After a long march, they enter Auschwitz, where Elie becomes number A-7713. The male Jews are shaved, showered, and given work clothes. It feels like a nightmare that he can never forget. Elie cannot imagine that this is actually happening. As they prepare to enter the camp, they see a ditch where babies are thrown into a burning flame. Realizing the importance of being together, Elie and his father lie about their age. The air smells of burning flesh.Īt Birkenau, Elie is separated from his mother and sisters. When the train arrives at its destination, they are at Birkenau, the reception center for Auschwitz. When that does not work, they merely ignore her. 22) Periodically, throughout the train ride, she yells about fire, flames, and the furnace. She yells, "Fire! I can see a fire!" (Chapter 2, pg. A woman named Madame Schachter starts to go mad. The conditions of the train ride are horrific they are treated no better than animals. The Jews of Sighet are forced into crowded cattle wagons, each car consisting of eighty people. After a while, the Germans begin the deportation of the Jews to the concentration camp in Auschwitz. But by 1944, Germans are already in the town of Sighet and they set up ghettos for the Jews. One day, Moshe the Beadle, a Jew from Sighet, deported in 1942, with whom Elie had once studied the cabbala, comes back and warns the town of the impending dangers of the German army. Having grown up in a little town called Sighet in Transylvania, Elie is a studious, deeply religious boy with a loving family consisting of his parents and three sisters. Night begins in 1941, when, the narrator of the story, Elie, is twelve years old.
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