Empowerment Through Resistance and Hope is exemplified in the prisoners as they hear about the liberation of Paris; they feel hope that their ordeal might come to an end if the Germans are defeated by the Allied powers. This helps them to tolerate the immense discomfort of the camp: “We cried together. The news was too wonderful to be accepted other than with simple joy” (122). However, inversely, when the Germans reclaim ground or have victories, it becomes immensely harder to maintain hope: “Whenever I heard that the Allies had suffered reverses, I had to make a great effort to conceal my sorrow and invent good news. For the morale of the internees had to be maintained (122).

Lengyel refers to The Mass Genocide Committed by the Nazis in Wenger’s declaration, describing the inhumane and indifferent murder of Mussulmen who are thrown into an open truck “like animals at the slaughterhouse” (125). Wenger further states: “They were taken to Birkenau to be killed in the gas chamber; following that, they were burned in the crematory ovens” (125). Wenger also describes “fits of sadism” conducted by SS guards, which led to individuals being beaten viciously to death, injected with poison into their hearts (later falsely recorded as “heart failure”), and mass shootings against barrack walls. Wenger’s tone of horror is clear in his description of the needless and indiscriminate murders: “I myself saw, at the end of 1943, or the beginning of 1944, how the male nurses threw the naked corpses on a large truck. These were the bodies of men and young women and healthy people” (126). In the face of Nazi propaganda and disinformation about the death camps, Wenger offers an accurate account of Nazi atrocities.

The horrific scientific experiments conducted on inmates epitomize the Cruel and Degrading Treatment at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Lengyel uses the metaphor of “heartless children who amuse themselves by tearing off the legs and wings of insects,” except that—crucially—“the insects were human beings” (128). In detailing the painful, humiliating, and terrifying experiments, Lengyel reveals the conception of prisoners by the SS as less than human; there was no respect for human life or human suffering in this experimentation, as is illustrated by the absence of anesthesia for invasive—and unnecessary—surgeries, such as the removal of women’s uteruses and ovaries, or the castration of men and boys. The deaths suffered by those involved in experimentation are often prolonged, such as when “they laid hundreds of sick out in the blazing sun. The Germans wanted to know how long it would take a sick person to die under the sun without water” (131). In particular, Lengyel condemns Dr. Mengele as a “mad amateur” with “no one to account to but himself” (129). Lengyel’s account thus highlights both the systemic evils of the death camp—such as the dehumanizing rhetoric that officials used to justify the brutal mistreatment of the inmates—and the misdeeds of individual actors such as Dr. Mengele, who, as Lengyel suggests, did not carry out this brutal mistreatment because of any institutional pressure but rather out of personal motivation to carry out these deeds.

Later, Lengyel learns that the focus on sterilization and experiments on genitalia were motivated once again by the Nazis program of mass genocide:

[T]he Germans had a geopolitical reason for these experiments. If they could sterilize all non-German people still alive after their victorious war, there would be no danger of new generations of “inferior” peoples. At the same time, the living populations would be able to serve as laborers for about thirty years. After that time, the German surplus population would need all the space in these countries, and the “inferiors” would perish without descendants (133).

Lengyel thus demonstrates how the predilections toward sadism exemplified in individual people like Dr. Mengele dovetailed with the sadistic principles of the Nazi ideology.

In these chapters, the fate of Miklos is revealed. The deprivation and cruelty of the camps are illustrated in his appearance, which shocks Lengyel, and in Lengyel’s appearance, which shocks Miklos in return: “[A]t the sight of me, he grew pale. I stood there speechless. How feeble and aged he had become. His features were drawn and his hair was gray” (142). The tragedy of Miklos’s death is accentuated by the fact that he dies trying to save another’s life:

Despite the explicit order of the Germans, my husband stooped over to help a French internee who had collapsed. He wanted to give the poor man an injection of a stimulant to keep him going. Immediately an S.S. guard opened fire and slaughtered both of them (143).

The text also underscores the tragedy of Miklos’s death: He dies in 1945 on a death march—shortly before liberation.