I cowered under a desk, in the rubble of what had been a Berlin bankers office. 

Nineteen, with my Hitler Youth uniform hanging off me, torn and stained . My cheeks hollow, eyes wide now with empty desperation eyes that used to burn with pride. And now I’d been caught, hiding in a cellar, not with a panzerfaust, but with a silk scarf pressed to my soft shaved face. 

“Please,” I whispered.. but my eyes were fixed not on her face, but on the small, open trunk beside her boot. 

Inside, a spill of fabrics glimmered in the rubble: satin, lace the stark black lines of seamed stockings. Impossible perfection  in the devastation and rubble.

Mistress leant forward, placing her leather-crop on the desk with a soft, definitive tap. She pointed my uniform tunic, then to the floor 

“little sissy devil”. She said.

“A pansy Faust….” 

My fingers trembled violently I could barely undo the buttons of the coarse wool tunic, that fell aside revealing a pale, skinny torso.  

A faint, traitorous flush  of excitement about my immanent total  surrender began to creep down my neck.

Mistress  moved with a predator’s grace to the trunk. She selected. A pair of sheer, black seamed stockings. A lace garter belt. 

A scrap of silk that was a maid’s apron, a startling white against the room’s decay. 

She held them out as man approached, a big, warm weary Russian. He  saluted Mistress. 

And then his gaze predatory and hungry moved to meet mine.