Night Section Two
They are offloaded at the Auschwitz station, and immediately upon their arrival, Eliezer and his father are separated from his mother and sisters. Eliezer never sees his mother and younger sister ever again. As they are escorted towards a selection center, Eliezer and his father learn from the others that they are either going to be forced into hard labor or be cremated. Some of the inmates are angry at the newcomers for submitting peacefully to the Germans, and a rebellion nearly begins to foment among the younger Jews. However, the elders of the community pacify the angry youths and counsel them to have faith that everything could be resolved peaceably. Eliezer and his father receive advice about how to get through the selection process, which would determine whether they are fit enough for labor or if they are to be simply killed. Eliezer is told to lie that he is eighteen years old, while his father is told that he should lie that he is forty years old and not fifty. They are both sent to the same queue by Dr. Mengele, who performs the selection, but they are unaware whether they are being sent to the crematorium or labor.
As the queue proceeds, Eliezer and his father witness horrific scenes that reduce them to tears along with the other people in their queue. They see two pits of fire. Soldiers can be seen burning small children in the small pit while adults are being burned in the larger pit. Eliezer is horrified and he asks his father how such atrocities could be occurring in the modern world, but his father has no reply for him. The other people in the queue begin to sing the Kaddish, for the deceased, but Eliezer cannot begin to understand how he could still praise God after witnessing such horrific acts. The people in the queue begin to worry when they are guided towards a pit, but they are soon redirected to a barracks where they are stripped, shaved, showered, and redressed in prison clothes. The kapo, a prisoner responsible for the other inmates, tells them that their only options in Auschwitz were to either work hard or be killed. They spend a few weeks in that barrack, where they encounter an old relative, Stein. The conditions are barren in the barracks, and Eliezer focuses on feeding himself enough to recover from the harrowing conditions of the transports. He worries about his father continually. Eliezer lies to his relative about the news of his family, as he tells him that his mother had received word that Stein’s family was safe before they had been removed from Sighet. The relative disappears when he learns the truth about his family. Prisoners in the camp continue to express their faith in God even as their conditions continue to worsen. After nearly a month’s stay at Auschwitz, Eliezer and his father are forced to march to Buna where they are engaged in labor for several months.
The prisoners go through a thorough cleaning and a period of quarantine before they are allowed to integrate into the labor camp. The prisoner’s mouths are examined for gold crowns, and they are sorted into bocks. Eliezer and his father are assigned to the same block, where they are required to work sorting out electrical in a warehouse. They begin to reside with musicians and a pair of Zionists, and Eliezer expresses his hope of migrating to Palestine after the end of the war. He encounters another devout Jew, Akiba the drummer, who promises everyone that the end of the war is imminent. Eliezer is summoned to the dentist to have his gold crown pulled, but he lies to the dentist about being sick and so the appointment is continually postponed. Eliezer is prevented from going back to the dentist as the man is arrested by the Germans for illegally dealing in the gold crowns that he had been assigned to remove. He feels no pity for the dentist and is simply happy to retain that little amount of wealth. However, the tooth continues to haunt him, as the prison foreman learns of its existence. He demands the tooth, but Eliezer and his father both agree to resist the foreman. This resistance fades rather quickly as the foreman exploits his father’s inability to march as an excuse to deliver severe beatings. Eliezer finally relents and the foreman extracts Eliezer’s crown with a broken spoon in a toilet.
Eliezer suffers several brutal beatings in those initial days at Buna. He is thrashed senseless by his workplace supervisor once, who tends to have random fits of horrifying violence. A severely injured Eliezer is then aided by a young French girl, and he recounts meeting her several years after the war on a metro in Paris. They had recognized one another easily, and she had told him that she had been traveling with fake documents that proclaimed her to be an Aryan. Another time, Eliezer is whipped until he is unconscious because he sees his kapo having sex with a woman while the other prisoners perform labor.
The conditions at the camp are severely impoverished, so much so that prisoners risk death to steal a little bit of soup that is left unattended during an air raid. Eliezer continually worries about the health of his father, who seems to age faster in those depraved conditions. His faith takes a severe hit as well, as the camp is forced to witness the hanging of several prisoners who are accused of breaking the camp rules. The most horrific hanging is that of a young boy who happens to be the servant of a resistance member from the prison. They are forced to watch the child struggle for breath even as his weight isn’t quite enough for a clean hanging. Eliezer is forced to look at the dying boy as the prisoners march past him, he hears a man asking where God was at that moment. Eliezer answers to himself, that God was on the gallows being hanged.
Analysis
The reader witnesses two crucial developments in this section of the book. Firstly, this section contains a horrific description of the hanging of a young boy whose death isn’t just cruel but quite unholy. Eliezer is shocked by the callousness of the situation, and the act precipitates the loss of his faith. No longer is Eliezer the devout Jew, who had once sought a teacher to teach him about the greater mysteries of religion and existence. He now spends most of his time thinking about food, and worrying about survival. Therefore, when a man behind him questions how God could allow such a terrible act to occur, Eliezer answers the question instinctively.
“He is hanging here on these gallows.”
The death of the little boy is the death of God for Eliezer.
Secondly, the protagonist's relationship with his father begins to morph into the harsh conditions of the labor camps. The Holocaust took the lives of millions of Jews, and while a lot of them were executed directly, others were killed due to the horrific conditions they were exposed to. Eliezer describes several times how bodies were piled up after difficult train transports and forced marches. These conditions make survival itself difficult, which leaves little room for filial affection and love. A desperate Eliezer begins to feel the weight of taking care of his father’s survival along with his own. However, Eliezer’s reaction to witnessing a son beating a father is prayers, as he seeks the strength to resist such an attitude towards his aging father.
