Chapter 2, Into the Crematorium Summary and Analysis

Muller and Maurice are taken to the Auschwitz I crematorium and put to work stripping the clothing from hundreds of corpses. The work is difficult and the overseers are brutal—Muller feels his meager strength failing and knows that to collapse means death. He is repulsed by the piles of massed, intertwined bodies but also discovers that many of them have food hidden in pockets or suitcases. Thus, while they work, Maurice and Muller begin to eat the food of the dead. After the have stripped several hundred corpses they are put on a labor team with other men and begin to load the naked bodies onto carts and feed them into cremation ovens. Muller describes the operation of the crematorium and its physical layout in considerable detail—it is similar to the...