What delightful days: no roll-call, no duties to perform. The entire camp stands at attention, but we, the lucky spectators from another planet, lean out of the window and gaze at the world. The people smile at us, we smile at the people, they call us ‚Comrades from Birkenau‘, with a touch of pity — our lot being so miserable — and a touch of guilt — theirs being so fortunate. The view from the window is almost pastoral — not one cremo in sight. These people over here are crazy about Auschwitz. ‚Auschwitz, our home … ‚ they say with pride.

And, in truth, they have good reason to be proud. I want you to imagine what this place is like: take the dreary Pawiak, add Serbia, multiply them by twenty-eight and plant these prisons so close together that only tiny spaces are left between them; then encircle the whole thing with a double row of barbed wire and build a concrete wall on three sides; put in paved roads in place of the mud and plant a few anaemic trees. Now lock inside fifteen thousand people who have all spent years in concentration camps, who have all suffered unbelievably and survived even the most terrible seasons, but now wear freshly pressed trousers and sway from side to side as they walk. After you had done all this you would understand why they look down with contempt and pity on their colleagues from Birkenau — where the barracks are made of wood, where there are no pavements, and where, in place of the bathhouses with hot running water, there are four crematoria.

—Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 100-101.