Summary

In the first section of this story, Tadek is one of ten chosen for training as a medical orderly at the concentration camp’s hospital. He writes in his letter to his girlfriend that he has set out trying to find someone to take his letters to her. He also details an incident where he promised to try to keep a well-known leader in the camp from being burned on a pile with a hoard of other prisoners. Instead of dying, the man gets better. Tadek counts this as his most recent contribution to lowering the camp’s mortality rate.

In the second section of the story, Tadek writes about how delightful he finds the camp. He describes how different and how much better this camp is than Birkenau. He writes that it has been so long since he has...