Recently I read a book about the Holocaust, in which there were accounts of the efforts women went to in order to save their children from death.
Even as these women were naked and being herded to the gas chambers, they were desperately trying to save the children - hiding their babies under piles of clothes, in buckets.
When they opened the doors of the gas chsmbers, they would have to prise the bodies of mothers and children apart, as even in the final moments, with no escape from the gas that was consuming them, the women still tried to shield the children.
Some of these women no doubt came from abusive homes and abusive marriages. They had suffered dreadful things at the hands of the Nazis. Still their last act was to protect their children.
Women today carry their children for miles across war zones, before crossing seas in rubber dinghys because they want to protect their children.
This woman was apparently able enough to care for six children, presumably therefore she knew right from wrong. Whatever nonsense he promised her or however much he threatened her, she was a piece of work herself to stand by while someone set fire to the house her six children were in.
She was clearly abused, and she shouldn't have been - that dreadful man should never have been allowed out from the first time he was in jail.
But it's an insult to the mothers who have been abused, threatened, beaten and raped and who have still protected their children even on the brink of their own deaths, to excuse her behaviour on those grounds.
She did a terrible thing, and as a result six children are dead. She broke the law, and she did it in the knowledge that what she was doing was wrong and dangerous, and that her kids would be the ones to suffer. She was given a prison sentence and she should not be allowed out half way through it, in order to live her life as a free woman.