The first jobs were to light the series of open fires and put what was left of the soup from the day before on to warm up for breakfast. It would be wrong to call them leftovers, because given the paltry amount of food that was given to each inmate, there would never have been anything left over, if it had been down to the prisoners.
Thirty minutes later, the inmates, mostly male, eagerly shuffled past a long, shuttered opening in one of the walls holding up the bowls that they had tied to their waists for the regulation ladleful of thin gruel at breakfast. If Natasha had thought that the kitchen staff had looked rough, they looked positively affluent, well-dressed and overfed compared with the others. What shocked her the most was the look of sheer hopelessness in their sad, sunken, life
