Chapters 8 & 9

Summary

 

The journey to Buchenwald has fatally weakened Eliezer's father. On arrival, he sits in the snow and refuses to move. He seems at last to have given in to death. Eliezer tries to convince him to move, but he will not or cannot, asking only to be allowed to rest. Eliezer leaves his father and falls deeply asleep. In the morning, he begins to search for his father, but halfheartedly. Part of him thinks that he will be better off if he abandons his father and conserves his strength. Almost accidentally, however, he finds his father, who is very sick and unable to move. Eliezer brings him soup and coffee. Again, however, Eliezer feels deep guilt, because part of him would rather keep the food for himself, to increase his own chance of survival.Instead, he feels relief.

Eliezer tries to find medical, but the doctors will not treat the old man. The prisoners whose beds surround Eliezer's father's bed steal his food and beat him. Eliezer, unable to resist his father's cries for help, gives him water. After a week, Eliezer is approached by the head of the block, who tells him what he already knows—that Eliezer's father is dying, and that Eliezer should concentrate his energy on his own survival. The next time the SS patrol the barracks, Eliezer's father again cries for water, and the SS officer, screaming at Eliezer's father to shut up, beats him in the head with his truncheon. The next morning, January 29, 1945, Eliezer wakes up to find that his father has been taken to the crematory. To his deep shame, he does not cry. Instead, he feels relief.

 

Eliezer remains in Buchenwald, thinking neither of liberation neither of his family, but only of food. On April 5, with the American army approaching, the Nazis decide to annihilate all the Jews left in the camp.  As the evacuation begins, an air-raid siren sounds, sending everybody indoors. When it seems that all has returned to normal and that the evacuation will proceed as planned, the resistance movement strikes, driving the SS from the camp. Hours later, on April 11, the American army arrives at Buchenwald. Now free, the prisoners think only of feeding themselves. Eliezer is struck with food poisoning and spends weeks in the hospital, deathly ill.

Quote:

 When he finally raises himself and looks in the mirror—

“From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me.”- page 115

Reaction:

This is the bitter reality of all the surviors of the Holocaust, they were in the true sense just skin and bone, hardly enough mussel to move around

Dibiltated for live, most died early, those who survived bore scars phisically, mentally, emotionally, and even spritually. These were a

crushed people, but, time heals all wounds and the world has moved past the Holocaust, but it will forever hang over the shoulder of the world, a reminder

of the lowest of all human acts.

Chapter 6

Summary

 

In the blizzard and the darkness, the prisoners from Buna are evacuated. Anybody who stops running is shot by the SS. At last, the exhausted prisoners arrive at the Gleiwitz camp, crushing each other in the rush to enter the barracks. In the press of men, Eliezer and his father are thrown to the ground. 

Fighting for air, Eliezer discovers that he is lying on top of Juliek, the musician who befriended him in Buna. Eliezer soon finds that he himself is in danger of being crushed to death by the man lying on top of him. He finally gains some breathing room, and, calling out, discovers that his father is near. Among the dying men, the sound of Juliek's violin is heard in the silence. Eliezer falls asleep to this music, and when he wakes he finds Juliek dead, his violin smashed. 

After three days without bread and water, there is another selection. When Eliezer's father is sent to stand among those condemned to die, Eliezer runs after him. In the confusion that follows, both Eliezer and his father are able to sneak back over to the other side. The prisoners are taken to a field, where a train of roofless cattle cars comes to pick them up.

Quote:

"The front followed us..... we no longer had the strength or the courage to think that the Germans would run out of time, that the Russians would reach us before we would be evacuated."

Reaction:

This section is a depressing sight, the S.S. has crushed these people so much that to hope of a hope is to much effort. They were force to run over 20km with no cold protection, food, or any other essentials. Eliezer is very lucky his father and him give each other strength I'm sure neither of them would have made it without the other.

After Liberation, video about the liberated camps.

Holocaust Horrors

Chapter Five

Summary:

Despite their imprisonment and affliction, the Jews of Buna come together to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, praying together and praising God's name. On this solemn Jewish holiday, Eliezer's belief in God slackens, and he cannot find a reason to bless God in the midst of so much suffering. Eliezer mocks the idea that the Jews are God's chosen people, deciding that they have only been chosen to be massacred.

When Eliezer returns from work, it seems to him that there has been a miracle. A second selection occurred among the condemned, and Eliezer's father survived. With the arrival of winter, the prisoners begin to suffer in the cold. Eliezer's foot swells up, and he undergoes an operation. While he is in the hospital recovering, the rumor of the approaching Russian army gives him new hope.

But the Germans decide to evacuate the camp before the Russians can arrive. Thinking that the Jews in the infirmary will be put to death prior to the evacuation, Eliezer and his father choose to be evacuated with the others. After the war, Eliezer learns that they made the wrong decision—those who remained in the infirmary were freed by the Russians a few days later. With his injured foot bleeding into the snow, Eliezer joins the rest of the prisoners. At nightfall, in the middle of a snowstorm, they begin their evacuation of Buna.

Quote:

""For the liberating army, he told us. "let them know that here lived men and not pigs."

So we were men after all? The block was cleaned from top to bottom." 

Blackest

-pg.84

Reaction:

This command of the Blockaste was hypocritical. the next paragraph Elie to notices and wonders, what they were, if they were still men. He has been shook with doubt in God during his time in Buna, along with most every other inmate, all debating the Whys, Hows and What Fors of their situation. Also discussing whether of not to fast during Yom Kippur for instance, most, if not all, decide to eat, how would they survive anyway? 

________LINK_______

In this section  Elie visits the infirmary, he is lucky to have a jewish doctor, some were not so lucky. their were Nazi doctors during the Holocaust, whom in fiction would be called "mad" or "evil" scientist. thy performed terrible experimentation on the Jews, some which wouldn't be humane on the lowest animal. This site give the list of such "experiments": 

Medical Experiments of the Holocaust and Nazi Medicine

Chapter 4

Summary

After the required quarantine and medical inspection, Eliezer is chosen to serve in a unit of prisoners, counting electrical fittings in a civilian warehouse. His father, serves in the same unit. Eliezer and his father are to be housed in the musicians' block, which is headed by a kind german Jew. Not long after Eliezer and his father arrive (in Buna) Elie is summoned to the dentist to have his gold crown pulled. He delays claiming illness and postpones having the crown removed. Soon after, the dentist is condemned to hanging for illegally trading in gold teeth. Eliezer does not pity the dentist, because he has become too busy keeping his body intact and finding food to eat to spare any pity.

Eliezer's father then falls victim to one of the Nazi's rages. Painfully honest, Eliezer reveals how much the concentration camp has changed him, he is concerned, at that moment, only with his own survival. Rather than feel angry at the Nazi, Eliezer becomes angry at his father for his inability to dodge the blows. During an Allied air raid on Buna, during which every prisoner is supposed to be confined to his or her block, two cauldrons of soup are left unattended. The man reaches the soup, and after a moment of hesitation lifts himself up to eat. As he stands over the soup, he is shot and falls lifeless to the ground. A week later, the Nazis erect a gallows in the central square and publicly hang another man. Eliezer then proceeds to tell the tale of another hanging, that of two prisoners suspected of being involved with the resistance and of a young boy who was the servant of a resistance member. Although the prisoners are all so hardened by suffering that they never cry, they all break into tears as they watch the child strangle on the end of the noose. One man wonders how God could be present in a world with such cruelty. Eliezer, mourning, thinks, as far as he is concerned, God has been murdered on the gallows together with the child.

Quote:

"But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing..."-page #65

Reaction:

It is difficult to imagine what emotions would play through your body, under the conditions of Auschwitz. IT is even more difficult to imagine a child being hung. What would it the, feel like, if these two crimes against nature were together? Even the appointed executioner refused and the SS had to step in. ANd now  as a reader it seems that events in Elie life at this point roller coaster, going good for a while the suddenly getting worse, then  again the situation lightens and then he's cast even more sharply, deeper down in to the horrors of Auschwitz 

Link: About the conditions at Auschwitz: Food Rations, Quarantines, ect.

Video:AUSCHWITZ ,THE NAZIS AND THE FINAL SOLUTION

Kazimierz Piechowski, a former concentration camp political prisoner narrates how he escape in the most dreadful German concentration camp Auschwitz.

Chapter 3

Elie and his father remain together, but  separated from their mother and younger sister. Eliezer and his father meet a prisoner, who tells them to lie about their ages. Elie, almost fifteen, said that he is eighteen, while his father, who is fifty, is to say that he is forty. As the prisoners move through Birkenau, they are horrified to see a huge pit where babies are being burned, and another for adults. Eliezer cannot believe his eyes, and tells his father that what they see is impossible, that “humanity would never tolerate” such an atrocity. His father, breaking down into tears, replies that "humanity is nonexistent in the world of the crematoria."       

Everybody in the column of prisoners weeps, and somebody begins to recite the Jewish prayer for the dead, the Kaddish. Eliezer's father also recites the prayer. Eliezer, is skeptical. He cannot understand what he has to thank God for. When Eliezer and his father are two steps from the edge of the pit, their rank is diverted and directed to a barracks. In the barracks, the Jews are stripped and shaved, disinfected with gasoline, showered, and clothed in prison uniforms. Despite all that they have seen, the prisoners continue to express their faith in God and trust in divine redemption. Finally, they are escorted on a four-hour walk from Auschwitz to Buna, the work camp in which they will be interned for months.

Quote:

"MY Father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked."

Reaction: 

This scene is proof of the terrible way the concentration camps changed people. 

Elie finds he has no physical reaction to the abuse of his father. He feels ashamed and says he still feels that shame. I doubt he could of helped at all, and this seems to foreshadow Elie future tortue in Auschwitz .
Auschwitz concentration camp>>>>><-Link

Chapter 2

Summary

The Jews are packed into cattle cars, there is almost no air to breathe, the heat is unbearable, there is no room to sit, and everyone is hungry and thirsty. Some  begin to 'show 'affection' openly on the train as though they were alone, and others pretend not to notice. After days of travel in these inhuman conditions, the train arrives at the Czechoslovakian border, and the Jews realize that they are not simply being relocated.  Madame Schächter, a middle-aged woman who is on the train with her ten-year- old son, soon cracks under the oppressive treatment to which the Jews are subjected. On the third night, she begins to scream that she sees a fire in the darkness outside the car.

 

The train eventually stops, they have reached Auschwitz. This name means nothing to them, and they bribe some locals to get news.  With nightfall, Madame Schächter again wakes everyone with her screams, and again she is beaten into silence. The train moves slowly and at midnight passes into an area enclosed by barbed wire. Through the windows, everybody sees the chimneys of vast furnaces. There is an undefined, odor in the air—what they soon discover is  the smell of burning human flesh. This concentration camp is Birkenau, the processing center for arrivals at Auschwitz.

 

Quote:  

"Jews, look! Loook at the fire! Look at the flames!"-pg 28

Reaction:

This isn't the first mention from Madame Schächter of fire, no, this is the only time it makes sense. Before they were in the middle of no where and no fires in sight. BUt in the Cattle car the the Jews faced a kind of fire we have no idea of, the extreme heat of 80 bodies shoved in a space meant for nearly half that, and with a very minimum amount of water the Jews must have felt like they were burning. However this madness of Madame Schächter seems to be a bad omen foreshadowing the cremotoria.

Link ABOUT RAILCARS OF THE HOLOCAUST, from the HOlocaust Documentation and EDucation Center

Chapter 1 page 3-22

In 1941, Eliezer, is a twelve-year-old boy living in the Sighet, Transylvania. Needing guide his to discuss religious mysticism, he turns to Moshe the Beadle, a very poor and pious homeless-man who everyone seems to like. One day, without warning, Hungarian police arrest Moshe along with other foreigners and take them away aboard cattle cars.

 After several months, having escaped his captors, Moshe returns and tells how the deportation trains were handed over to the  German secret police at the Polish border. There the Jews were forced to dig mass

 graves for themselves and were killed by the Gestapo. The town thinks he is crazy refuses to believe his story. The town keeps on hearing news of the Nazi army, they didn't think the Germans stood a chance. News from Budapest warns that fascism is on the rise. Although a villager returns from the capital with news of anti-Semitism, optimism continues to prevail. But suddenly the army is rolling through town, and still everything seems okay to the people of Sighet. Then series of increasingly oppressive measures are forced on the Jews—the community leaders are arrested, Jewish valuables are confiscated, and all Jews are forced to wear yellow stars. Eventually, the Jews are confined to small ghettos, crowded together into narrow streets behind barbed-wire fences to await departure.

 By 4 A.M., families are preparing food for the journey. At 8 A.M., Hungarian police order Jews outside police club anyone moving to slowly. Within two hours, all Jews stand in the streets. By 1 P.M., the first convoys begin their march out of Sighet. On Thursday, the Wiesels anticipate deportation. To their relief, they are forced to move into the small ghetto. Elie leads the way; his father weeps. The small ghetto is littered with possessions that the first deportees abandoned in turmoil. The Wiesels move into Elie's uncle's rooms for four nights. At dawn on Saturday, after a wretched Friday night packed in the synagogue with the remaining Jews, the Wiesels join the last deportees to board railway cattle cars.

This is the trailer of "Jacob the Liar," with Robin WIlliams this is a brief example of some of the conditions Jews had to face in some Ghettos.

Quote:

"That was when I began to hate them, and my hatred remains our link today. They were our first oppressors. They were the first faces of hell and death." -page 19

Reaction:

This quote makes us think: How can we relate to the people of this era? this quote tells us how, by the repulsion and anger at the people who committed such terrible acts. Wiesel also shows us how, in this case, the Hungarian police were their first attackers, their first enemies, their first foreshadowing of events to come.

Visit:HOLOCAUST/TIMELINE To learn more about the ghettos