![]() The train arrives at Birkenau, the gateway to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where the passengers can see chimneys belching fire and can smell burned flesh. The Jews travel on the train for several days, during which time one Jewish woman goes mad and screams about fire. Next, they force the Jews like cattle onto trains headed to an unknown destination. Soon, the Hungarian police round the Jews up into two ghettoes. Before long, German officers are living in Sighet and then arresting the Jewish leaders of the town. The Fascists come to power in Hungary and German soldiers enter the country. Eliezer wants his father to relocate the family to Palestine, but his father says he's too old to start again. In 1944, the Jews of Sighet still don't really believe Hitler intends to exterminate them. The Jews of the town can't believe what Moché is saying, and think he's gone mad. Moché escaped with a leg wound and has come to warn the Jews of Sighet to leave. When the Hungarian police deport all of the foreign Jews, Moché is sent away, but he returns with a terrible and fantastic tale: the Gestapo stopped the train and slaughtered the deported Jews. Eliezer begins to study the Cabbala, the book of Jewish mysticism, with an immigrant named Moché the Beadle. ![]() His parents and sisters run a shop in the town, and his father is highly respected in the Jewish community. He's deeply religious and spends much of his time studying the Torah (the Bible) and the Talmud and praying. At the start of the memoir, it's 1941 and Eliezer is a twelve-year-old Jewish boy in the Hungarian town of Sighet. ![]()
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