Summary

Yanek and the others arrived in Birkenau at the beginning of Chapter 16, and they are forced to wait inside the train for hours as they stare out at the burning chimneys of the crematoria where they knew they would be taken to their deaths. Yanek thought that this period of waiting was the Nazis’ last mind game, driving them mad in the train car before killing them. But they eventually moved again, disembarking from the car to the whips and beatings of the Nazis and kapo officers. Dozens had died while in the train car, and their lifeless bodies were left behind as the living were marched to the smokestacks to be burned. They arrived in a room with shower heads that they believed to be the gas chamber, and Yanek begins to laugh as he waits for the gas to kill him...