Rottenegg, Austria ? Tightlipped and teary-eyed, Henrietta Karl leaned on her shovel Tuesday amid the tangle of muddy debris that trashed her home and offered this requiem to Europe’s worst flooding in well over a century: “Now the real work begins: rebuilding a life.”

As the waters ebb, the enormity of the destruction is starting to sink in. Hundreds of thousands of Austrians, Czechs and Germans are struggling to mop up an estimated $20 billion worth of damage and salvage what they can.

A woman removes rubble out of her house during a huge cleanup operation in the village of Grimma, Germany. As the Mulde River receded to its normal level on Tuesday, residents began to take stock of their possessions.

“It was very, very bad,” said Karl, 62. “Everything, and I mean everything, was under water. All of my flowers, all of my shrubs they’re gone. I’m lucky I still have a house.”

It’s what Ernst Strasser, Austria’s interior minister, meant when he told the nation a few days ago: “The worst hours are behind us, but the most difficult days lie before us.”

Germans, too, know the feeling, even as the swollen Elbe River continues to inflict fresh destruction on dozens of towns and villages.

In Dresden and other places where the waters were receding, residents crept cautiously back to their homes Tuesday to examine their sodden belongings and determine which might dry out and which were ruined for good.

Sabine Wilmer’s home in Dessau on the rain-engorged Mulde River was spared, but the 38-year-old teacher was blinking back tears after wading through knee-deep water to the flooded school where her son studies.

“All the things that he loved there are under water,” she said. “Who knows if any of this is insured?”

Mingled with the despair was relief among some that it could have been much worse.

“I was so lucky,” said Nicole Aurich, 25, hauling debris from the basement of her four-story apartment building near the Elbe, where the water line was still visible about a yard up the outside wall.

“I lost only a backpack, some books and things in the basement nothing important,” she said, wearing yellow knee-high rubber boots and rubber gloves.

But heartbreak played out across the flood-stricken Czech Republic, where the worst flooding in 175 years drove at least 150 families from their homes in Prague.

Jitka Zichova, 60, who fled her apartment with just a few clothes after floodwaters reached the second floor, spent Tuesday rummaging with long, blue rubber gloves through a large pile of mud-caked trash containing her belongings.

“What I miss the most are the photographs. We lost our wedding pictures,” she said, bursting into tears. “Now we are beggars. I never want to have any possessions again.”

A few houses away down a foul-smelling street lined with mud-caked mattresses, waterlogged books and ruined electronic equipment Karel Hajek stood in front of the home he built 40 years ago.

“I didn’t have insurance,” Hajek, 73, mused sadly.

Back in Rottenegg, a sleepy hamlet of fieldstone houses and winding lanes fringed with geraniums about 130 miles west of Vienna, dozens of villagers pitched in Tuesday to help Anna Gattringer gather what was left of her nursery.

Twice over the past week, torrential rains pumped a nearby creek into a raging, snaking torrent that tore Christmas trees from the earth as though they were dandelions and peeled the asphalt off the parking lot like it was the skin on an orange.

“It was wild water, and it tore up my business,” she said, choking back tears. “Look at this. I lost millions. I lost everything. You spend 30 years building a business, and overnight, a stream gone crazy sweeps it all away.”