The Last One
- It's almost Christmas in the camp.
- In a stroke of good fortune, Primo and Alberto get some extra soup each day from Lorenzo. The pair have a special pot, called a "menaschka," made to carry it.
- This extra soup makes Primo and Alberto superstars in the camp for awhile. People who previously didn't pay them any attention now want to be their friends.
- The duo also has some other action going on.
- Primo has been smuggling brooms into the camp to the Blockältester.
- "Operation File" is Alberto's idea. He checks out one file from the tool-store and exchanges it for two smaller files at the Exchange Market. He then sells one, and returns the other to the tool-store.
- Alberto's major achievement, though, is how he's recently started stealing colored labels from his work detail and selling them to the all the Blockälteste. The price is pretty steep, too: ten rations of bread.
- In the middle of a seemingly normal return from work, the work Kommandos are stopped in the big roll call square. And this seems quite ominous, because there's a gallows nearby.
- One month ago, one of the crematoriums in the Birkenau camp was blown up, and nobody knows who did it.
- Under suspicion is the "Special Kommando," the group of Jewish prisoners assigned to work at the Birkenau death camp, and who are themselves regularly exterminated.
- Apparently, the SS have captured one prisoner who was involved in this plot, and are going to execute him.
- After one SS officer rattles of a bunch of German (which many of the Jewish prisoners don't understand), the condemned man shouts out: "Kamaraden, ich bin der Letzte!" (which means, "Comrades, I am the last one!")
- Even this cry doesn't prompt a general uprising among the prisoners. The poor man is hanged and the day goes on as usual.
- Primo realizes that the Germans have succeeded in utterly destroying all of the men there; they have no strength whatsoever to act or react.
- When they return to their hut, Primo and Alberto can't even look each other in the eye. They realize that the hanged man didn't allow himself to be conquered.
- They are ashamed.