Echoes Page 0,97

dead eyes and worn faces of people who'd been battered severely both before and after they got there.

When Amadea finally made it through the endless line, she was sent to one of the barracks with a dozen other women. There were numbers over doorways, and men and women inside. She was assigned to an area that had originally been built for fifty soldiers, and was inhabited now by five hundred people. There was no privacy, no space, no heat, no food, and no warm clothing. The prisoners themselves had built beds stacked three high, and close enough so the people in them could reach out and touch each other. Couples shared single beds if they had been lucky enough to come together and not get separated before they got here. Children were in a separate building, monitored by both guards and other prisoners. And on the highest floor, with broken glass in most of the windows, there were sick people in the attic. One old woman told her in hushed whispers that they were dying daily from the cold and disease. Both old and sick alike had to stand on line with everyone else for as long as six hours to get dinner, which consisted of watery soup and rotten potatoes. And there was one toilet for every thousand people.

Amadea had fallen silent as someone showed her her bed. As she was young and strong, she was assigned to a top bunk. The weaker, older people got the bottom ones. She was wearing wooden clogs they had given her during her “processing,” when they had taken her boots and given her camp identity papers. They had ordered her to take off Véronique's custom-made leather riding boots, which had instantly vanished. Another guard had taken her warm jacket, and said she didn't need it, in spite of the freezing weather. It was a welcome that consisted of terror, deprivation, and humiliation, and reminded Amadea once again that she was the bride of the crucified Christ, and surely He had brought her here for a reason. What she couldn't imagine was her mother or sister enduring an existence like this, and surviving. She forced herself not to think of it now, as she looked at the people around her. It was nighttime by then, and everyone had come back from their jobs, although many were still outside on line, waiting for dinner. The kitchens cooked for fifteen thousand at a time, and even then apparently there was never enough to feed them.

“Did you just come on the train from Cologne?” a thin woman with a raging cough asked her. Amadea saw that her arm had been tattooed with a number, and her hair and face were dirty. Her nails were broken and filthy. She was wearing nothing more than a thin cotton dress and clogs, and her skin was almost blue. The barracks were freezing too.

“Yes, I did,” Amadea said quietly, trying to feel like what she was, a Carmelite, and not just a woman. Knowing that and holding fast to it was her only source of strength and protection here.

The woman asked her about several people who might have been on the train, but Amadea knew no one's names, and people were all but unrecognizable in those circumstances. She recognized none of the names or descriptions the woman offered. Someone else asked the woman as they came in if she had been to the doctor. Many of the doctors and dentists who had been forced out of practice earlier had wound up here, and were doing what they could to help their fellow inmates, without benefit of medicines or equipment. The camp had only been open for two months, and already it was rife with typhoid, as someone warned her. They told her to drink the soup, but not the water. And as was inevitable, given the numbers living there, there were almost no facilities for bathing. Even in the freezing cold, the stench in the room was overwhelming.

Amadea helped an old woman get onto her bed, and saw that there were three women in the beds next to her. The barracks she'd been sent to were a mixture of women and children under twelve. Boys over twelve lived with the men separately. Some of the very young children were housed somewhere else, particularly those whose mothers had been sent on to other camps, or been killed. There was no privacy, no warmth, and no comfort. But in spite of that,