Depicts a five-day train ride which the narrator and 119 other prisoners took in the winter of 1943, in a padlocked boxcar, on their way to a German concentration camp not far from Weimar. This the book utilizes the classical unity of time - all action being compressed into a narrow focus - as a solid basis from which to range both forward and backward, remembering and anticipating, until the stifling boxcar is filled with memories of the narrator. Translated from the French by Richard Seaver.

(Key Words: World War II, Fiction, Concentration Camps, Cattle Cars, Trains).