She was driven twenty miles to the office of the head of the Karlsruhe Gestapo.
Three other women were already there, all of them thin and pale. One had a terrible cough that brought a snarl of irritation to the face of the Gestapo officer. The sick woman looked over at Noor. Her eyebrows shot up, and she gave her a wary smile.
Noor stared. It wasn’t… It couldn’t be, could it?
It was. It was Yolande Beekman. They’d met during their training back in England a hundred years before. Noor put her fingers to her lips and blew her a disguised kiss.
The Gestapo officer’s jagged voice sawed through Noor’s mixed feelings of joy and fear.
‘You will all four leave now. For Dachau. Two officers will accompany you,’ he said in French.
Dachau? Were they being taken to another prison? Noor glanced at Yolande, but she didn’t seem to know where or what it was.
Forbidden to speak to each other, they were driven to the station, and made to board a train.
Once they were on the way to Munich, their guards let them speak. Noor threw her arms around Yolande. The two of them clung to each other. And then the barrage began: not having spoken to anyone for close to a year, Noor poured out questions. How was the war progressing? Who was winning? Where had the others been? Who had they worked with? How had they been captured?
They exchanged stories, gasping at each other’s narrow escapes. Noor told them how she’d been stopped by two Gestapo officers on the Metro, and how she’d pretended her radio set was a cinematographic apparatus.
‘They even looked inside the suitcase,’ she said. ‘Neither knew what it was, but they didn’t want to admit it.’ She acted out their eyebrow-raising and pretend-knowledgeable grunting, and all four women roared with laughter.
Through the window, the scenery changed. It was like watching a beautiful film.
‘Where are we going?’ they asked the guards.
‘To a camp,’ they said. ‘Where there is farming.’
They were given lunch, and cigarettes, and all four women felt light-hearted, as though they were on holiday. It was dark when their train finally slowed, and stopped.
‘Out!’ the guards ordered. The holiday was over.
The women stepped out into an eerily silent place of lined-up sheds, watchtowers, barbed wire fences. And a stink of rot and sewage so thick Noor felt she was being smothered.
She bent over and vomited.
Gagging too, Yolande put her arm around her.
‘Stop that! Walk!’ shouted the guard.
They stumbled through a gate. The metalwork sign above it read Arbeit Macht Frei. Work makes one free, Noor translated. What work?
Other guards appeared, with German shepherd dogs. With the butts of their rifles, they separated the women, shoving them in different directions.
‘Bye!’ Noor called out to the others. Their replies were stifled. She was herded into a cell. The door slammed, and was bolted three times. When Noor turned round, there was a man waiting for her.
Then the longest night of her life began.