If we could not do the job properly, we were kept awake half the night.
The meager pleasures of camp life provided a kind of negative happiness—“freedom from suffering” as Schopenhauer put it—
and even that in a relative way only. Real positive pleasures, even small ones, were very few.
I remember drawing up a kind of balance sheet of pleasures one day
and finding that in many, many past weeks I had experienced only two pleasurable moments.
One occurred when, on returning from work, I was admitted to the cook house after a long wait
and was assigned to the line filing up to prisoner-cook F ——.
He stood behind one of the huge pans and ladled soup into the bowls which were held out to him by the prisoners, who hurriedly filed past.
He was the only cook who did not look at the men whose bowls he was filling; the only cook who dealt out the soup equally, regardless of recipient,
and who did not make favorites of his personal friends or countrymen, picking out the potatoes for them,
while the others got watery soup skimmed from the top.
But it is not for me to pass judgment on those prisoners who put their own people above everyone else.
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