Not surprisingly, the title's dry, sarcastic tone is upheld throughout these stories, although they do often verge upon very horrifying fates, and although many of the characters die in their imprisonment or are tortured by the Nazis. So the reader should wonder, why would the tone be caustic and sarcastic if the actual content of the stories is so genuinely horrifying? The truth comes from humor, which is shown in this story collection to be a mysterious alternative to unbridled trauma and horror.
By observing the horrendous absurdity of the Holocaust, both in that Borowski himself was not a Jew but was still trapped in Auschwitz nevertheless, and also in the fact that any human, for any reason, could possibly believe that this was a tolerable way to treat other human beings. The horrors of the Holocaust are well-known, but these stories treat them for their more local, personal pains, the little ways that horror happened in those camps. The stories all have dehumanization at their core, like in "A Day At Harmenz," when Tadek is continually forced to concede in small menial ways that add up to a hopelessness that he only overcomes by not giving into his temptation to return Becker's sins with hatred.
The way the camp brings out competition is on display in these stories too, like in the story just mentioned, or "The People Who Walked On," which notes that while three thousand people were being gassed only a short distance away, the well-bodied and able prisoners began to play pick up soccer, another indication that competition is a way they can survive the horror of their everyday life. In "The Supper," this propensity is shown in its full expression—full-blown cannibalism. The starving prisoners consume the corpses of twenty Russian soldiers.
