“Sometimes at night the only sound was the syncopated footfalls of a Nazi patrol stiffly marching past in their nailed boots. It was like the noise of a pitiless machine. The sound of those unseen boots created an abyss in the atmosphere that you felt yourself falling into. You can’t imagine how sinister it seemed that they marched in step like that when there was no one around to see them. They didn’t seem like human beings, more like programmed automatons.”