This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

Tadek is extremely ill and certain that he is about to die. He is in the hospital “on a bare straw mattress under a blanket that stank of the dried-up excrement and pus of my predecessors” (157). He is feverish and extremely thirsty. In the next bed is Kapo Kwasniak, a large man with bad kidneys who resents being confined to a bed and mocks Tadek as if he is lazy. Kwasniak is easily bored and demands that Tadek entertain him with stories but insists that the stories must be true and from Tadek’s life. Tadek is running out of personal stories, and he tells Kwasniak about a boy he met in prison. The boy read the Bible constantly, but a Jewish man is placed in their cell and recognizes the boy. He tells him to admit that he is also Jewish as he is “among friends” (159). The boy, whose name was Zbigniew Namokel, insists that he isn’t Jewish. Later that night, he is shot with several other prisoners. Kwasniak replies that the story was not Tadek’s and that Namokel died of typhoid fever in the same bed where Tadek is suffering. Kwasniak gives Tadek his coffee because he isn’t allowed to drink it, as well as a tomato, but doesn’t want Tadek to tell him any more stories.