Hosenfeld had trouble finding houses to serve as billets and offices for the regiment’s new headquarters. While he was looking over a house in the Niepodległoci Avenue on 17 November, Hosenfeld came upon the skeletal figure of a Jew searching for food in the kitchen – and, after hearing him play Chopin, helped him to hide in the attic. That night, as Hosenfeld lay awake in the dark, he imagined conversations with his dead comrades. ‘It is incredibly comforting to speak with them,’ he told his wife. ‘I feel fully alive and held in this closed company . . . And then I see my loved ones at home,
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