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He strips them of their luggage, lifts dead infants out of the cattle cars, and pushes the arrivals toward the trucks for the gas chambers, knowing that the food and goods seized from them will feed him and his fellow prisoners. By the end of the day he feels rage not at the SS but at the victims, because their arrival forces him to do this work.
A prisoner who was not gassed lived partly on what was taken from those who were: their bread, shoes, and valuables. Survival was therefore bound up economically with the extermination process itself. Because the system gave privileges to prisoners who kept it running, no survivor stood fully outside the machinery that killed others.
When a person is made to take part in an atrocity they cannot stop, their resentment often lands on the victims, whose presence makes them complicit, and not on the perpetrators, who are out of reach. The victim becomes the visible cause of the observer's moral discomfort. Hatred moves downward toward whoever makes one's own degradation obvious.
The stories describe mass murder in the same casual voice used for football matches, food parcels, and camp gossip, with no stated outrage. This flatness shows how thoroughly the camp had made killing routine for the people inside it.
Borowski's narrator argues that people walked quietly into the gas chambers because they hoped until the very end: for a transfer, for rescue, for one more day. Hope stopped them from rebelling while rebellion was still possible. What looks like a humane virtue worked as a mechanism of control that the killers relied on.