As always, I search around for Vati and Otto. We haven’t seen them for over a week. The men’s camps are quite close, really. But they might as well be on another continent for all the chance we have of seeing them.

Yesterday, two men were caught sending letters to their wives. The soldiers told us they would be punished today.

We are all here, standing in the cold, waiting for the daily orders, when the men are dragged out in front of us.

‘See this?’ a guard shouts. ‘This is how we treat those who think they are cleverer than us!’

And then he pulls out a huge whip. He orders one of the men to bend down.

The man is crying. ‘Please. Please, no.’ His hands are held together in prayer. He kneels at the guard’s feet. ‘I beg you.’

In reply, the guard kicks him in the stomach so hard that the man almost flies through the air and lands on his side. The guard kicks him again so that the man flops over on to his front, his face in the dirt.

And then he uses the whip on him.

The other guard holds on to the second man and screams at us, ‘Anyone who looks away will face the same punishment!’

No one looks away. A couple of people are sick on the ground right in front of where they stand. I bunch my fist into my mouth to make sure that doesn’t happen to me.

When you live on one bowl of thin soup a day, you need to keep it all down.

Luckily for me, Mutti is one of the kitchen helpers which means that sometimes she manages to sneak away some kind of treasure. Last week she came to the barracks with a whole potato! We could hardly believe it. She cut it into six portions and shared it with the women in our corner of the barrack.

I made my portion last two whole days. And that included giving half of it to Greta.

Greta is my lifeline. I don’t think I could survive here without her. We don’t play like we used to. We don’t gossip and tease each other. But we still talk. We still dream. We still pretend to plan a life after this. We still smile. We smile sometimes.

We made a rule a few weeks ago. Every day we have to find something good to say. Every single day, something new. We have managed it so far. I try to recall at least five of them each day and I say them to myself whenever the guards shout at us.

It feels like a rebellion.

I do it now, as the guards whip the two men. But it doesn’t feel like rebellion today. Rebellion feels far too ambitious an idea. It feels like survival.