“People have several times confronted Mayer with the following question: 'When a large number of Jews were being controlled by possibly only two or three guards, why didn't they take the opportunity of taking these Germans with them?' Mayer has thought many times about this question and an associated one that derides the Jews for not fighting back and merely weakly accepting their fate.
Should a Jew have killed two Germans, a minimum of two hundred of their fellow Jews would be exterminated by shooting or hanging. In either case, their workmates would be made to parade in front of the dead in order to break their spirit still further. How could a man live with himself when he considered that some of those two hundred might have survived the atrocities of the camp had it not been for his hatred boiling over and leading to more wastage of human life? The other factor, that people who were not present at the carnage cannot appreciate, is just how weak the slaves became due to vastly depleted sources of strength and spirit.”