to the mountains of Central Asia, her thirty-two years as a doctor, her favourite dishes, the friends whose lives, with all their ups and downs, had been intertwined with her own, her frequent telephone calls, the odd phrases of Ukrainian she had always used, her games of cards, the belongings she had left in her room in Moscow.

She also remembered her time in Stalingrad – together with Alexandra Vladimirovna, Zhenya, Seryozha, Vera and Marusya. The closer people had been to her, the further away they now seemed.

Early one evening, while their train stood in a siding somewhere near Kiev, she was searching her collar for lice; two middle-aged women beside her were chattering away, very quietly, in Yiddish. She suddenly realized with absolute clarity that all this really was happening to her – to Sonechka, Sonka, Sofya, Major Sofya Osipovna Levinton of the Medical Service.

The most fundamental change in people at this time was a weakening of their sense of individual identity; their sense of fate grew correspondingly stronger.

'Who am I? In the end, who am I?' Sofya Osipovna wondered. 'The short, snotty little girl afraid of her father and grandmother? The stout, hot-tempered woman with tabs of rank on her collar? Or this mangy, lice-ridden creature?'

She had lost any hope of happiness, but many different dreams had appeared in its place: of killing lice… of reaching the chink in the wall and being able to breathe… of being able to urinate… of washing just one leg… And then there was thirst, a thirst that filled her whole body.

She had been thrown into the wagon. In the gloom, which had seemed like complete darkness, she had heard the sound of quiet laughter.

'Is that a madman laughing?' she asked.

'No,' answered a man's voice. 'We're just telling jokes.'

Someone else said in a melancholy tone of voice: 'One more Jewess on our ill-fated train.'

Sofya Levinton stood by the door and answered people's questions, frowning as she tried to get used to the darkness. She felt suddenly overwhelmed, not only by the stench and the noise of people crying and groaning, but by the sound of words and intonations she had last heard in childhood.

She wanted to step further inside, but found this impossible. Feeling a thin little leg in short trousers, she said: 'Forgive me, son; did I hurt you?'

The boy didn't answer.

'Mother,' said Sofya into the darkness, 'perhaps you could move your dumb little boy. I can't stand here for ever.'

'You should have sent a telegram in advance,' said a hysterical voice from the corner. 'Then you could have reserved a room with a private bath.'

'Fool!'

A woman whose face she could now just make out, said: 'You can sit down beside me. There's plenty of room here.'

Sofya could feel her fingers trembling. Yes, this was a world she had known since childhood, the world of the shtetl – but very changed.

The cattle-wagon was full of workers from different co-operatives, girls at teacher-training college, teachers from a school for trade unionists; there was a radio technician, an engineer who worked at a canned-food factory, a livestock expert, and a girl who worked as a vet. Previously, such professions had been unheard of in the shtetl. But then Sofya herself was still the same small girl who had been afraid of her father and grandmother – she hadn't changed. Perhaps, at heart, this world remained equally unchanged. But what did it matter? Changed, or unchanged, the world of the shtetl was poised on the brink of the abyss.

'Today's Germans are just savages,' she heard a young woman say. 'They haven't even heard of Heinrich Heine.'

A man's voice from another corner said mockingly: 'What help's this Heine of yours been to us? The savages are rounding us up like cattle.'