Night by Elie Wiesel

Today in class, we read a passage from the book Night, by Elie Wiesel. It was about a person traveling in a freight train that was eventually going to Auschwitz, Poland. The freight car was dark and cramped, making it almost unbearable for the many people that were stuffed in the freight car to survive. Everyone who was in the car didn’t have the right qualities to work in labor camps, so they were being sent to concentration camps to die. Mostly everyone in the freight car were silent because of the lack of water, making the thirst become ‘intolerable.’ We do not know who the narrator of the book is, but they and everyone else in the car were clearly very irritated with one woman named, Mrs. Schächter.

Throughout the passage, Mrs. Schächter often yelled of ‘fire’ and ‘flames’. At first, people are worried about her and wonder if she is okay, but eventually they get very annoyed. At one point, some of the men gagged and strike Mrs. Schächter to make her stop screaming. Even before the narrator says that they think why Mrs. Schächter is yelling, you can infer why even before. In the very beginning of the passage, the person described how much everyone longed for a glass of water and how ‘intolerable’ their longing was. Similar to needing water, the feeling of having the flames of fire lick onto your skin, burning you, making you scream out in agony can make you have an ‘intolerable’ type of feeling. Even though you can infer things, it doesn’t mean they’re necessarily correct. Was Mrs. Schächter really that that thirsty, or was it that she could see into the future and knew that people would be burned to death lter? Or was just an old lady who lost her mind? Although, there are some topics that you truly don’t know if the inference is correct or not, you can make a very clear inference of what the rest of the story is going to be about.