Designed as a factory of death no one was intended to survive, let alone describe its humanity to a world not yet ready to listen.
This sums up the German intentions for the death camps they were intended to be unsurvivable. When Heinrich Himmler first created the plan for the death camp, it was called the Final Solution - the finality being the end of both the lives of the prisoners kept there and end of any Jewish presence in Germany and the countries it now occupied. There was no attempt to hide what was being done at the camps; in fact, quite the opposite, as the Germans kept records and notated everything that occurred each day at every camp. This was for their own reference because they believed they would never be stopped.
The narrator describes the world as not ready to listen but it is hard for the world to listen to what it is not able to comprehend. It is almost beyond our understanding to hear Kitty's tale, and the tales of millions like her. It is almost beyond our understanding to comprehend man's inhumanity to man, and to comprehend the hate that was the foundation of the Holocaust and the camps, like Auschwitz, where millions perished. Kitty,and those like her, were simply unimaginable to the Germans. They did not believe that anyone would survive the camps, or that they would lose the war, and have the camps discovered after liberation.
We were reduced to consumable byproducts of the killing process.
The death camps were run like factories; they were also seen in much the same way, as prisoners were de-personalized by intention, and seen as products, or items, that needed to be disposed of, rather than as people waiting to die. Kitty compares the prisoners to factory byproducts. When a cow is killed for meet, its hide is used as a byproduct that runs an entirely separate business. Kitty tells us that this is the way in which the Germans saw the prisoners. Their factories were producing death, but from the dead came useful by-products. Gold teeth were pulled form the mouths of dead prisoners; belongings rifled through and stolen, piles made of shoes, coats, eye-glasses. Everything that could be used, was used. Then the bodies of the prisoners were thrown away. This was a factory operation, and nothing to do with human life. Kitty's recollections are blunt, but incisive.
