German cars are not unusual in the Czech border town of Cheb. By day, the BMWs and Mercedes come to buy cheap cigarettes and alcohol.
By 10 p. A black BMW with a German licence plate and a baby chair on the back seat stops at a street corner. The lone driver rolls down the passenger-door window and speaks briefly to the teenage girl standing in the bitter cold.
The girl climbs into the car and they disappear into the night. Welcome to the child-prostitution capital of Europe. The men who go to the town know that to have sex with a child, you don't have to take a plane to Thailand, you just need to take your BMW over the border.
Bavaria is seven kilometres to the west, Saxony is 10 kilometres to the north. A minute drive from Germany and everything has a price.
Teenage girls, pre-pubescent boys and what's known as "the special" - children of three and four, so young that they don't offer themselves but are offered by others, for rent or purchase. She looks 15 but, with her make-up smeared, it's hard to tell. With a dry, cutting wind blowing down the street, she tries to straighten her clothes - not hard to do when you are wearing just a miniskirt and a T-shirt. The prostitutes up and down the streets in Cheb refer to the drivers of the big cars not as men, or as customers, but as "the Germans".
