Elie fears that he was sent to the ovens while he was still breathing. Gradually, the dying man succumbs to dysentery, malnutrition, and a vicious beating. In wooden bunks, Elie tries to nurse his father back to health. Finally, only the Wiesels and ten others cling to life. Three days later, living on mouthfuls of snow, the remaining inmates travel in open cattle cars on a ten-day train ride to Buchenwald in central Germany. At a makeshift barracks, survivors pile together. Elie prays for strength to save his father from death. Elie binds his bleeding foot in strips of blanket. The Wiesels and their fellow prisoners are forced to run through a snowy night in bitter cold over a forty-two mile route to Gleiwitz. Elie undergoes surgery on his foot.īecause Russian liberation forces are moving ever closer to the Nazi camp, SS troops evacuate Buna in January 1945.

Chlomo, however, passes a second physical exam and is given another chance to live. At the next selection, the doctor culls Chlomo from abler men.

The savagery reaches its height when the guards hang a childlike thirteen year old, who dies slowly before Elie's eyes.ĭespairing, Elie grows morose during Rosh Hashanah services. After three weeks, Elie and his father are forced to march to Buna, a factory in the Auschwitz complex, where they sort electrical parts in an electronics warehouse. Sadistic guards and trustees exact capricious punishments. After viewing infants being tossed in a burning pit, Elie rebels against God, who remains silent.Įvery day, Elie and Chiomo struggle to keep their health so they can remain in the work force. Elie's mother and three sisters disappear into Birkenau, the death camp. Elie and his father Chlomo lie about their ages and depart with other hardy men to Auschwitz, a concentration camp.

Guards wielding billy clubs force Elie's group through a selection of those fit to work and those who face a grim and improbable future. One of the deportees, Madame Schächter, becomes hysterical with visions of flames and furnaces.Īt midnight on the third day of their deportation, the group looks in horror at flames rising above huge ovens and gags at the stench of burning flesh. In a cattle car, eighty villagers can scarcely move and have to survive on minimal food and water. Elie's family is part of the final convoy. In spring, authorities begin shipping trainloads of Jews to the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. However, even when anti-Semitic measures force the Sighet Jews into supervised ghettos, Elie's family remains calm and compliant. His instructor, Moshe the Beadle, returns from a near-death experience and warns that Nazi aggressors will soon threaten the serenity of their lives. In 1944, in the village of Sighet, Romania, twelve-year-old Elie Wiesel spends much time and emotion on the Talmud and on Jewish mysticism.

The night road book