Friday, April 25, 2008

Chapter 2 Night

In Chapter 2 of Night the account of Elie become gruesome and show the true tyranny and maliciousness of the Nazis towards the Jews. The chapetr begins exactly where the other left off the Jews are huddled together in a cattle car and are tormented and tortured because it is hot, theres no air to breathe, no room to sit, and no food or drink being given to them. While on the trip the Jews loose their sense of dignity and loose their proper ways. Men and women openly flirt while the others pretend not to be listening. When the Jews reach the Czechoslovakian the begin to understand that they are not being moved but something horrible is happening. A German officer takes command of the train and threatens to shoot any Jew who refuses to give up his or her belongings and that he would kill everyone in the cr if so much as one Jew escaped.

Madame Schachter is one of the first to crack under these inhumane circumstances. She has been taken along with her son. After many hours on the train she begins to yell and scream that she sees a fire. She terrifies everyone in the car and begin to treat her as they treated Moshe the Beadle when he told them of what he had seen. The people frightened and scared ar5e consoled in the fact that she might be crazy just as they had thouht Moshe was. Finally, the Jews in the car with her tie her up and at this her son begins to cry. She breaks free of her bonds and begins to scream again, at the sound of her screams others on the train encourage some boys to beat her into silence. This stopped her however, she continued to do so a few nights later.

When the train eventually stops, the prisoners find out that they have reached Auschwitz. This name does not mean anything to them and they bribe the locals into giving up information. The locals tell them that Auschwitz is a labor camp and that they will be treated well and will be kept with thier families. This comes as good thing and the Jews once again begin to believe that all is still well and nothing bad is going on. Agian Madame wakes everyone with her screams and once more is beaten into silence. Late in the night the train moves into an area that is enclosed by barbed wire and through the windows can see the chimeys from furnaces and start to gat a horrible, horrlible odor in the air.

In this part of the story Elie shows that those treated as animals will act as if they were animals. Once they were deprived of their humanity they began to act as if they were less than human and the punishments worsen. The terrible part about this story is that the Jews do not realize that bad things are coming the quote "out of sight out of mind" stands true for the Jews because if they cannot see the torture and the killing or exoperience it first hand they wobn't believe it for themselves. The Jews even call their Jewish brothers crazy and beat them because of what they said they had seen and experienced. Too bad for the Jews however that they don't realize the pain and anguish that awaits them at the hand of the Nazis in the concentration camps.

2 comments:

msj10SCelestina said...

This is a very well written essay, but it maybe a little to long. Good job on the summary.

Boss Blog said...

Very well thought out but you spelled chapter wrong in the first sentence. Other than that job well done.

Steven Arnold