Wouldn't it be a relief and delight to stroll through a lush green field and touch the blades of shining grass and feel the fresh texture of a leaf on a tree or sit on a hill and gaze upon a valley filled with the buzzing life of spring, smelling the fresh, clean, healthy scent with nothing but miles of space around me.

Freedom: that was it. Freedom to live again. I turned from the window to continue my relentless pacing, disheartened a little by the thoughts of freedom. I looked at the stinking, dirt-covered walls, the piles of disease-ridden rubbish and decaying waste food that lay scattered in the corners on the damp floor. The mutilated, filthy mattress, torn to shreds by a thousand searches. The tea-stained ceiling, to cut the glare reflecting off the bright light, the scraped and scarred door, and the disease-ridden chamber pot that lay beside the door. It was getting harder and harder to conjure up the picture of that beautiful lush green field. Every minute my nightmarish surroundings screamed at me. There was no escaping this nightmare unless I gave up! A few – a very few – had already given up. They had put on prison clothes and conformed. Not that they had wished to do this. They just couldn't bear the unrelenting burden of torture, the continued boredom, tension and fear, the deprivation of basic necessities like exercise and fresh air, no association with other human beings except through a shout from behind a closed heavy steel door.

The depression, the beatings, the cold – what is there? I said to myself. Look out the window and concentration camp screams at you. Look around you in the tomb that you survive in and you are engulfed in hell, with little black devils in the forms of A—, B— and C— ready to pounce on you each minute of each stinking nightmareridden day.