This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

Tadek describes the hospital’s Schreiber, a Jewish man who used an influential friend and manipulation to procure the envied job of doing clerical work in the hospital instead of hard labor. Every two weeks, there is a selection in which sick Jews from the hospital are sent to the crematorium, and the Schreiber keeps records and helps to escort those who are chosen to die to a holding area. However, the Schreiber becomes ill and ends up on the list to be killed. Before he is escorted to the holding area, he ties his possessions into a cardboard box. When Tadek sees this, he tells another doctor that the man is ridiculous for hanging onto his belongings instead of giving them to someone because he cannot take the box with him. The doctor replies that he might do the same, adding, “I think that even if I was being led to the oven, I would still believe that something would surely happen along the way” (150). Sure enough, when the truck arrives to take those slated to die to the crematorium, the Schreiber is loaded with the others, naked and carrying nothing. According to rumors in the camp, the Jews in the truck on their way to the gas chamber sang “some soul-stirring Hebrew song which nobody could understand” (151).