Night Ch. 2

  Chapter 2 is all about the ride to Auschwitz. By the second day, they were running out of food and water. Since there was 80 people crammed in a box car, there was little space, so everyone had to take turns sitting down. The ones by the window were lucky, since they could watch the countryside flit by. The amount of food they had they tried to conserve for the next day. When the train stopped in Kaschau, a small town on the Czechoslovakian border, they realized too late that they weren't being relocated some other place in Hungary. a German officer and a Hungarian lieutenant acting as an interpreter stepped in. He said they were now under the authority of the German Army. Anyone still carrying valuables must hand them over, anyone found to have kept any will be shot, and anyone who's sick should report to the hospital car. The German officer added that if anyone went missing, everyone would be shot like dogs. He's dehumanizing the Jews.
   Mrs. Schachter had been one of Elie's neighbors. She was in her fifties and her 10 year old son was with her on the train. Her husband and two older sons had accidentally been deported with the first transport and the separation had shattered her. On the first day of the ride, she had started moaning and asking why her family had been separated. On the third night, she screamed that she saw a terrible fire and was pointing through the window. Some looked out the windows to see, and only saw the darkness of night. Everyone reassured themselves that she was just a mad, poor woman. When they tried calming her down, she continued to scream about the fire, while her son was crying and clinging to her, trying to reassure her that there wasn't anything. The rest of the Jews thought she was possessed by an evil spirit, or that she was hallucinating because she was thirsty. They ended up binding and gagging her. An hour or two later, she had broken free and was screaming about the fire again. People were glad when the men struck her to shut her up, even though it was several blows to the head that could have been lethal. Her son wasn't crying anymore, but desperately clung to her. By daybreak, she had settled down until evening, she shouted about the fire again. This time no one did anything. They were then pulling into a station, and someone near a window read that they were at Auschwitz.
   The train didn't move again and when the doors of the wagon opened in the afternoon, the two men who fetched water learned that this was their final destination, and that it was a labor camp. Apparently the conditions were good. The young would work in the factories while the old and sick would work in the fields. Everyone had a sense of hope and started giving thanks to God. Mrs. Schachter was still in her corner with her son. At 10 pm that evening, Mrs. Schachter yelled about the fire again, and for an instance, they had believed her. They had to hit her several times again to quiet her down. The man in charge of their car asked a passing German officer if they could have the sick woman moved to a hospital car. The German told them she could be moved later. At 11, the train started to move again, but then 15 minutes later, they slowed to a stop at he camp. Mrs. Schachter screamed for one last time about the fire, and then fell silent on her own. This time, they did see the fire, and it came with the smell of burning flesh. They were ordered out of the car. At midnight, they had arrived in Auschwitz.
   It's kind of like Mrs. Schachter was a prophet, like how Moishe was. She was talking about the fires that were burning the Jews' dead bodies. Once again, no one listened to her, and they also thought she was crazy, like Moishe. She probably was crazy, but maybe instead of shutting her up, they could have listened to her and faced their fears instead of burying them under false hope. Another thing is that when they had stopped at the train station before arriving at the actual camp Auschwitz, they probably had another chance to flee instead of sitting around for water. When the two men who got water said that it was their final destination, it was true for many people, thankfully not Elie. For many of them, it really was their final destination because many of them would die there at Auschwitz. Wherever they learned that the working conditions were good, or that the young worked in factories while the old and sick worked in the fields, that information was far from the truth. The working conditions killed a lot of those who were kept alive, and the old and sick were just sent to immediate death upon arrival. When they arrived at the train station of Auschwitz, and no one had recognized the name, it shows how well and how cunning the Germans were at covering up what was actually happening at the concentration camps. Overall, the Jews had another chance or two at realizing what was happening before it actually did, and they chose to ignore them.