The Trains Heyen Summary
Another poignant moment in this chapter occurs when the inmates are put under the control of a young polish man that seems to value the lives of the inmates sincerely. After the man tells them to go to bed, Wiesel adds that the man’s words where the “first human words” (39) that the jews had heard while at the camp. This brings into perspective the fact that people in concentration camps were not treated as human. Instead, they were treated as a problem that needed to be taken care of. This can be said for all genocides: one group of people dehumanizes another group of
Elie Wiesel and his family were deported from the town Sighet to camp Auschwitz. Elie and his town were gathered into train carts vigorously. The German SS officers shouting ”if anyone goes missing, you will all be shot, like dogs” (24). While on the train carts there were an average of eighty Jews in one cart, Elie saying “there was little air, thirst became intolerable, as did the heat” (23). Although the Jews of Sighet were warned they did not listen.
This portrays the awful conditions that the Jews had to bear in the concentration camps. Elie Wiesel woke up one morning to looking down to his father's cot and seeing “there lay another sick person. They
Jennifer sanchez Mrs. Alcala Period 6 21 February 2017 In the poem of “Auschwitz” by Charles N Whittaker uses a train to symbolize a end rhyme which evokes the train used to forcibly transport people to extermination camps in the holocaust. For example, when the evidence states,” that the terror in the eyes of all the young ones to go”. This evidence reveals, on how the fear and desperation of all the prisoners trying to give tattoos to the holocaust prisoners.
If one of [the prisoners] stopped for a second, a quick shot eliminated the filthy dog,” there was no commentary on the morality of the officers or the impact it had on Elie (Wiesel 85). This lack of commentary and matter-of-fact way of stating these tragic events increases the awareness of the emotions they had to repress in order to survive. His dictional use of euphemism also emphasizes this point. They refer to the death camps as “work camps,” the place where millions died as the “crematoria” or “chimneys,” and the place where many were gassed as “showers.” Changing the names to more benign titles made them have less power, as though they were common things that didn’t have any effect on those who were not in them.
The condition inside of the train is awful. There are a hundred confused and scared people packed into one cattle car, unable to breathe, hot from being squished together, hungry, thirsty, and wondering what fate has in store for them. After crossing the Czechloslovakian border, the soldiers start to become extremely demanding, putting more fear into everyone on the train. They threaten to shoot anyone who tries to escape and they even go as far as nailing the doors shut. Some become delusional like Madame Schächter in Elie Wiesel’s novel, Night.
Elie Wiesel’s touching memoir, Night, shares intimate details about the cruelty of World War Two concentration camps and the horrors that occurred within them. Concentration camps were spread throughout Germany and Poland from 1933-1945 as the result of strong anti-Semitic views radiating from the President and Chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler. In the memoir, Night, Wiesel shares of the time that he and his father endured being held captive in several concentration camps, and the battle to escape death, day after day. In the memoir, the significance of night was used throughout the piece to draw connections and emotions from the reader. In Night, night was used both literally and symbolically to portray the unknown, pain, and the end of a journey.
In this passage, Elie Wiesel creates a cruel and disturbing tone through the use of word choice and imagery. The choices Elie made when crafting this passage perfectly depicts the scene in a terrifying manner. He uses this work choice most significantly in the beginning of the passage to describe how drastically the men in the train had been transformed. By using words such as “hurling… trampling… tearing… mauling… animal hate,” and adding phrases like “beasts of prey unleashed”, and “sharpening their teeth and nails” (Wiesel 101), the author is effectively able to completely dehumanize these people, showing the extent of their motivation to obtain what they desire.
Before the train started to move, “the doors were closed. We were caught in a trap, right up to our necks” (Wiesel 18). The author was not exaggerating when he suggested that the prisoners were trapped right up to their necks. The cold-heartedness of the situation is appalling and unimaginable in today’s world. As appalling and shocking as the initial treatment of the prisoners was, their fate went from bad to worse once they arrived at
Night has revealed to me the immensity of the suffering and ruthlessness that Jews were subjected to on daily basis during the holocaust in an emotional and moving first-hand experience. I choose a train, symbol of oppression, to represent the initial separation from a normal life in which everyone inside the crowded train car received, along with a taste of the pain and suffering that was soon to be forced upon them. I choose this quote to show how shocking mentally and physically the transition phase was from a normal life to that of the oppressed and to emphasize how easily he gave up in the beginning. Despite this, he managed to persevere and overcome the enormous challenges of surviving in a concentration camp.
The concentration camps are a symbol of the destruction of humanity: “Beneath me, an abyss opened wide. I was inside the abyss, with it's smells, it's thirst, and it's hunger” (24). The concentration camps were places where human beings were stripped of their dignity, reduced to mere objects, and subjected to the most heinous acts of violence. The symbolism used by Wiesel serves to emphasize the magnitude of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust and the importance of remembering these
Here Wiesel describes one of the numerous deaths he witnessed during the 12-mile death march to another concentration camp. He watched his friend fall behind in the march and be trampled to death. Another common traumatic event that many Holocaust survivors went through was the cattle cars that they were transported in, “We remained lying on the floor for days and nights, one on top of the other, never uttering a word. We were nothing but frozen bodies. Our eyes closed, we merely waited for the next stop, to unload our dead” (Wiesel 100).
There are many literary works based on World War II and the Holocaust, including one we read this semester: Tadeusz Borowski's “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen”. However, it is not told from the typical perspective. We typically only see stories from the Jewish Holocaust victims, but this story is told by a different type of prisoner. The narrator is part of the group who were forced to collaborate with the Nazis. His job was to unload the new prisoners from the trains, and as a reward, he was allowed to loot the cars and keep any food they found.
When I first heard of the novel’s title, "Train dreams", I was imagining the book would take place in modern times and perhaps tell the stories of people that ride the subway station in New York or some kind of urban city, however, I guessed wrong. " Train Dreams" is really about Robert Grainier, who works at Spokane international railway in the Idaho panhandle in the summer of 1917. The beginning of the novel felt like I was reading a scene from an old western movie as Grainer and other railroad workers were trying to throw a Chinaman off a bridge because he was accused of theft. Nonetheless, the Chinaman was able to escape, and “A couple of the work gang cheered his escape, while others, though not quite certain… shouted that the villain ought
Wiesel wrote “Our senses were numbed, and everything was fading into a fog. We no longer clung to anything. The instincts of self-preservation, of self-defense, of pride, had all deserted us” (Wiesel 36) It shows the identity loss of the prisoners as they give in to the conditions of the concentration camp. It highlights the dehumanizing nature of the Holocaust.
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