She takes it for granted that she and her younger brother are one individual. When she finds a raw potato in the mud, he and she alternate taking bites out of it. She devotes just part of a sentence to the selections at Ravensbruck, when she dragged him to the left, away from the chimneys. There's a phys-cal quality to Lobel's memories of the terror. The deprivation is visceral.
Fear is stifled by wave upon wave of hunger.
All they want is not to be noticed, not to be singled out. She mourns the loss of her braids when her head is shaved, but otherwise she barely mourns the loss of anything. She does not think about her parents. There is no heartfelt family reunion, just as there is no nostalgia for a pre-Nazi Eden. When her father first writes to her in Sweden, his words are flowery, as if he is learning to be a father again after seven years of not having children.