"A few? Out of three million five hundred thousand done to death at this single camp? A few?"

The young prosecutor was drinking water again. Three times they'd refilled the glass jug. He drank in gulps, breathing as if he'd been running hard. All the time he drank he didn't take his eyes from the accused.

I watched the spectators, but there was no one I could recognise. Sometimes these people, just as with ordinary man people, returned to the scene of their crime, re-enacted in these places by verbal witness and film projected on to the roll-up screens. I'd got five of them that way.

But it was the one man I wanted now, out of all this city. Zossen. Of the many faces in my memory I could recall only a dozen that I'd seen in that man's company; of that dozen, none were here.

Dark came before the session was ended. I waited my turn at the doors. People left this place looking drugged, as if awakening from a nightmare under anaesthesia. I new that three of the lay jury were under the constant observation of their doctors to avert a breakdown before the trial ended.

They shuffled into the vault of the main hall. The girl in the black fur hat was ahead of me. The big doors were fastened wide open, framing a rainbow of colours on the snowy street. The air tasted of metal in the mouth. I began walking. The others had nearly all turned in the other direction because they made for the inter-urban stop. There were only three people anywhere near me: a man signalling a taxi, a man going into the pharmacy next to the hall we had left, and the girl in the fur hat.

Directly facing the steps of the Neustadthalle is a narrow street forming a T-section with the Wittenau-strasse, along which I was walking. There are no standards for the lamps at this place: they're suspended from overhead cables. There is a stretch of blank wall for twenty yards, concealing a cemetery.