This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

In his mind, Tadek “visits” his early days at the camp. He remembers the men and the women (his long-lost girlfriend somewhere among them), and the intense pain of the bayonet wound he received on his first walk from the train. One man stumbled out of the train, desperate for fresh air, threw his arm around a man he didn’t know and called him “brother” (174). Another man seemed dead in a pile of bodies that suffocated on the stifling train, but he sprung to life when someone tried to steal his boots. Tadek saw the prisoners building guard towers and crematoria, suffering and struck down by disease and hunger, people hoarding stolen jewelry and women selling their bodies for food. Those who were ill and sent to the crematorium pleaded for their stories to be remembered and told, However, Tadek can only see others; he cannot envision himself. He feels “homesick for the people [he] saw then” (176) and acknowledges that the man with the boots survived and became an electrical engineer, the man who staggered off of the train now owned a successful bar, and Tadek was the person who the man embraced and called “brother” (176).