“Several other men are carrying a small girl with only one leg. They hold her by the arms and the one leg. Tears are running down her face and she whispers faintly: ‘Sir, it hurts, it hurts…’. They throw her on the truck on top of the corpses. She will burn alive along with them.”
1. this paragraph is saying a group Canada men are throwing a young girl onto a pile of dead body, and try to burn her. alive. 2. This part of description of the working group gave me a strong impression about how these people become so ruthless and robotlike. It’s hard for me to imagine how a man can treat another live human like a corpus. 3. The significance about this part to the story is, It shows not only the camp a killing factory, also a place to transfer innocent people into horrible devil. 4. Apprently, in this story, The best way and easiest way to make people fall is to give them absolute power. This rise me a question that, are there really innocent people?
Nan,
The last question you raise is precisely the one that most troubled Borowski. Do you remember that in the story the narrator asks his friend, “Are we good people?” The text is exploring exactly the issue you raise. What does it mean to take part in something like this – even if you too are a prisoner? Why does our narrator state that he hates the Jews and is glad that they are being killed? Where does that come from?
JS