Katz was compassionate. A doctor without love is like a mechanic.
-- Herta's Father (chapter 3)

Importance: Spoken by Herta’s father, this line foreshadows Herta’s gradual desensitization and her ultimate downfall: her loss of humanity. From the beginning of the novel, elements of Herta’s desensitization have seeped into her speech and language, as she dehumanizes Jewish people, coldly repeating the words of Nazi propaganda. When she arrives at camp, Herta is made to lethally inject a female prisoner, and her colleague, Fritz, tells her to think of them, “as sick dogs needing to be put down” (122). When a psychiatrist at camp visits Herta, he comments on how her desensitization has affected Herta’s psyche: “you can’t possibly be indifferent to it all. It’s not in your nature to end lives, Herta. You’re no doubt experiencing psychic numbing” (264). By the end of the Herta’s story, her father’s prediction, that...