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Constant hunger destroys the human psyche. It is impossible to stop thinking about food, you think about food all of the time. To your physical incapability is added moral weakness, as constant hunger removes your sense of self-respect, your sense of self-worth. All of your thoughts run in one direction: how to get more food? That’s why on the garbage pit, near the dining hall, at the entrance to the kitchen, the dokhodyagi were always milling about. They wait to see if someone won’t possibly throw something edible out of the kitchen, for instance some scraps of cabbage.¹⁰

The attraction to the kitchen and the obsession with food blinded many to almost all other considerations, as Gustav Herling has also tried to describe:

There is no limit to the physical effects of hunger beyond which tottering human dignity might still keep its uncertain but independent balance. Many times I flattened my pale face against the frosted-glass pane of the kitchen window, to beg with a dumb look for another ladleful of thin soup from the Leningrad thief Fyedka who was in charge. And I remember that my best friend, the engineer Sadovski, once, on the empty platform by the kitchen, snatched from my hand a canful of soup and, running away with it, did not even wait until he reached the latrine but on the way there drank up the hot mess with feverish lips. If God exists, let him punish mercilessly those who break others with hunger.¹¹

Yehoshua Gilboa, a Polish Zionist arrested in 1940, eloquently describes the deceptions which prisoners used to convince themselves that they were eating more than they were:

We attempted to deceive the stomach by crumbling the bread until it was almost like flour and mixing it with salt and large quantities of water. This delicacy was called “bread sauce.” The salty water took on something of the color and taste of bread. You drank it and the bread pap remained. You poured more water on it until the final drop of bread flavor was squeezed out of it. If you ate this bread sauce for dessert after you had filled up on bread water, as it were, it had no taste at all but you created an illusion for yourself by stretching several hundred grams.

Gilboa also writes that he soaked salt fish in water as well. The resulting liquid “could be used for making bread sauce and then you really had a delicacy fit for a king.”¹²

Once a prisoner was spending all of his time hanging around the kitchen, picking up scraps, he was usually close to death, and could in fact die at any time: in bed at night, on the way to work, walking across the zona, eating his dinner. Janusz Bardach once saw a prisoner fall during roll call at the end of the day.

A group formed around him. “I get the hat,” one man said. Others grabbed the victim’s boots, foot rags, coat and pants. A fight broke out over his undergarments.