Status Updates From The Tale of the Ring: A Kad...

"I'm from Auschwitz," I said, when the conductor asked me for the fare. Other passengers looked at me with curiosity. Somebody whispered, "And I thought the Germans had gassed them all." I felt a deep bitterness coming over me.

Now, soon, I'd be free to go. To go where? I realized more dramatically than ever that there was no place for me to go, no people for me to embrace. A deep sadness enveloped me.

Dr. Mengele at Birkenau studied twins. Twin siblings were searched for in each incoming transport, to be kept alive for his research. As soon as this became known, on a number of occasions children of equal age who were strangers were paired by their doomed parents, in the hope that their lives might be saved.

[A] group of four Jews underwent the testing of a truth serum. They were all given a cup of coffee containing the truth medicine in various concentrations. All four fell asleep, and only one woke up again.

A group of Jews had their testicles removed, after which their sexual responses were examined. They were stripped naked, put next to naked women, and examined for erection.

One thing was good about Auschwitz: you did not have to worry about unemployment.

The Lagerkommandant himself confirmed the importance of organizing: once, in a speech directed at the Haftlinge population of Auschwitz, he said, "The diet in this Lager has been calculated scientifically so that its consumer should stay alive not less and not more than three months. Therefore whoever has been here longer than that and is still alive and functioning is, by definition, a thief."

While Treblinka presented to the inexperienced eye a picture of utter chaos, Auschwitz struck me as a place where rigorous discipline was the overlord.

....Auschwitz prisoners “would leave the clinic with a white paper bandage around their heads, which, in combination with their skinny bodies and starved faces, gave them the appearance of desert nomads. This probably accounted for the name by which this ultimate proletariat of Auschwitz came to be known: Mussulmen, or Muslims."

Every Blockaltester had a Schreiber ("secretary"), who was actually his alternate and his liaison with the population of the block. Such secretaries weren't officially recognized, as this was a purely nepotistic appointment, often assigned by a homosexual Blockaltester to his lover.

I felt guilty because I hadn't joined Father when he was going to his death. I acted the coward, and all I had attained was a short delay, seven months' delay, and now I was going to die anyway. At least I could have died with him, with honor, and wouldn't have to feel guilty now.

Two prisoners slept on each bag, and the sleeping room was so skimpy that when one man wanted to turn over, his entire row had to turn with him.

It was amazing how I had got used to being slapped. Once upon a time, a year and a half before, a slap had been an insult. I would have become bloodthirsty at a slap. Now, it didn't matter. If it had mattered, there would be no way to remain alive.

When the moment arrived when even the Jewish Order Service lieutenants were imperiled, Szczepan had made a painful decision: he himself put his parents and his only child on the train to Treblinka, thus making it possible for himself and Anna to escape alive.

We saw objects hanging from each of the tall lamp poles posted along the tracks. Reluctantly, we identified them as people.

That evening, we helped Mr. Zmigrod to die. Martin and I, and a couple more people from Astrawerke sat around him, while he swallowed a bottle of barbiturate pills, taking them, one by one, like a gourmet enjoying an hors d'oeuvre. He had decided today that he didn't want to live without his wife.

Long after that day, I told myself that had I known my Father was going to his death, I would have joined him. Today, I am no longer ashamed to admit the obvious truth: I knew where he was going. I must have known by intuition that we were drowning in a sea of death, and I wanted to steer away from it, toward some shore of salvation.

Adek, who had got a job at the airport, where he was working for the Luftwaffe, had just found out that his work did not protect his mother, as only the spouses of the workers were covered by the Gestapo certificates. So, in the wake of our moving to the new quarters, Adek had married his mother and had taken her to the airport, where the two of them would be living now as husband and wife.

Along our route, we saw groups of people being dragged out of their homes, being beaten with the butts of rifles, and being shot for not responding promptly to orders that were thrown at them in the quick, hostile syllables of an unknown tongue. I watched all this with the cool eye of a bystander rather than with compassion...

The Jews knew how to accept the inevitable, without lifting a hand in self-defense. They also had faith in the Warsaw Ghetto: How do you exterminate a city of seven hundred thousand Jews, especially as long as there are Germans willing to take bribes and there are Jews willing to produce the money?

...unpleasant rumors were heard from time to time, about transports of Jews being taken out of the Lodz Ghetto and exterminated by gas on the trains. Of course, we didn't believe it: How can you take a couple of thousand people and gas them on a train? Sheer nonsense.

When a Ghetto Jew died, "a naked, nameless corpse was left out in the street, the genitals sometimes covered, for the sake of decency, with a page of an old newspaper and a stone to keep the paper from flying off."

At the slightest sign of doubt, a Jew would be sequestered and deported to a labor camp. In this, the Ukrainians were thoroughly helped by the Jewish Militia, some members of which did a good job as denouncers and enforcers.

These [anti-Jewish] decrees were signed by various German authorities, but they were always countersigned by the head of the Judenrath, so as to make the Jewish Council responsible for what was happening to the Jews.