Five years in preparation – inspired by frustration – visiting an amazing concentration camp museum near Gdansk only to find virtually nothing in print in English about the place. An initial booklet led to lengthy research and eventually this full history of the camp, its creators, its inmates, its guards… Writing it also made me realise how little of what we think we know about the purpose and use of concentration camps (all 1200 of them in existence until 1945) is fact – what we know about is Auschwitz-Birkenau (a place unique in scale and purpose both as a death and labour camp). Stutthof was very different in so many ways. Its a grim history but one full of tales of survival and humanity too.

Two small boys are playing wargames as boys have done since time immemorial. They run towards the camera clutching guns made of wood, their knees grubby beneath the type of clothing in which small boys across Europe were commonly dressed for most of the twentieth century when out of school – shorts and hand-knitted, woollen jumpers. Nothing unusual about that…except that these boys are the two eldest sons of Max Pauly and the backdrop to their game is the Stutthof Concentration Camp where their father is Kommandant. What price innocence now?