Night; Blog #2

     In class today, we read an excerpt from Night by Ellie Wiesel. The narrator was Mr. Wiesel himself, telling the story of his experiences during the Holocaust.  The part of the story we read about discussed what it was like in the train cars that lead to different camps. This one in particular, was headed toward Birkenau. Eighty people were crammed into one very small train car. There is one woman, Mrs. Schӓcter, who began hallucinating of a blazing fire that she saw constantly out the train car opening. She screamed of it night and day, her mind losing touch with the world. When the train got to its destination, the passengers found that the woman was right. A fire was in fact burning outside, and bright flames rose from a chimney. The place that they had arrived was Birkenau, one of the best known concentration camps during the Holocaust.  How was this woman able to hallucinate and predict these flames, before she had seen the actual camp?
     I wonder if when the fire was actually seen, people still believed Auschwitz to have "good conditions." (27) In the story, on page 28, Ellie Wiesel recounts what he smelled that night. He says, "In the air, the smell of burning flesh." Based on the conditions of the Holocaust, and the smell of bodies burning, I can infer that many of the people in that train car will be burned in that very fire; that they will be stripped of their dignity just before death, and stand naked in front of everybody. I also am inferring that Mrs. Schӓcter was among those people; that or she was shot. I think this because there was no “room” in the Holocaust for ill or mental people. A thought that saddens me asks how Ellie Wiesel knew the smell of flesh previous to the Holocaust. Could the conditions in his hometown have made him exposed to such things at a young age?

     As Mr. Wiesel had put it, "We had arrived," (28) but I'm afraid most of them were only arriving to the end.