After one of them had just died, I watched without any emotional upset the scene that followed,
which was repeated over and over again with each death.
One by one the prisoners approached the still warm body.
One grabbed the remains of a messy meal of potatoes;
another decided that the corpse’s wooden shoes were an improvement on his own, and exchanged them.
A third man did the same with the dead man’s coat, and another was glad to be able to secure some—just imagine!—genuine string.
All this I watched with unconcern. Eventually I asked the “nurse” to remove the body.
When he decided to do so, he took the corpse by its legs, allowing it to drop into the small corridor between the two rows of boards
which were the beds for the fifty typhus patients, and dragged it across the bumpy earthen floor toward the door.
The two steps which led up into the open air always constituted a problem for us, since we were exhausted from a chronic lack of food.
After a few months’ stay in the camp we could not walk up those steps, which were each about six inches high,
without putting our hands on the door jambs to pull ourselves up.
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