This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

In “The People Who Walked On,” Tadek meets a Block Elder in the women’s camp who asks if he believes that there will ever be justice for the atrocities of the camp. Tadek replies that people will only feel that there has been justice when they enact the same cruelties on those who committed acts of violence. In the different stories, people express different ideas of justice, whether legal or exacted by the universe, and the question of whether justice will be served is one that hangs over the people who are incarcerated in the camp. Because the violence in the concentration camps was state-sponsored and legal, it was complicated to exact official justice against those who were following orders, particularly given the sheer magnitude in terms of numbers of people who participated in the violence and killing.

The American soldier in “Silence” promises the camp prisoners that those responsible for the atrocities committed would be subjected to justice and tells them not to seek justice on their own. However, the stories of incarceration show a prevailing injustice that is only countered occasionally by acts of justice exacted by either fate or other inmates. In “A Day at Harmenz,” Tadek tells Becker that he hopes that he will be selected for the gas chamber because Becker had other inmates killed or put to death at his last camp, including his own son. When Becker is selected that evening, it seems like a retribution by fate. Similarly, when First Sergeant Schillinger (“The Death of Schillinger”) is shot and killed by a woman prisoner whom he intends to rape, it appears to be another act of justice from the universe.

These moments of justice are far outweighed by the injustices of millions of innocent deaths. At the end of “The Death of Schillinger,” Tadek describes how the man who told him about Schillinger’s manner of death, the foreman of the crematorium, would eventually die with the other crematorium workers while trying to rise up after learning that they were slated to be killed. Not only were innocent people executed en masse, but those who survived in the camps were forced to hurt and kill each other, even resorting to cannibalism in their desperation. In “The January Offensive,” Tadek argues that “the ideals of freedom, justice and human dignity had all slid off man like a rotten rag” (168). At the end of “Silence,” the inmates wait for the American soldier to leave and then kill a Nazi with their bare hands. Legal justice is designed to be humane and affords the perpetrator human rights. It can take years or never happen at all. These stories show that there is a fine line between revenge and justice, and that it is difficult to have faith in the justice of a system that allowed such injustices to be perpetrated in the first place.