Chapter 2 Summary

The journey in the cattle cars is inhumane. There is no space; people are hungry and thirsty; there is insufficient air. After a few days, the train arrives at the Czechoslovakian border, and the Jews are told that they are now under German authority. A German officer takes charge of the train, threatening to shoot everybody even if one of them tries to escape.

Madame Schächter, a middle-aged woman who is on the train with her 10-year-old son, soon cracks under the oppressive treatment and starts screaming that she can see fire and flames everywhere. As the others can’t see any fire around, they dismiss her as insane just like the townspeople did with Moishe. When she continues screaming, this disturbs the other passengers. She is bound and gagged and further beaten into silence as her son watches.

The train reaches Auschwitz station, and the Jews are informed that this is a labor camp where they will be treated well and kept together as families. The young will work in the factories whereas the old and sick will work in the field. This news assures the Jews, again, that all will be well. At night, Madame Schächter wakes up screaming, and she is again beaten into silence. At midnight, the train reaches the camp. Through the windows, everybody sees the flames rising from vast chimneys. There is a terrible odor in the air—what they soon realize is the smell of burning human flesh. Madame Schächter’s vision has finally come true. They have arrived at Birkenau, the processing center for arrivals at Auschwitz.

Chapter 2 Analysis

The section illustrates the old adage—cruelty begets cruelty. As long as there was a semblance of civilized society in the ghettos, the Jews were sociable and maintained their sense of propriety and morality. As they are bundled into the cattle cars like animals, they are stripped, layer by layer, of their humanity, descending into animalistic behavior, the first acts of which are when they lose their modesty and sense of sexual inhibition. Despite their unknown future and the physical threat of their captors, the prisoners are more terrified of Madame Schächter’s visions. What she imagines perhaps confirms their worst fears, but in a desperate attempt to believe otherwise, they turn on her and beat her into silence; now being capable of the same cruelty that they had suffered so far. To Nazis, the Jews are animals, and now they behave exactly like that. Wiesel suggests that one of the great psychological and moral tragedies of the Holocaust is not just the loss of faith in God but faith in humankind, where two people in the same circumstance turn on each other in a primal instinct to survive. Hence, the Nazis don’t just inflict cruelty but also induce the Jews to act cruelly against each other.

Madame Schächter’s character serves to question our assumptions of sanity and insanity. In her supposed insanity, she can actually foresee what lies ahead of her whereas the so-called sane Jews are unable to do so. Their continuous denial to acknowledge the horrors of Nazism underline how writing about the Holocaust had been so difficult. Until the Jews experience the horrors of Auschwitz, they cannot believe that such horrors exist. To many, the systematic extermination of six million people in the twentieth century was an improbable idea, thus resulting in generations of Holocaust deniers. Wiesel reminds us that the Holocaust is too awful a story to tell but one that must be told so that history doesn’t forget the enormous cruelty perpetrated.