Free A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy by Elie Wiesel, Thomas Buergenthal Page A

fellow inmates, day
     in and day out. Right after the Kapos had greeted our barrack boss, one of them yelled in German, “Spiegel, you son of a bitch.
     Get down. We want to talk to you!” As soon as Spiegel stood before them, the men surrounded him and started to hit him with
     their fists and clubs: on his face, his head, his legs, his arms. The more Spiegel begged for mercy and screamed, the more
     the Kapos beat him. From what I could make out as the Kapos yelled while beating him, Spiegel had apparently denounced one
     of them to the Gestapo in Kielce, with the result that the denounced man had been sent to Auschwitz some two years earlier.
    Spiegel was soon on his knees and then flat on the ground, begging to be allowed to die. He was covered with blood and no
     longer really trying to protect himself against the blows that continued to rain down on him. The Kapos then picked up Spiegel
     and began to push and pull him out of the barrack. We did not see what happened next. Later we heard that the Kapos had dragged
     Spiegel to the fence and that he died on the fence. Our camp, like the others in Birkenau, was enclosed by a highly electrified
     fence that emitted a perennial buzz. The fence separated those of us in the Gypsy camp from camp D on one side and camp F
     on the other. A single wire strung about a meter high and a meter from the fence on either side warned inmates not to get
     any closer lest they be electrocuted. Spiegel must have died by being thrown against the fence or by crawling into it. Gradually,
     I came to realize that it was not uncommon for inmates to commit suicide by what was known as “walking into the fence.”
    It is difficult not to wonder whether it ever occurred to these Kapos that they were no different from Spiegel. He denounced
     fellow Jews to the Gestapo because he believed that he was thereby prolonging his own life, whereas the Kapos allowed themselves
     to become the surrogates of the SS by beating their fellow inmates, forcing them to work to total exhaustion, and depriving
     them of their rations, knowing full well that by these actions they hastened the deaths of the prisoners. All that in order
     to improve the Kapos’ own chances of survival. Thus, besides testing the morality of those who became neither informers nor
     Kapos, the concentration camps were laboratories for the survival of the brutish. Both Spiegel and the Kapo he had denounced
     had been friends of my parents. Both had been with us in Katowice. At that time they had been my “uncles.” I seem to recall
     that the Kapo whom Spiegel had denounced had been a dental technician or a dentist in his prior life; I never knew what Spiegel’s
     profession had been. Had they not ended up in the camps, they probably would have remained decent human beings. What is it
     in the human character that gives some individuals the moral strength not to sacrifice their decency and dignity, regardless
     of the costs to themselves, whereas others become murderously ruthless in the hope of ensuring their own survival?
    I remember very little about my activities in the days immediately following the Spiegel beating. Of course, I thought a lot
     about my mother and missed her very much. I wondered what she was doing, whether they had also cut off her hair as they had
     ours, whether she had enough to eat, and whether she had to live in a barrack similar to ours. In those early days, I was
     also introduced to the Auschwitz feeding system. We would be awakened early in the morning and made to line up in front of
     a big kettle from which an inmate with a ladle would pour out a liquid that looked like black coffee. Next to him stood the
     barrack boss, cutting slices of black bread. The bread was frequently moldy and the slices rather small. I soon noticed that
     not everyone got the same amount of bread. Those the barrack boss did not like would get a smaller piece or no bread at all,
     while his friends and he himself would keep