The single motif that appears most often throughout the narrative is the abject cruelty perpetrated by the Nazis, particularly against Jews. Some of the cruelty comes from the idealism espoused by the Nazis, who perceived themselves as Aryans and thus genetically superior to non-Aryans. Thus, when Jewish women in Birkenau give birth to fair-haired babies, matrons spared those infants from the immediate infanticide perpetrated upon dark-haired babies because, as the SS officers proclaim, a woman who gives birth to a blonde child cannot be fully Jewish, but rather, tainted by Jewish influence.

At other times, the cruelty expressed by the Nazis seems capricious and arbitrary, as when Irma Grese picks out beautiful women prisoners to desecrate or when an SS officer decides to punish Ester for pleading for her mother’s life by arresting Ester as well. Ana Stuart describes the sound of the frail, elderly Jews loading onto cattle cars bound for Auschwitz: “The air was filled with wailing and cries of ‘have mercy’ but they were reflex only, for everyone knew that the Nazis had no mercy” (97). The author reveals the seemingly paradoxical reality that, the more powerless the victims are, the more ruthless the Nazis are.