‘My mother had no time for religion at all. She said that she had seen huge chimneys belching out smoke from the burning bodies of the people from her town, from the town next to hers, the town next to that and from every town she had never heard of. She saw it, Rose. Day after day, hour after hour, it never stopped. We cannot imagine it. She saw people come in and smoke go out way up into the air where God was supposed to be.
‘As children we heard her in the middle of the night. She would wake up screaming. She used to sleep in a separate room to my father because she needed to sleep with the television on.’
‘Why?’
‘In case she had a nightmare. She often had nightmares. The television would immediately remind her that her screams belonged to the past and that this was the present, the death camps were behind her.