NIGHT CHAPTER 6 - SUMMARY
The SS officers make the prisoners run through the snow, and they shoot those who fall behind.
Eliezer feels separate from his body and wishes he could get rid of it because it is so heavy to drag along.
He begins to run mechanically and starts to lose his sense of self. A man named Zalman suddenly gets a
stomach cramp and has to go to the bathroom; he falls and is trampled by the crowd. Eliezer wants to
die to stop feeling the pain, but knows that he must keep going in order to help his father. It is
impossible to slow down because there are so many people in the mob. They keep running through
the night, even after an SS officer announces they have already come 42 miles. When they finally stop
to rest, Eliezer and his father go inside a shed. Eliezer falls asleep, but his father wakes him up almost
immediately. All around them people are falling asleep and dying in the snow. Eliezer and his father
agree to take turns sleeping, and Eliezer stays awake first, watching people sleep and die around him. He
tries to wake up a neighbor, but the man refuses to heed his advice. Eliezer whispers into his father's
ear, and his father is startled, trying to figure out where he is. Then his father inexplicably smiles, and
Eliezer says that he will always remember that smile.
An old man named Rabbi Eliahou comes into the shed looking for his son, who was separated from
him while running. Rabbi Eliahou is a good man, admired by all, and he and his son had remained
together for three years in the concentration camps. Eliezer tells the Rabbi that he hasn't seen the
man's son, but after he leaves, he realizes that he actually had. The son had seen his father falling
behind in the pack, but he had continued to run farther and farther away from him. He had been
trying to get away from the burden of looking after a weak father. Eliezer prays to God for the
strength never to act in the same way that Rabbi Eliahou's son did. The prisoners continue to march,
and even the SS officers seem tired and offer encouragement. Eliezer's foot seems completely frozen,
and he resigns himself to having one leg in the future.
When they finally arrive at Gleiwitz, they are crowded into barracks, and Eliezer feels like he is going to
be suffocated by the mass of people lying on top of him. People are crushing each other to death
because it is so crowded, and Eliezer suddenly finds himself on top of Juliek, a boy who played the
violin in the band at Buna. Eliezer is glad that Juliek is still alive and shocked to discover that he
brought his violin with him. Then Eliezer begins to be suffocated by a man on top of him and has to
fight his way out to get some air. He calls to his father, who is also still alive. That night Juliek
miraculously extricates himself from the tangle of bodies and begins to play Beethoven soulfully on his
violin. The music is so pure amidst the silence of the night, and Juliek puts his whole self and being into
his music, which is only heard by an audience of dead and dying men. The next morning he finds Juliek
dead and his violin crushed.
They stayed at Gleiwitz for three days without food or drink, and then are going to be deported into the
center of Germany. The front is following them, but the prisoners do not believe that the Russians will
ever arrive in time to liberate them. On the third day there is a selection, and although Eliezer's father
is sent to the crematory group, Eliezer creates a disturbance so that he manages to sneak back into the
other group. The prisoners wait standing for a train in the middle of a snow-covered field, and because
they are deprived of water and forbidden from bending over, they begin eating snow from each
other's backs using spoons. The SS officers simply laugh. Finally, a train arrives, and they are loaded in,
a hundred per car.