People plied Sofya with questions about the position on the different fronts. Nothing she said was very encouraging and she was promptly told she had been misinformed; she realized that this wagon had its own strategy, a strategy founded on a passionate hunger to remain alive.

'Surely you must have heard that an ultimatum has been sent to Hitler demanding the immediate release of all Jews?'

Yes, of course. What saves people when their bovine melancholy, their mute fatalism yields to a piercing sense of horror – what saves people then is the opium of optimism.

They soon lost interest in Sofya. She was just one more prisoner -with no more idea of her destination than anyone else. No one asked her name and patronymic; no one remembered her surname. She realized with surprise that although the process of evolution had taken millions of years, these people had needed only a few days to revert to the state of cattle, dirty and unhappy, captive and nameless…

She was also surprised how upset everyone still got over trivia, how quick they were to quarrel with one another. One middle-aged woman turned to her and said: 'Look at that grande dame over there! She sits there beside that chink in the wall as though no one except her son has a right to any fresh air.'

The train stopped twice during the night. They listened to the squeaking boots of the guards, occasionally making out odd phrases of both German and Russian. The language of Goethe sounded quite appalling in the middle of the night at a Russian wayside halt, but the Russian spoken by the collaborators was still more sinister.

Like everyone else, Sofya began to suffer from hunger and thirst. Even her dreams had something pathetic about them; she dreamed of a squashed tin with a few drops of warm liquid at the very bottom. She scratched herself with the quick, jerky movements of a dog scratching itself for fleas.

Sofya now understood the difference between life and existence: her life had come to an end, but her existence could drag on indefinitely. And however wretched and miserable this existence was, the thought of violent death still filled her with horror.

It began to rain; a few drops came in through the barred window.

Sofya tore a strip from the hem of her shirt, made her way towards the wall and pushed the material through a small chink. She waited for it to absorb the rainwater, pulled it away and began to suck; it was cool and damp. Soon, the other people sitting by the wall were following her example. Sofya felt quite proud of herself; she was the one who had thought up a way of catching the rainwater.

The little boy she had bumped into during the night was still sitting nearby; he was watching everyone squeeze their shreds of material into the chinks. The dim light was enough for her to make out his thin face and sharp nose. He must have been about six years old. Sofya realized that he hadn't moved or said a word while she had been there; nor had anyone else said a word to him. She held out her wet rag and said: 'Here you are, son.'

He didn't answer.

'Go on. It's for you.'

Hesitantly, the boy stretched out his hand.

'What's your name?' she asked.

'David,' he answered quietly.

Sofya's neighbour, Musya Borisovna, told her that David was from Moscow. He had come to stay with his grandmother and been cut off by the outbreak of war. The grandmother had died in the ghetto and he had been left with another relative, Rebekka Bukhman; her husband had fallen ill and she wouldn't let the boy sit beside her in the wagon.

By evening Sofya had had her fill of conversations, stories and arguments; she was even talking and arguing herself. She often began with the words: 'Fellow Jews, what I think…'

Many of the people in the wagon were looking forward to the end of the journey; they thought they were being taken to camps where each person would be given work in his own field and the sick would receive special care. They talked about this incessantly. But, deep down, their souls were still gripped by a silent horror.

Sofya learned that there were many things in human beings that were far from human. She heard about a paralysed woman who had been frozen to death by her sister; she had been put in a tub and dragged out onto the street on a winter's night. She heard about mothers who had killed their own children; there was one in this very wagon. She heard about people who had lived in sewers for months on end, eating filth like rats, ready to endure anything if only they could stay alive.

The conditions the Jews lived in were terrible; and they were neither saints nor villains, they were human beings.

Sofya's pity for these people grew particularly intense when she looked at little David. Most of the time he just sat there without saying a word; sometimes he took a crumpled matchbox out of his pocket, looked inside, and hid it away again.

For several days now Sofya hadn't wanted to sleep. She sat there, wide awake, in the stinking darkness. 'I wonder where Zhenya Shaposhnikova is now,' she thought suddenly. As she listened to people's cries and mutterings, she realized that their heads were filled with painfully vivid images that no words could ever convey. How could these images be preserved, how could they be fixed – in case men remained alive on earth and wanted to find out what had happened?

'Golda! Golda!' cried a man's voice, racked with sobs.

…The brain of the forty-year-old accountant, Naum Rozenberg, was still engaged in its usual work. He was walking down the road and counting: no the day before yesterday, 61 yesterday, 612 during the five days before – altogether that made 783… A pity he hadn't kept separate totals for men, women and children… Women burn more easily. An experienced brenner arranges the bodies so that the bony old men who make a lot of ash are lying next to the women. Any minute now they'd be ordered to turn off the road; these people – the people they'd been digging up from pits and dragging out with great hooks on the end of ropes – had received the same order only a year ago. An experienced brenner could look at a mound and immediately estimate how many bodies there were inside-50,100, 200,600,1000… Scharfuhrer Elf insisted that the bodies should be referred to as items – 100 items, 200 items – but Rozenberg called them people: a man who had been killed, a child who had been put to death, an old man who had been put to death. He used these words only to himself – otherwise the Scharfiihrer would have emptied nine grams of metal into him – but he continued obstinately muttering: 'So now you're coming out of the grave, old chap… There's no need to clutch your mother like that, my child, you won't be separated from her now…' 'What are you muttering about over there? Me? Nothing. You must have imagined it.' And he carried on muttering; that was his little struggle… The day before yesterday there had been a pit with only eight men in it. The Scharfiihrer had spluttered: 'It's ridiculous; how can you have twenty brentiers burning eight items?' The Scharfiihrer was right, but what could you do if there were only two Jewish families in a whole village? Orders were orders – all graves were to be dug up and all bodies burnt… Now they had turned off the road, they were walking along the grass – and there, for the hundred and fifteenth time, was the grey mound of a grave in the middle of a clearing. Eight men dug; four men felled oak trees and sawed them into logs the length of a human body; two men split these logs with axes and wedges; two men went back to the road to fetch old dry planks, kindling and petrol cans; four prepared the bonfire site and dug a ditch for the ash-pit – yes, they'd have to work out which way the wind was blowing.

The smell of damp and mould immediately vanished; the guards began laughing, cursing and holding their noses; the Scharfiihrer walked off to the edge of the clearing. The brenners threw down their spades, tied old rags round their mouths and noses and picked up their hooks again… 'Good day, grandad! So you're seeing the sun again! My! You are heavy…!' A mother who who had been killed with her three children – two boys, one of them already at school, and a girl born in 1939 who'd had rickets, but never mind, she's cured of that now… 'Don't clutch your mother like that, my child, she won't leave you now…' 'How many items?' shouted the Scharfiihrer from the edge of the clearing. 'Nineteen,' – and then, very quietly, to himself -'dead people.' Everyone cursed; they'd wasted half the day. But then last week they'd dug up a grave with two hundred young women in it. When they'd taken off the top layer of earth, a cloud of grey steam had risen from the grave. The guards had laughed: 'These women really are hot stuff!'