I broke off my reading of The Spectator magazine last week midway through, leaving it open on the table beside my favourite armchair. On the page facing upwards was a review of Sarah Helm’s new book, If This is a Woman: Inside Ravensbrück: Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women. I had heard Sarah talking about it on Radio 4 a few days earlier. When time permitted, I planned a careful study of the piece.

Over the next couple of days, I glanced at the upturned page from time to time and especially at the smiling woman pictured in an illustration to the article (see above). I assumed she was one of the Ravensbrück inmates photographed, at a guess, in a happier later life.

I was wrong. When I finally read the review, the caption to the photograph surprised me. “The face of evil,” it began. “Irma Grese, one of the most hated of all camp guards, trained at Ravensbrück, before moving to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Survivors testified to her extreme sadism, including her use of trained, half-starved dogs to savage prisoners.”

Can any of this horror be deduced from study of the photograph? I would say not. This is powerful proof that appearances can be deceptive.

The matter was put very well by Leonard Cohen, in a similar context, in his poem All You Need to Know About Adolph Eichmann. In it are listed the observable characteristics of this major organiser of the Holocaust: eyes, hair, weight, height (all medium); his distinguishing features (none), the number of his fingers and toes (both 10).

Then Cohen asks: “What did you expect? Talons? Oversize incisors? Green saliva? Madness?”