Echoes Page 0,101

was their only protection, and even that didn't always work, if the guards got drunk enough, which they often did, particularly at night. They were young and wanted women, and there were a lot of them in the camp. Even the old guards couldn't be trusted.

Amadea tried to get to sleep early that night, so she would be ready for work the next day. But it was hard sleeping with so many people around her. It even distracted her at times when she tried to say silent prayers. She tried to stick to her routine of the convent, as much as possible, just as she had while she was hiding at the Schloss. It had been easier there. But at least it was quiet when she got up at three-thirty. She had slept in her clothes, and for once there were only about thirty people waiting for the toilet. She was able to go before she left for work.

She made her way to where they had told her the gardens would be. There were about a hundred people reporting for work when she got there, mostly girls and some young boys, and a few older women. The night air was freezing, and the ground icy. It was hard to imagine what they would do there, as the guards handed them shovels. They were supposed to be planting potatoes. Thousands of them. It was backbreaking work. They worked eight hours straight until noon, their hands frozen and blistered as they pawed at the ground with the shovels, and the guards walked among them poking them with their guns. They let them stop for half an hour for some bread and soup. And as always, the soup was thin and the bread stale, but the portions were a little more plentiful. After that, they went back to work for another seven hours. As they left the gardens that night, they were searched. Stealing from the gardens was punishable by either beatings or death, depending on the guard's mood and how resistant they were. They searched Amadea's clothes, patted her down, and had her open her mouth. And as the guard searching her patted her, he grabbed her breast, and Amadea said nothing. She looked straight ahead. She said nothing about it to Rosa when she got back. She was sure she had endured worse.

The following week Rosa was moved to another barracks. A guard had seen them talking and laughing on several occasions, and reported them. He said they were troublemakers and needed to be separated. Amadea didn't see her after that for months, and when Amadea saw her again, Rosa had no teeth. She had been caught stealing a piece of bread, and a guard had broken all of them, and her nose. The life seemed to have gone out of her by then. She died of what someone said was pneumonia that spring.

Amadea worked hard in the garden, doing what she could, but it was hard to get results given what they had to work with. Even she couldn't make miracles with the frozen ground and broken implements, but she planted row after row of potatoes every day for her fellow inmates. And in the spring, she planted carrots and turnips. She longed to plant tomatoes and lettuce and other vegetables as she had in the convent, but they were too delicate for what they needed. Some days all she got to eat was a single turnip, and more than once she was longing to steal a potato, and turned her mind to prayer instead. But on the whole, her stay there had been uneventful, and the guards left her alone. She was always respectful of them and kept to herself, did her work, and was helpful to the other inmates. She had started visiting some of the sick and the elderly at night, and when it rained too hard to work in the garden, she went to help with the children, which always buoyed her spirits, although many of them were sick. Most of them were so sweet and so brave, and it made her feel useful working with them. But there were tragedies even there. A whole trainload of them was shipped off to Chelmno in February. Their mothers stood by the trucks that took them to the train, and those who clung to them for too long or tried to fight the guards had been shot. There were horror stories every day.

By the time Amadea turned twenty-five