![]() ![]() Cold, snow, thousands not walking but jogging, forced to run by hundreds of SS guards with machine guns. It is January 1945, the depths of bitter frozen winter, when Eliezer and his father join the 60,000 inmates who are driven on a death march west. Only days later, with the same suddenness, the same midnight panic, the Block elders announce the Russians are now close, so the Germans are evacuating the camp. ![]() He is terrified they will amputate his leg, but it is only an abscess which needs lancing. ![]() Then Eliezer develops an infected foot and is sent to the infirmary. There is the terrifying ordeal of a ‘selection’, all the inmates passing naked before the legendary Dr Mengele, his pencil hovering, ready to add your number to those selected for gassing. In August 1944 he and his dad are transferred to Buna camp where the entire focus of existence becomes getting enough food. Wiesel and his father were selected for labour and sent to a men’s barracks where he survived, enduring privations and the anguish of watching his father’s steady deterioration. The bewildered boy watched his mother and sister lined up with the other women and marched off, and that was the last he ever saw of them. On arrival men and women were separated in a matter of minutes, then marched off to their separate dooms, to be stripped naked, forced into the gas chamber, then incinerated in the crematoria. A few months later, with terrifying suddenness, the Germans arrived, arrested all the Jewish elders, packed the rest of the population into cattle trucks and sent them to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. In Birkenau.Įliezer ‘Elie’ Wiesel was 15 when the authorities in his Hungarian hometown, Sighet, rounded up all the Jews and forced them into a tiny ghetto. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |