Max's freedom was short-lived. He was captured yet again and taken to Auschwitz, one of several concentration camps the Nazis built in occupied Poland. Max was forced to work as a Sonderkommando, a member of a work gang that had to dispose of the bodies of people killed in the camp's gas chambers. As the years went by, Max grew more and more hollow, and less inclined to believe in saviors.
Max found some small solace in a reunion inside the camp, however. He found Magda, the girl who had worked at his school, and quietly began to foment revolution with his fellow prisoners. When wary men protested, saying that an uprising would cause brutal Nazi retaliation, Max calmly laid out all the times he had followed those lines of thinking. He'd had many opportunities to fight back, he said, against the perpetrators of Kristallnacht, bigoted authority figures, and officials within the camp. He hadn't taken them, out of fear of the destruction the Nazis would rain upon the Jews as a result. "And guess what," hee asked his skeptical bunkmates: "They killed them all anyway."
As in our world, the Sonderkommandos revolted on October 7, 1944. In the ensuring chaos, Max and Magda escaped into the Polish countryside.
