This way for the gas

Diana Ortiz Tucker

Part of the text that pains me

We line up. Someone has marked down our numbers, someone up ahead yells, "March, 
March," and now we are running towards the gate, accompanied by the shouts of a
3 "Muslim" was the camp name for a prisoner who had been destroyed physically and 
spiritually, and who had neither the strength nor the will to go on living—a man ripe for 
the gas chamber. 4
multilingual throng that is already being pushed back to the barracks. Not everybody is 
lucky enough to be going on the ramp . . . We have almost reached the gate. Links, zwei, d
rei,  vier!
Mützen ab! Erect, arms stretched stiffly along our hips, we march past the gate briskly, 
smartly, almost gracefully. A sleepy S.S. man with a large pad in his hand checks us off, 
waving us ahead in groups of five. "Hundert!" he calls after we have all passed.
"Stimmt!" comes a hoarse answer from out front.
We march fast, almost at a run. There are guards all around, young men with automatics. 
We pass camp II B, then some deserted barracks and a clump of unfamiliar green—apple 
and pear trees. We cross the circle of watchtowers and, running, burst on to the highway. 
We have arrived. Just a few more yards. There, surrounded by trees, is the ramp.
A cheerful little station, very much like any other provincial railway stop: a small square 
framed by tall chestnuts and paved with yellow gravel. Not far off, beside the road, squats 
a  tiny wooden shed, uglier and more flimsy then the ugliest and flimsiest railway shack; 
farther along lie stacks of old rails, heaps of wooden beams, barracks parts, bricks, paving 
stones. This is where they load freight for Birkenau: supplies for the construction of the 
camp, and people for the gas chambers. Trucks drive around, load up lumber, cement, 
people—a regular daily routine.
And now the guards are being posted along the rails, across the beams, in the green shade 
of the Silesian chestnuts, to form a tight circle around the ramp. They wipe the sweat fro
m 
their faces and sip out of their canteens. It is unbearably hot; the sun stands motionless at 
its zenith. "Fall out!"
We sit down in the narrow streaks of shade along the stacked rails. The hungry Greeks 
(several of them managed to come along, God only knows how) rummage underneath the 
rails. One of them finds some pieces of mildewed bread, another a few half‐rotten sardine
s.  They eat

1. I feel appauled by the vivid description of the people who are suffering this horrific
experience, how the author is able to portray the situations lives as they were, for
us this is imposible to grasp because we haven’t lived it so we “romantizice” the
idea of how prisoners talk or when or why, but this is real life, just as it is shown,
real life human conversations lived while a person’s worst nightmare is happening.
2. Why do we think that delicate or tough of difficult situations have to be addressed
in such a particular manner, with a particular vocabulary or behavior, why arent we
able to call things for what they are and stop hiding behind semantincs? If a person
has been murdered they are not “ a deceased” they are a “murder victim” specially
in spanish, we put so much color to what we are going to say when it is related to a
difficult subject that we don’t actually address the subject ever, we just go around
it and never really solve anything.
3. This reminds me, this part, were they freely talk about unwillingness to live
reminds me of one of president bush’s speeches about how wonderful things were
in afganistan while he had declared war, how triunphant americans were in that
foreign land, how much “good” they were doing, while in reality thousands were
being masacred in the name of being a petroleum source holder nothing else, how
he embelished unnecessary suffering and made soldiers talk about that as a
“Sacrifice for their country” while it was nothing more than an organized
ransacking, in this text at least people show how life is lived while they are being
destroyed mentally, spiritually and phisically.
4. “It is the camp law: people going to their death must be deceived to the very end. 
This is the  only permissible form of charity”
To me this part is the one that explains the whole text, the interactions they have
with the guards, with other prisoners, it is all one that does not mention clearly
what is evident, those interactions are as if life is going by normally with a few
painful glitches, this part made understand that in order to survive it the must be
some kind of lying, some kind of forgeting, some kind of silence around what is
really happening, if it is brough to light hope might run out the window, and that is
first the noblest way of survival and the worst way of torture at the same time.
5. To me the most significant figure of speech is the kind of metaphors used by the
soldiers or guards to describe human life, to describe what they are whitnessing, to
refer to this group of humans as “meat” is the most dehumanizing strategy there
can be, if they are just meat they have no importance hence anything can be done
to that meat and it is excused, powerfully painful to read.