Here we never went out to Church. The priest came to us only twice. Whatever services we had, we held them ourselves. Mother read aloud from the Bible; the rest of us chanted the prayers. We had our own service every day. The comfort of the homemade service lifted us all and gave us satisfaction. Morning, noon and evening we refreshed our faith in God. Religion was our nourishment, especially to Mother. There is no book as precious as the Bible and nothing will ever be able to take its place. It is the Word of God and will never die. Even the hovering guards listened in quiet, their heads bowed. We were astonished. At last the hard shell of the guards began to crack and out of the cracks oozed a crude shame. In their rough way they tried to atone for their treatment of us. They extended pity when all we wanted was to be left alone. They even gave us some of that by lessening their intrusion into our privacy. Mother called it victory--an answer to our prayers. But when it was discovered that they were becoming lenient, they were, much to our sorrow, promptly removed. The last part of June or the beginning of July they were replaced by the toughest, lowest crew imaginable. These men were beasts. We tried submissiveness, courtesy, but to no avail. When they saw the comfort we derived from our daily services they took away our Bible. But they could not take away our faith. Mother said, “This is another test. Is there not enough of Christ in us to do without the Bible?” But Mother was more shaken than I had ever seen her as she said this. Father looked at the guards and accepted the humiliation. The men were so unshakeable and cruel. Now we no longer saw or heard them. Their inhuman treatment had built a wall around us, a wall of fear, hard and dark on the outside, soft and mystical inside. We became a world apart, detached from mundane things. Our bodies touched the ground, but our souls were far above in God’s world. Each day of persecution lifted us higher. We were helping Christ to carry His burden. We were marked to suffer, for Russia. In our last days our privacy was so uncertain we never wholly undressed. The men were there with a repulsive curiosity. Instinctively we drew our skirts aside as one draws away from vermin. The new guards were not Russian at all. We heard every kind of language: Polish, Latvian, Hungarian, German and Yiddish. In the dining room, carelessly thrown on the table, we saw German newspapers which we did not touch. The guards were ready for any trouble, their expressions were filled with accusations.