Night is the story of author Elie
Wiesel's time in the work and death camps of the Holocaust. This particular chapter
takes place late in the book, as the men and boys are being transferred by train to
their next camp, Buchenwald. On their first train journey they had been crammed eighty
to a car; this time one hundred of them fit in each car. They were emaciated, freezing,
and hungry as they traveled in these open cattle cars for ten days. Along the way,
corpses--as many as twenty at a time--were carelessly removed from the
cars.
At this particular stop, some workers thought it
would be great fun to throw crusts of bread into the cars to hear the mad scramble (the
life and death scramble, it turns out) for the small piece of bread. One of those
crusts of bread was thrown into Elie's train car, and the madness
began.
An old man, Elie noticed, was able to grasp the
crust and had put it to his mouth.
His eyes gleamed; a smile, like a grimace, lit
up his dead face. And was immediately extinguished. A shadow had just loomed up near
him. The shadow threw itself upon him. Felled to the ground, stunned with blows, the
old man cried: "Meier. Meir, my boy! Don't you recognize me? I'm your father...you're
hurting me...you're killing your
father!"
The old man lied
and said he had some bread for son, and then he collapsed. Meir searched his dead
father for the bread, "took the bread and began to devour it." Two men had seen the
exchange and suddenly threw themselves upon the son. Soon there were two corpses, side
by side. Father and son.
This story is a picture of the
dehumanizing effects of this horrific ordeal. These men, none of them, were like this
when they arrived at the camps for the first time. They were now reduced to animals,
herded into cattle cars, killing for a crust of bread.
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