Monday, February 8, 2016

What camp were the men marched to in the book Night?

One of the most heartbreaking episodes in Elie Weisel's Night, a memoir of his experiences in Nazi death camps during World War II, is the forced march from Auschwitz to the train station near Gleiwitz for deportation to the Buchenwald concentration camp across the German border.


Wiesel describes the horrific march where, for many miles, the prisoners, most starved or sick, had to literally run or be shot by the SS guards. He also describes the train ride in open cattle cars in the dead of winter with literally thousands of men pressed up against each other. Starving, they would often attack each other for the smallest morsel of bread.


He learned later that the camp at Auschwitz was liberated two days after most of the prisoners were forced west. Russian troops routed the German army and eventually took over Auschwitz, saving those that had been left behind. It wouldn't be for another nearly four months that the prisoners in the Buchenwald Camp were freed. In those four months thousands more Jews perished from assassination and disease. Wiesel was one of only about 900 children under 18 that survived Buchenwald. He was only 15.    

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