Proserpina 

I will never know how I made it through the hours of waiting for the axe to fall. I ate the stale bread and the lumpy cereal, barely aware of the taste. Staring around me, I figured out that it was mid-morning when the door opened.

Another woman entered a little while later, this time a woman who was in a long skirt and had her head covered with a gaily coloured scarf. She spoke in a dialect that I did not understand. Her black eyes, narrow and slightly slanted, were ...