For those trapped inside the Lindt Chocolate Cafe those hours felt like an eternity, as day dragged into night and their initial hopes of an early rescue faded.

As young waiter and part-time uni student Jarrod Morton-Hoffman later told the coroner, it was a case of "if no one was going to come and save us, we would have to save ourselves".

Two of the 18, Tori Johnson and Katrina Dawson, never made it out. The coroner's report on their deaths will be handed down on Wednesday, and is expected to cast light, at last, on troubling questions about how police and other government agencies responded to gunman Man Haron Monis, in the lead-up to the siege and during the siege itself.

To study the statements of the 16 surviving hostages is to marvel at their many small, individual acts of heroism and quick-wittedness.

Morton-Hoffman, then just 19, would become a key figure in helping to manage the volatile environment inside the cafe, as Monis cycled through moods ranging from seeming near-rationality to repeated murderous threats.

Early in the piece, Morton-Hoffman and fellow cafe worker Joel Herat, 21, stashed box-cutters and scissors in their aprons, hoping for a chance to overpower Monis. It was a chance that never arrived. As Herat told the coroner later, "I thought maybe I could maim him or stab him and that could be a chance for people to get out".

In the end he judged it too risky: "If I missed, there was a good chance he could kill someone then and there."

A few hours into the Lindt cafe siege, Monis was outraged when three hostages - solicitor Stefan Balafoutis???, elderly but sprightly former tennis player John O'Brien??? and chef Paolo Vassallo??? - managed to break out at around 3.30 in the afternoon.

Convinced the police had somehow crept into the cafe to assist the escapees, Monis began threatening to shoot one of the remaining captives. It was Morton-Hoffman who took the lead in calming him down, leading Monis to declare afterwards, "Everyone thank Jarrod, I would have shot somebody".

An hour-and-a-half later, the young man had another split-second decision to make. Unseen by Monis, two staff members who had been hiding under a table - Elly Chen and April Bae - managed to quietly unlock a side door and crawl out without being seen.

Morton-Hoffman saw them go - he helped shield the two girls by quietly moving a large free-standing sign so that it would obscure the gunman's view of the side door.

But now he feared Monis would erupt again upon discovering that two more hostages had slipped away. So when the gunman ordered Morton-Hoffman to start reading him news bulletins off a phone, the young waiter decided to "edit" the readouts so it appeared only three had escaped. It was a "massive risk", as he acknowledged to police later.

"I just started subbing in new numbers and stuff. And I was, like, changing every news story and there was heaps of them," Morton-Hoffman told them. "It was really scary, because [if caught out lying] I was dead for sure but at the same time it had been so recent that we had made the deal that if anyone else ran, someone was going to die, I probably would have died anyway."

When Monis eventually heard for himself that the media were reporting five escapes, the group quickly worked together to convince him the journalists were lying - an explanation that in his paranoid state he seemed prepared to accept.

"It was very very lucky, it was quick-thinking on everyone's behalf" Morton-Hoffman recalled.

The group used a similar tactic later in the evening, when Monis latched onto a BBC report that police had surrounded the cafe.

"We're going 'no, no, they're just making that up, how can they tell, they are in London'," recalled another hostage, Louisa Hope, trapped in the cafe with her elderly mother Robin. "We're trying to placate him and talk him down, and agree with him and all that kind of thing."

As the hours wore on, Monis became increasingly angry that his key demand of being able to talk to then prime minister Tony Abbott was not being met. Again there were periodic threats to shoot somebody.

"I think it was Katrina [Dawson] who started to say, 'When I get out of here I'm going to tell everybody exactly what Tony Abbott's like'," Hope said. "And then people [started joining in], 'we don't like him either' ... that group thing that was created, it was vital and really important and it worked."

Morton-Hoffman and fellow Lindt staffer Fiona Ma, a 19-year-old dentistry student, were the two staff members Monis relied on most heavily to carry out his orders throughout the siege.

It was an extraordinary burden of responsibility resting on their young shoulders, with Morton-Hoffman later telling the coroner he was worried if he "screwed up someone would have died".

Although seemingly compliant with the gunman's wishes, both youngsters quietly used their roles to plot ways to ease the hostages' plight.

Morton-Hoffman slipped notes written on the back of business cards and a map of the cafe's interior to police under the rear door. When night fell and Monis again started threatening to shoot a hostage because police had not turned off the lights in Martin Place as he'd wanted, Morton-Hoffman devised an elaborate explanation to convince Monis why it was a complex operation, which would take time.

And when the gunman wanted a cigarette but was afraid of setting off sprinklers in the cafe, Morton-Hoffman tried to persuade him to smoke inside the freezer. There he planned to lock the gunman inside, a plan unfortunately thwarted when someone else suggested Monis blow his smoke into a bottle.

Monis tasked Morton-Hoffman and Ma with escorting other hostages to the toilets in the rear of the cafe and fetching food and drink from the kitchens. Each time they traversed the cafe, the youngsters would quietly try to do a little more to clear a path for possible escape.

"During these times of ferrying people to the toilet, Fiona and I were slowly moving things out of the way of the side entrance to assist in possible later escape. We also told some others about the door being unlocked," he explained.

"I spent a lot of time in the [male and female] bathrooms taking people up and down. It was a good place for people to feel safe for a little bit ... if he started shooting, we'd have more of a chance up there."

Meanwhile Ma had defied Monis' demand that hostages pile all their phones on a table where he could see them. Keeping hers secretly tucked in her pocket, she would offer it to the others to use whenever they reached the relative safety of the bathrooms.

Hope would say of Ma later: "I mean my God, was that the foolishness of age or was she just brave, you know, to let people do that."

Ma's composure was all the more remarkable given that she'd passed up a chance to escape in the early afternoon, when the first group of three made a break for it.

Paolo Vassallo later told the coroner he'd tried to persuade Ma to join him but Ma had refused because, "I couldn't leave people behind".

She would later become the last person to escape the cafe before the police onslaught, managing to flee just two minutes before Monis executed cafe manager Johnson at 2.13am.

Morton-Hoffman escaped 10 minutes earlier, leading a group of five other hostages whom he and Herat had alerted to the fact that the side door remained unlocked.

There were other acts of bravery that night.

Johnson showed incredible composure as he had to make the first, long agonising call to emergency services at 9.44 that morning.

Counsel assisting the inquest, Jeremy Gormly, SC, would later remark on the "calmness and coolness with which he managed that call".

Hope, suffering from multiple sclerosis, could have escaped in the group that left with Morton-Hoffman, but would not leave her mother, Robin, behind.

After witnessing Monis shoot Johnson, she lay on the floor with her hands above her head as police finally broke in. "I thought to myself this is as good as any position to die in," she said later.

Hope, like many of the hostages, still carries the scars from that night. Shrapnel remains embedded in her body, and her left foot has still not property healed. Other hostages have been left nursing deep and long-lasting psychological trauma.

Vassallo spoke openly at the inquest about the survivor's guilt he felt over not having "done more" before he fled the cafe in mid-afternoon.

But Gormly spoke for many when he stood before the coroner and said: "It is impossible for anyone who was not in the cafe to fully understand and relate to the situation [those people] endured ??? and guesswork to say how any of us would have behaved over those long drawn out and stressful hours."