Finally, when the train arrives at Birkenau/Auschwitz, the prisoners see the flaming chimney that Madame Schaechter had prophesied. They try to silence her by beating and gagging her, but she nevertheless screams repeatedly throughout the night. She starts to scream hysterically about a flaming furnace she claims to see in the distance, and she scares the other occupants of the train. A woman named Madame Schaechter is on the train and begins to lose her mind, having earlier been separated from her husband and two older sons. Young people openly copulate with each other, and the prisoners are forced to give up all their valuables. Inside the train it is so crowded that people have to take turns sitting down. The next day, the prisoners are crowded into cattle wagons on a train. The family refuses to be separated from one another, and they join the rest of the community in the synagogue to be deported. Eliezer's family is scheduled to leave in the last group, and they are moved into the smaller ghetto, where an old family servant named Martha offers to hide them in the country. The first convoy of deported prisoners is kept standing in the middle of the hot courtyard, and Eliezer and others run to bring the parched individuals water. Eliezer goes to wake up the neighbors, and everyone begins to pack in preparation for the upcoming journey. He returns bearing bad news: all Jews will be deported. Even among the ghettos, people carry on as normal until one day when Eliezer's father is unexpectedly summoned to a meeting of the Jewish Council. Jews are first forbidden from leaving their homes for three days, required to wear the yellow star, and then crowded into two ghettos. On Passover the persecution of the Jews begins. Eliezer's father refuses to try to escape the country. In 1944 the townspeople remain foolishly optimistic even after the Fascists come to power, Germany invades Hungary, and the German army itself arrives in Sighet. People continue on in their normal, everyday lives through 1943. They refuse to believe him, however, and think that he is either insane or just wants attention. He manages to escape and comes back to warn the townspeople of the atrocities that he has seen. Moché is deported along with other non-Hungarians and taken to a concentration camp. Moché teaches him that he must seek to ask God the right questions even though we will never understand the answers he gives us.ĭespite ominous signs, the Jews in Sighet refuse to believe that the Fascists could ever do anything to hurt them. Nevertheless, Eliezer starts studying the cabbala with Moché the Beadle, a poor and humble man who works in the Hasidic temple. His father, who is a prominent leader of the Jewish community, thinks that he is too young. He is very devout and wants to study Jewish mysticism. Eliezer Wiesel is a fourteen-year-old boy living in Sighet, Transylvania, at the start of World War II.
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