Breathe deeply

“Breathe deeply” is both a heading in Szmul’s narration and a phrase he imagines speaking to a child in the gas chamber. In a scene built around an anticipated death rather than an event that has occurred, the instruction carries a stark tension: it is an ordinary, almost reassuring appeal to breathe, addressed to someone Szmul expects to be killed.

Heading and imagined scene

The phrase appears in the heading “SZMUL: BREATHE DEEPLY” and returns in Szmul’s imagined words to a boy in a sailor suit. He pictures himself going to the gas and weaving among those condemned, though he first notes that his conspicuousness would probably mean he was taken aside and shot in the nape instead. The imagined scene is therefore conditional, not an account of an actual entry into the chamber.

Address to the condemned

Szmul’s imagined speech distinguishes two figures. To an old man in an astrakhan coat, he would advise standing as close as possible to the meshed shaft; to the boy, he would say, “Breathe deeply, my child.” The adult’s instruction is spatial and specific, while the child’s is intimate and bodily. The phrase’s gentleness does not remove the lethal setting; it makes the contrast between an ordinary act of breathing and the threatened killing more stark.

Significance

In the imagined scene, Szmul places himself among the people being killed and gives them words of direction. The section title thus names not a general maxim but a brief act of address within a vision of mass death. Its tenderness is inseparable from the horror surrounding it: the child is told to breathe in a place where breathing cannot offer safety.