13. October 1944

“Seven out of ten of us will die. Whoever does not die will suffer minute by minute, all day, everyday." (pg.123)

It is the time when the selection starts and sends the majority of prisoners to the gas chambers and also the coldness starts to pierce the prisoners’ body. Only with a shirt, underpants, cloth jacket, and trousers, they have to endure the cold winter and wait for their death to be announced. Winter equals no hope.During the selection, it is mostly randomly picked. In three or four minutes, a hut of two hundred men is done (there are about sixty huts), as well as the twelve thousand men inside the concentration camps. After the selection, the chosen ones receive a privilege, gaining a double ration during their meals, which made me feel awkward about it.

“Just as our hunger is not that feeling of missing a meal, so our way of being cold has need of a new word. We say ‘hunger’, we say ‘tiredness,’ ‘fear,’ ‘pain,’ we say ‘winter’ and they are different things. They are free words, created and used by free men who lived in comfort and suffering in their homes. If the Lagers had lasted longer a new, harsh language would have been born; and only this language could express what it means to toil the whole day in the wind, with the temperature below freezing, wearing only a shirt, underpants, cloth jacket and trousers, and in one’s body nothing but weakness, hunger and knowledge of the end drawing nearer.”(pg.123)

I agree with what Primo has to say with the words, “hunger, tiredness, fear, pain, and winter.” Just as Primo stated that they are just free words, which seems to represent ‘the feeling,’ which the prisoners feel at the camps. Winter did not simply represent one season out of four to the prisoners. To them it forshadowed suffer and death. It was coming, and they could not avoid it. It was the reality and it had to happen. Prisoners fear the launch of winter, which meant death. I was extremely doleful about the fact that the prisoners feared winter. Because I never feared winter. Actually I always waited for winter to play in the snow, make snowmans, play snowfight, go skiing and etc. I realized that there are people in this world who used to fear winter because it confronts death and suffering in the concentration camps. Once again, I realized how blessed and gifted I was.