There is indeed an essential difference between what a man experiences in battle and what he experiences in a concentration camp. In battle, he faces nothingness, he stares death in the face, but in the camp we ourselves were nothing, we were already dead during our lifetime. We were worth nothing. We did not only see nothingness, that is what we were. Our life counted for nothing; our death counted for nothing. There was no halo, not even a notional one, around our death. It was the departure of a small nothing into the vast nothingness. And this death was also barely noticed. We had already
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