Chapter 6

“I bite deeply into my lips; we know well that to gain a small, extraneous pain serves as a stimulant to mobilize our last reserves of energy. The Kapos also know it: some of them beat us from pure bestiality and violence, but others beat us when we are under a load almost lovingly, accompanying the blows with exhortations, as cart - drivers do with willing horses.(67)"

Have you ever felt that someone should just kill you because you have so much homework for the next night? That’s what these prisoners feel. The pain of the work is so much that its easier for them if someone beats them so that the pain that is related to the work will decrease, and another pain will arise. Which leads to the next point, not all the guards at the camp were evil. Many of them were good in fact. They beat the prisoners lovingly. That is amazing. You would thin that after a certain amount of time the guards would become hard and not care about the prisoners at all. What would make the guards care about the prisoners? We could say that the guards were good, but if they were good, why wouldn’t they then stop the concentration completely? Maybe the guards weak minded. Maybe they didn’t realize how much power they really had. Maybe they were too afraid to change things, thinking that they themselves might be killed if they opposed. So instead of opposing, they helped in the small things they could. Things that the generals wouldn’t catch, and possibly that the prisoners wouldn’t either. Yes, their were bad ones in the camp, people that thrived in the act of destroying another human, but like on earth, not everyone is bad. There are some good people left, and there were some people in the camp that cared about the prisoners. So next time you say you want someone to kill you, be careful, they just might do it lovingly.