Quote 13
“They registered us in … They took from us our names. And here they put me my number.” (II.1.6)
The numbers assigned to each of the prisoners further dehumanizes them.
Quote 14
“Each morning and evening they made an Appel. They counted the live ones and dead ones to see it wasn’t any missing … we stood sometimes the whole night while they counted again and again.” (II.2.30)
We get another image of Nazi bureaucracy at work with their obsessive counting at the Appel, or roll call. With Vladek’s own obsessive counting (of his pills, crackers, the money in his checking account), we have to wonder if his neuroses have some origin in his experience with the Nazis.
Quote 15
“Auschwitz, it was a camp where they gave you to work so they didn’t finish you so fast. Birkenau was even more bad. It was 800 people in a building made for 50 horses. There it was just a death place with Jews waiting for gas … And there it was Anja.” (II.2.31)
Auschwitz has become the name that most people associate with the Holocaust, but it was Birkenau where over a million Jews lost their lives.