"Crammed into cattle cards by the Hungarian police, they cried silently" (6).
Chapter 1 (3-22) details the setting of Elie Wiesel's life. Wiesel begins the chapter by describing an influential person in his life, Moishe the Beadle. He discusses how he was "as awkward as a clown. His waif-like shyness made people smile. As for me, I liked his wide, dreamy eyes, gazing off into the distance" (3). Moishe is an influential person in twelve-year-old Elie's life, and so it's interesting that once Moishe and the other foreign Jews of Sighet are deported in cattle cars, Elie and the others in Sighet write off the deportation as a by-product of war. Even when Moishe returns, his words do very little to warn the Jews of Sighet to prepare for escape.
The first image above is a map of Sighet in Romania. It shows the geography of the village in context of the rest of Eastern Europe during World War II. The middle image is a photograph of a Hasidic Jewsih Man during WWII. The final image is one of a cattle car. This image strikes me the most because I keep envisioning the human beings who were forced to board trains like this and leave their homes, completely unaware of what was waiting for them.
The first image above is a map of Sighet in Romania. It shows the geography of the village in context of the rest of Eastern Europe during World War II. The middle image is a photograph of a Hasidic Jewsih Man during WWII. The final image is one of a cattle car. This image strikes me the most because I keep envisioning the human beings who were forced to board trains like this and leave their homes, completely unaware of what was waiting for them.
"The student of Talmud, the child I was, had been consumed by the flames. All that was left was a shape that resembled me. My soul had been invaded-and devoured-by a black flame" (37).
In chapter 3 (29-46), Elie arrives in Auschwitz and leaves behind his mother and his sister Tzipora as they are divided by an SS officer by gender. Elie and his father then go through selection as they arrive and are saved by another prisoner when he and his father take his advice and lie about their age. Elie then learns the reason for selection and realizes what is happening in Auschwitz. He sees that many Jews are being burned alive and turned into ashes by the crematorium. He also sees another very disturbing scene, where small children and babies being unloaded from trucks and thrown alive into ditches filled with fire. Elie is then petrified by the scenes he witnesses all in one night and states, "The student of Talmud, the child I was, had been consumed by the flames. All that was left was a shape that resembled me. My soul had been invaded-and devoured-by a black flame" (37). In which, he claims that he would never be the same innocent child he once was after experiencing Auschwitz. And, as he mentions all that was left of him was nothing but a shape, as his soul was taken by a black flame, he intends to demonstrate that he is also dead from the inside with the rest of the Jews that died in the flames. By using the black flame, Elie also symbolizes and emphasizes the death of all the Jews who were burned that night in Auschwitz.