Prisoner B-3087: Chapter 15 Summary & Analysis

One day, Yanek is assigned to a quarry when the kapos abruptly change his work detail. He and the other prisoners are marched out of the camp and into a train car. They are packed in so tightly that Yanek feels crushed, gasping for air. One man starts to scream, gasping for breath, and when he exits the car he is shot immediately. Yanek works his way towards a ventilation grate on the wall of the car. Yanek stands there for half a day while prisoners are loaded into other cars. There is no food, no water, and no way to go to the bathroom.

In the afternoon, the car starts to move. Yanek sees snow-covered fields whipping by. He is shocked to see glimpses of the outside world: “the world for non-Jews.” Once, when they stop, a five-year-old Polish boy calls out to them, yelling that they’ll be turned into soap. His older brother corrects him, announcing that they’re being taken to the gas chambers. The boys then throw snowballs at them, for which Yanek is actually grateful, because he is dying of thirst. He licks the snow off his face and shirt. One man turns to another in the car and says that this is why they could never run away: the Polish people would sell them back to the Nazis for “a sack of potatoes.”

The car travels for another whole day, and still the prisoners have no food or water. Yanek drifts in and out of sleep, kept upright by the prisoners squeezed around him. Sometime later, Yanek wakes up to find that the man leaning on his shoulder is dead. Yanek tries to push him away, but they are too tightly packed, and he must endure the dead man’s weight. Later, when Yanek awakens again, he sees that the ventilation grate near him is covered with snow, which eats greedily to get some water.

Soon after, the train slows again, and another train filled with Jews stops alongside them. A prisoner from the other train asks what his train car says, as the trains have the destinations on them. Yanek calls out, saying their train is going to Treblinka. When he asks in return, the man says that Yanek’s car is headed for Birkenau. A man close by explains that Birkenau isn’t a work camp—it’s a death camp. He suggests that when they arrive in the gas chambers, Yanek should try to stand under the exhaust vents, because he won’t suffer as long before dying.