Daniel's Story

After three months at Auschwitz, the Nazis marched Daniel, his dad, and the other prisoners away from the camp to avoid the approaching Allies. They put them in uncovered boxcars though it’s windy and snowy. Daniel thinks they’re going to Germany, where they’ll work and die.

He thinks about why the Nazis still want to kill the Jews—they hate the Jews, but they also don’t want the Jews to tell everyone about the genocide. Maybe the Nazis know what they’re doing is wrong. Either way, Daniel wants to live and expose the atrocities. He doesn’t have tangible pictures but has pictures in his head. All his memories feel like pictures.

Daniel explains the setup of Auschwitz. There are three camps. Auschwitz I is the main camp, and it has the camp administration. Auschwitz II is known as Birkenau and has the gas chambers and crematorium. It also has the quarantine camp, the hospital, the Theresienstadt family camp, and Canada—the nickname for the warehouses where the Nazis kept all of the prisoners’ valuable items. Daniel and Joseph work in Auschwitz III, Monowitz, where they dismantle the machines for German companies and send them to Germany so the Russians can’t get them.