For Wiesel, the war seemed a distant event, and at his young age he did not bother to think much about what was happening in the feared concentration camps. Until he was deported with his family to one of them. In fact, many families in the area did not believe that the war was actually occurring, or at least not in the way they counted. Elie Wiesel describes the scenes he sees with an agony and a pain that make it impossible for the reader not to feel the same. One of the strongest scenes is when he witnesses one of his "companions" being forced to throw his own father in the oven. It is the kind of scene that even the most evil minds could not imagine. In 1944, at age 14, Wiesel was taken to the concentration camps of Auschwitz, separated