Chapter 10

“ We are satisfied with this. When one waits time moves smoothly without need to intervene and drive it forward, while when one works, every minute moves painfully and has to be labouriously driven away. We are always happy to wait; we are capable of waiting for hours with the complete obtuse inertia of spiders in old webs.(104)”

We all know that when we go to a friends house, time seems to fly by, but when we have that boring class, we are wondering if time could go any slower. We tend to think that horrible things move slowly, and good things more quickly, which is true in most cases. In the concentration camp it is a little different. There, time is slower when nothing happens. But that is a good thing. For teenagers it seems that waiting is the wost limit you could put on a person. But in the lager, it is a blessing. Waiting means no work, which is the closest thing there are going to get to going over to a friends house and playing computer games. Its all about perspective. We think waiting is bad, because it doesn’t benefit us, but time was a precious thing in the lager, and not to be messed with. Waiting meant more food, less energy, more rest. Waiting meant that you could survive on less calories and less sleep. Waiting parts go by quickly, while the work drags on. In the concentration camp work happened everyday, no rests. Imagine how good it felt to get away from all the turmoil of life and just relax and try to be like men a little bit! The thing is, as teenagers, we don’t really realize how important waiting is. We don’t realize it is a gift, and a need. Our brains need time to relax and think, to breath. We need to just let time go on smoothly and wait, instead of trying to make it flow by, life is too short as it already is.