Every now and then Biddy would go upstairs to her balcony to cook potatoes in a broken pail with wood collected from bombed buildings. Suddenly they heard soldiers running in the street. ‘Then someone rattled at the cellar door and it opened. We all sat as if we had been turned to stone.’ A Russian soldier entered the cellar and sat down to bandage his finger. He gave Gerda a sweet and left a message on a postcard that Biddy later had translated. ‘Now you are all safe and you will have democracy and the little girl will learn Russian.’ A week of chaos followed, in which, Biddy, along with the
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