This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

Food represents hope and survival, and another meal means staving off death for a bit longer. In certain instances, a variety of food represents privilege. The title story, in which Tadek helps to unload the people from the train to rummage through their belongings for food, shows how hunger makes the prisoners desperate enough to assist in sending innocent people to the gas chambers. As a Polish political prisoner, Tadek experiences hunger but is allowed to receive packages from home that contain food. Becker (“A Day at Harmenz”), however, embodies the idea of endless hunger. At another camp, he prioritized food over everything, even killing his own son for stealing food. However, he also steals food from Tadek, and at the end of the story, when Becker is to be sent to the gas chamber, he pleads with Tadek to feed him so he can finally be full. Tadek, recognizing starvation as torture and food as a human right, allows him to eat even though he despises him.

Becker says to Tadek, “Real hunger is when one man regards another man as something to eat” (54). In “A Day at Harmenz,” this is figurative, meaning that hunger causes a person to see other humans as disposable in the quest for food.