Scavenging Parts

"The Greek Jews being such a pathetic lot and ready to die anyway, we hope it is alright that they have been assigned to the death commando unit at the crematoriums, where they will handle the corpses and extract the gold from the teeth and feed the bodies to the furnaces until they too, exhausted beyond recall, are ready for the gas."

--William Styron, Sophie's Choice

I was just reading this for Southern Literature and was reminded of the scene from AI when David encounters all the other mechas rummaging through the trash heap of robot parts, trying to find compatible parts--the one trying on a couple of different wrists before he found one that actually fit on his arm.  At the time, the scene struck me as alienating--this is a very inhumane sort of scavenging.  It's not the first time I've seen it, either--it seems to occur throughout science fiction that machines will naturally be able to replace parts of themselves from discarded robots.

But now, after reading this excerpt from Sophie's Choice, we humans aren't so different--at least here, portrayed in the unforgiving light of the holocaust.  Germans taking the gold from the teeth of the people they failed to view as people--something about that just struck a chord that I'm not really sure what to do with.  It's not humane behavior, but perhaps it's human behavior--carpetbaggers in the civil war, stealing from corpses--it's not like the corpses need their valuables, but something tells us its wrong.

 We're a very compatible people, whether we realize it or not--we're always trading parts for other parts, and while it may seem alien and "machine-like" to scavenge for an arm, don't we donate our organs?  Maybe I'm the only one who finds this interesting, but I think there's both humanity and horror to be found in scavenging.