Night Chapter Two

The second chapter of Night by Elie Wiesel wasn’t as long as the first chapter had been. It took place in the wagon in which, Elie and his family had been put into, in the past chapter. Eighty people were crammed into a wagon with just a few openings for air to come in. They drove for a long time. The Jewish people were still hopeful that they were being sent somewhere safer, away from the frontier. Of course they were wrong, not that any of them knew this at the time. While the wagon kept on going for several days. All of the things people had brought onto the wagon, was what they ate. There was barely any space for people to sit down, let alone any space for people to lay down and have some good night sleep. In between the eighty people aboard was one of Elie’s old neighbors, Madame Schachter. At nights she would start screaming “Fire, Fire!” When everyone saw that there was no fire, they did everything to shut her up. But every night the same would happen, over and over again. This scared everyone since they knew that in a few days most people would become mad as Madame Schachter had. At the end of the journey the wagon arrived to Auschwitz, Poland. As the wagon came closer to the station the passengers aboard started to smell something. They looked outside the holes the wagon had and saw fire. While all of this happened Madame sat staring blankly and not showing any signs of reaction to this. At the end of the chapter Elie and the rest of the people arrive to the reception center at Auschwitz.
In my opinion, this was a chapter that wasn’t so long but had a lot of information in it. It shows how the Jewish people were treated and how they changed over a matter of days. The reality of the separation of families and the sufferment they had to pass through before even getting to the concentration camps. All the inhumane scenarios in which they had to live in for days or even weeks. When Elie tells the story of Madame Schachter, he tells it with sorrow. Knowing this woman for years he might have been impacted greatly by her behavior. In page 24 he says, “A few days more and we should all have started to scream too.” In other words, more of this and we shall all become crazy as Madame. The most shocking part of Madame’s story was how her little boy handled it. He was about ten years old and had to see his mom go mad before his eyes. He tried to calm her down all the nights, with tears in his eyes he calmed her down. The impact of seeing your mom like that and not being able of doing anything to calm her down. Besides that he had to see men beat his mother so she would stop screaming. Just by seeing this, knowing the person or not, changes your life in a matter of seconds. Even before being a part of his own family Elie had changed immensely due to this event.