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Chapter 8 Fellow prisoners On the third day of my stay in the court prison, the senior guard, S., came to my cell at nine in the morning and summoned me to go with the other prisonersunder herguard to theprisonyard. I followed willinglyand, because it was still bitterly cold in February, I was handed my coat for this "walk," which lasted fifteen minutes and was repeated daily in the future whenever the weather was reasonably tolerable. Outside deep snow lay on the ground. In the cell I froze day and night and still I was not allowed to put on my warm coat. . . As I stepped into the corridor I saw the other inmates for the first time as they stepped out of neighboring cells, several at a time; I did not have the capacity to look at them, as I was moved too much by how new it all was. The march down to the prison yard was completed silently. I was held separately from the others and came last, with no one next to, behind, or in front of me. When, weeks later, I dared to ask the senior guard why I was being treated as an outcast twice over, even in prison, she explained to me then that this was done according to an order from the Gestapo.... As the last in line I could easily observe how all of the inmates (there were about thirty-five) aimed for the middle of the yard where a round patch of lawn was located, around which a cement path led. Always around and around this round path with a certain distance between each individual: this was how the silent women walked for a quarter of an hour. I had to go back and forth off to the side, all by myself, and all the inmates naturally sized up the new one carefully. When I experienced this "walk" (as it was called in prison) for the first time, I just stared ahead of me and didn't want to raise my eyes, and the few handkerchiefs I had taken with me at my arrest were already so soaking wet that I didn't know what to dry my tears with. Thus, I also didn't see right away what I later noticed: namely, that on the other side of the prison yard another solitary inmate was walking, who constantly wiped her eyes with a handkerchief and couldn't stop crying. Perhaps her fate was worse 82 The Blessed Abyss than mine? A slim, young woman, but very care-worn. It occurred to me in a flash: could that be Frau Ballhorn? I knew her fate from hearsay. As I had heard a few days before my arrest, she had been picked up with her small child at her house in Holland by the Gestapo and then brought back to Minister to the court prison. The child had been given to the mother of the young woman in Miinster. My speculation was correct: it was Frau Ballhorn, and, as she told me later, she also knew right away who I was. From this day on a mute friendship was established between us. Through the daily, speechless meeting, through the knowledge of one another and through mutual understanding and sharing, we became for each other both strength and comfort. She, too, was in solitary confinement and an inmate of the Gestapo, while all others in this women's prison were detained pending trial or were convicted criminals serving sentences. Frau Ballhorn cried even more than I did. If my eyes were red and sore during the first weeks, hers were for months, and at the end she suffered from a facial rash from the constant crying. The poor woman's husband, who had worked steadfastly as an emigrant in Holland in the Catholic anti-Nazi press, was in a concentration camp, and she suffered from terrible homesickness for her child and was bent over with grief. The detainees and convicts were an interesting group of people in and of themselves, especially to someone who had never come into contact with people of this type. Already in my first days there I had heard in my cell noises, laughter, and screaming, curse words and loud singing from the neighboring cells, although all of that was strictly forbidden; and I had already tried somehow to imagine what sort of people my neighbors were. When I gradually began to size them up and form an...

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