![]() Moishe, Eliezer’s religious teacher, says that according to the Kabbalah, the redemption of the divine is yet to be. Jews do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah or the Son of God. He also studies the Kabbalah, mystical Jewish writings that attempt to explain how a divine and infinite God relates to the physical, created world, including mankind. In the hospital he sees himself in a mirror, and he looks like a corpse.īefore going to the concentration camps, Eliezer studies the Talmud, which is a collection of rabbinic writings that discuss Jewish law and life. Eliezer writes that nothing was important to him after his father’s death. At Buchenwald, Eliezer’s father dies from dysentery, but this death is hastened by an SS officer’s beating. Many die on this march and during their train ride in open boxcars. Eliezer has an injured foot, but he leaves with the prisoners because he will not be separated from his father. In January as the Red Army approaches Buna, the camp is evacuated. He chastises himself for failing to be a perfect son. Eliezer’s greatest desire is to be a good son, but his father’s frailties are sometimes burdensome, and Eliezer struggles with his responses. While in Buna, father and son endure starvation, hard labor, threats, beatings, betrayals and the constant fear of being chosen for the crematorium. Many of Eliezer’s other memories revolve around his determination to support his father and receive support from him. During a death march from Buna, he startles himself by praying to a god he no longer believes in. When 10,000 Jewish men gather to observe Rosh Hashanah, Eliezer stands apart, quietly denouncing God to himself, and he does not fast on Yom Kippur. Though Eliezer states that the events in camp during his first night killed God, he continues to reflect on God throughout the book, but his bitter rejection of God deepens as he experiences and witnesses the cruelties of the camps. A Jewish inmate tells him that Jews are being exterminated at this camp.Įliezer’s memories of the camps revolve mainly around two relationships: his relationship with God and his relationship with his father. He sees his mother and sister for the last time there. In spring 1944, the Hungarian police empty the two ghettos in Sighet and herd Eliezer, his family and the rest of the Jewish population into crowded boxcars for transport.Īt Birkenau, 15-year-old Eliezer sees flames rising from the chimneys and smells the odor of bodies being burned. He warns the Jews that the Nazis massacred all the other deportees. Moishe is deported with other foreign Jews but returns near the end of 1942. ![]() An avid student, he wants to know God and studies the Kabbalah with Moishe. ![]() In 1941, Eliezer Wiesel lives in a Jewish community in Sighet, Transylvania.
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