Through a variety of methods that will be detailed in coming sections of the book, the Nazis denied the Jews (and other inhabitants of the concentration camps) their humanity and led them to behave in crude, brutal, and uncivilized ways. In addition to the physical torture and extermination that the Nazis submitted the Jews to, it is this kind of mental and psychological torture that may have proved most damaging to Holocaust survivors. If people are not respected as individuals within society and are instead treated as animals, as the Jews are, then they will begin to act as animals, without regard to the usual social conventions and responsibilities. After being confined in a small, cramped wagon with no food, water, or sanitation, the young people submit to their animal instincts and copulate without even considering the people around them. In this section of the novel, we catch our first glimpse of how human behavior changes when people are placed in extreme circumstances. They are at Birkenau, the reception center for Auschwitz. Everyone is forced to get out of the train, amidst the smell of burning flesh. When her vision finally materializes, Madame Schaechter becomes silent. As the train pulls into the camp, everyone suddenly sees the flames and chimney that Madame Schaechter had prophesied. People's spirits lift, although Madame Schaechter continues to scream. Finally, the wagons arrive at Auschwitz, which they are told is a labor camp where conditions are good. She breaks free from her restraints and periodically screams throughout the night, until everyone else on the train feels like they are about to go mad too. After hours of her screaming, the people on the train can take no more, and they tie her up, gag her, and begin beating her to make her stop screaming about the fire. At first, she terrifies the people in her wagon, and they rush to see what she is pointing at out the window. She starts screaming hysterically about a fire and a furnace that she claims to see in the distance. She had been separated from her husband and two older sons earlier and is now beginning to lose her mind. He takes all their valuables and threatens to shoot everybody in a wagon if even a single person escapes.Ī fifty-year-old woman named Madamae Schaechter is on the train with her ten-year-old son. A German officer explains to them that they are now under the authority of the German army. The wagons stop at Kaschau, a town on the Czechoslovak frontier, and everyone realizes that they will not be staying in Hungary as expected. Social constraints become stripped away, and young people openly have sex, with everyone pretending not to notice. They travel for two days, and the heat, crowding, and lack of food and drink is becoming unbearable. It is so crowded inside the cattle wagon that people have to take turns to sit down. Chapter 2 "Lying down was out of the question"
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