In fact, Acrobat insisted that Sibyl accept Major von Haagen’s invitation. The instructions were to watch and listen; to let the Boche get drunk but not to drink herself. Drunk German officers were likely to spill secrets, secrets that might help the Special Operations mission of sabotage and subterfuge. As for von Haagen: she was to go along, within reason, with his efforts at courtship.

‘Do you think you can handle him?’ Oncle Yves asked.

‘Yes,’ Sibyl replied. ‘As far as I can tell, he truly does have honourable intentions; he seems to get a thrill out of talking about himself and discussing German poetry. That’s something I can handle. He seems to be yearning for something beyond the reality of war: music and poetry and art. He’s only human. My guess is that it’s his way of staying sane throughout Hitler’s madness.’

‘Pah! Germans are not human. Do you know what happened on this very street? There was a Jew down the road. A violin maker. A good friend of mine, Joseph Meyer. Before the war we used to meet some evenings, enjoy a glass or two of wine, talk into the night. Joseph of course played the violin; his wife played the flute. He had five daughters. They all lived in that house down the road, the one with the red shutters and the boarded-up shop. They would have musical evenings at the cultural centre; but also singing and dancing, laughter and just good community. They were proper Alsatians, proper Colmar citizens. Not rich but minding their own business. Do you know what happened to them?’

‘I’m listening.’

‘Well. Let me go back a little. Before the war there were about twenty thousand Jews living in Alsace and Lorraine. These Jews were well aware of what was going on in Germany, of the pogroms – after all, we are right beside Germany and we were hearing those terrible broadcasts of that crazy fellow Hitler and his plans for the Jews. And how they were to be persecuted and exterminated. We heard of that horrendous Kristallnacht. So Jews here were better prepared for what was to come than Jews in the rest of France. They knew. They had no illusions. So they organised themselves, protected their businesses and assets and of course their families.

‘Joseph had close friends and when things got threatening he distributed his most valuable violins among us. He had five or six very valuable ones. I myself still have one in the attic. It’s easier to hide a violin than a human. I would have hidden a human, one of his daughters, but he didn’t think it necessary. Not yet. He wasn’t a practising Jew, wasn’t active in the Jewish community in Colmar. So he thought he could get away with it. With staying in Colmar.

‘The Boche marched into Colmar in June 1940. On June 16th all the Jews still in the town were told to come to the police station. They were allowed to bring along a suitcase each, two thousand Francs, food for four days. They were all packed into trucks and transported to France. They weren’t allowed to take gold or jewellery. They weren’t sent to the German camps. It was all relatively civil, compared to some of the stories we’ve heard since – transports to concentration camps and such. No, the Colmar Jews went south. But Joseph, stubborn fool, refused to go. He had a German name; he thought he could get away with it. We lived on this quiet out-of-the-way street. My life is here. I was born in this house. Why should I go? He said. His workshop was here. His violins, his tools, his livelihood. What’ll I do without my tools? I’m not going. We’re staying. They won’t know I’m Jewish. We’ll take the risk.

‘All went well for a year or two. But then – well, someone must have ratted on him. It was already 1942. The Gestapo began interviewing us, neighbours, asking about Joseph. If he was Jewish, if he went to the synagogue, and so on. Well, he didn’t go to the synagogue so when they came I answered that truthfully. I said we never spoke of religion which was only half true but they weren’t to know. Joseph got scared. He decided to leave voluntarily, but now it was too late to be evacuated. Colmar was supposed to be Judenrein, free of Jews. Joseph was suddenly terrified. He had to get his family out! One by one, first the daughters. He had ambitious plans: he’d get his family to Vichy and then to America. He had a brother in New York and that was where he was headed, or so he thought.

‘We had it all planned. This was how I actually began to work for the Resistance. He had to get his family out secretly, through safe houses and so on. There was a route for rescuing Jews. We heard of a family-run vineyard near Ribeauvillé which was helping to hide Jews. Sarah was eighteen, a big girl who could look after herself. So she went alone first of all. In 1942 the rest of the family was to go there and they would hide them and get them down to the south through a planned route of safe houses. We got Sarah and two more daughters out.

‘But we were too late. One night, actually it was early in the morning, we heard shouting in the street, the shattering of glass. I looked out of the window and saw those German thugs; Gestapo, in uniform. They had smashed the glass of his shop and broken down the door. They dragged the family out into the street. The youngest was five, Rebecca. She was terrified and began screaming. They yelled at her to stop screaming but that made it worse of course. They began to beat her with a club. Joseph and his wife tried to stop them beating her but they were just clubbed down themselves.

‘I ran out to try to help, I yelled at them to stop but they had surrounded the family and beat everyone away. I got a few blows of the baton. In fact, they broke my arm but that was nothing. They beat Rebecca to death, right here in the street, in front of her parents. What had that child ever done to hurt them, the cowards! Joseph and his wife were frantic, yelling and crying for them to stop, to beat them instead. But they did not afford them such mercy. A truck came and took them away. We never heard from them again. You can still see Rebecca’s blood between the cobbles. It’s stained dark and we can’t get the stain out.

‘We had heard by now of trains taking Jews to concentration camps in Germany but we do not know if that’s where they went and if so, what happens to them there. We will find out once this terrible war is over. After that of course they raided the house and took away all the other violins and other items of value. The house is still empty, waiting no doubt for a German family to move in when the war is over. If Germany wins, which of course it won’t. But the Boche did not know that at the time. Now, where was I going with this story? Why did I tell you it in the first place?’

‘You were trying to convince me that Germans are not human.’

‘Ah yes. Well, there you have it. What human behaves in this way? To kill an innocent child in front of her parents? Simply for being of a certain race? Tell me, is that human? Animals behave better than that. I know of a female dog who had puppies and she adopted a motherless kitten and suckled it like one of her own. It is a human instinct to care for our young. If you lack that instinct so far as to actually destroy a young one then you are not human. That is my final word. And anyway, at some point the Germans declared Alsace to be Judenrein, and we have been that ever since. The Boche are not people to be toyed with and I do not at all like this new instruction, for you to start fraternising with them to extract information. That is not the work of an SOE agent, as far as I understand their mission. I thought they were just here in France to blow things up.’

‘They are in France to win the war. By whatever means available.’

Sibyl, agitated by Oncle Yves’ story, hardly slept a wink that night. Her claim that the Germans were only human; that von Haagen was only human, now seemed nothing but naïve wishful thinking. Trust no-one, Vera had said. She had laughed to herself at von Haagen’s pompous and condescending lecture, believing she could see right through him; but had she any idea what went on behind those cool blue eyes? Obviously not: but now, her duties entailed trying to find out. Accepting his courtship and helping the greater cause by pretending he was human; but was it all a sham because he was not, could not be, human? What did it even mean, to be human? Did humanness by default imply inherent goodness?

No, she concluded; no matter what, Germans were human, even the evil ones. She had no right to strip von Haagen of his right to be human, to make of him a beast. Whether she trusted him or not, he was human. There is a living spark in all of us, she reminded herself, something beyond good and evil, an essence of life that is, indeed, inherently good – even if buried deep in a morass of evil.

Could it work? Was she up to it? In the darkness she shivered, but not from cold; and the thumping of her heart echoed through the silence. This was war, and she was caught in the middle of it. She had chosen this route, and there was no way through but forwards.