At Buna, the SS hang a young boy along with two adults; the boy is too light to die quickly and struggles on the rope for over half an hour while the prisoners are forced to watch and then march past his face. When a man behind the narrator asks where God is, the narrator inwardly answers that God is hanging there on the gallows.
Under extreme deprivation the instinct to survive can override even the parent-child bond, so that sons come to see a weakening father as a threat to their own survival. The narrator records both his own guilty relief at his father's death and a son who beats his father to death over a crust of bread.
People discount credible warnings of atrocity because the scale is incomprehensible and belief would demand unbearable action; the town dismisses Moshe the Beadle's eyewitness report of mass killings as madness. Normalcy bias lets victims reinterpret each escalating step as survivable right up to deportation.
The progressive destruction of a person can be tracked not by what is done to the body but by the shrinking of emotional response: the narrator moves from horror at the first corpses to indifference, counting his own failure to weep at his father's death as the true measure of what the camp made of him.