STUDY GUIDE
ANSWERS
• Matching Character Section
• True False Section
• Multiple Choice Section
• Moshe chooses to live in poverty, doing odd
jobs so that most of his time can be spent
devoted to religious study.
• Eliezer wants to study Jewish mysticism
(against his father’s wishes).
• Moshe becomes Eliezer’s respected teacher and
role model.
• All foreign born Jews are deported, including Moshe.
• Moshe returns and tells the story of mass execution by
the Nazis.
• Moshe escapes and is a changed man; a man without
faith or joy.
• He warns the townspeople, but they refuse to believe
him.
• Even Eliezer doubts him and feels pity on his old
teacher who people believe has gone mad.
• The war has not yet touched them directly.
• They feel their remote village is insignificant to
the Nazis.
• The end of the war is in sight, and the Jews of
Sighet are optimistic that the Russian army will
liberate them.
• There are two ghettos in Sighet.
• All Jews must live in one and wear a gold star.
• The Jews soon feel a false sense of autonomy in the
ghettos as they set up councils to handle health
care, communication with captures, law
enforcement and sanitation.
• The Jews hope that they will live out the rest of the
war in this fashion.
• Before the Nazis occupy Sighet, Eliezer urges his father
to sell his shop and move to Palestine. His father
refuses; he feels he is too old to start over in a new
place.
• The Weisels' former servant, Martha, begs the family to
live with her; the elder Wiesel is too proud to accept.
• Shortly before the evacuation of the ghetto, someone
knocks on the Wiesels window, but is gone before
anyone can answer. Eliezer later finds out that the
police inspector was trying to warn his family to flee.
• The Hungarian police mercilessly beat the Jews
during the evacuation.
• The Jews are forced to sit or stand long hours in
sweltering heat without food or drink.
• Jews are packed 80 to a cattle car; they can barely
breathe, let alone sit or stand.
• The journey takes several days and nights.
Madame Schachter screams about an all
consuming fire that is invisible to the rest of the
passengers.
• The deportees are sympathetic toward
Madame Schachter when she begins her decent
into madness, but as her hysteria increases,
some become less tolerant of her. They beat
her into submission.
• Madame Schachter’s cries were prophetic.
• Upon arriving at Auschwitz the deportees are
shaken by the sight of the black smoke from the
gigantic chimney.
• They are seeing the crematory, and its purpose
becomes the central source of horror
throughout their time in the camps.
• Selection is the process by which it is decided which
prisoners will live as laborers and which will feed the
crematory.
• Selections are conducted quickly and dispassionately.
• First, men and women are segregated.
• Groups march toward the infamous Dr. Mengele; he
questions them about age, health, and occupation.
• The questions are cursory and the decisions are
random.
• Eliezer and his father lie to save their lives.
• While marching toward Mengele, another prisoner
asks their ages and corrects their reply; “Eighteen
and forty” he orders.
• If the two were truthful, they would be too young
and too old for labor.
• Eliezer quickly lies about his occupation calling
himself a farmer. A student may be considered
useless.
• Birkenau is euphemistically described as the
“reception center” for Auschwitz, the death
camp where Jews and others are slaughtered
and burned.
• The prisoners are selected for either labor or
death at Birkenau.
• Being subjected to one atrocity after another
takes its toll physically, emotionally, and
spiritually.
• But, it is the ditch filled with babies that forever
shakes Eliezer’s steadfast faith in God.
• Eliezer never questions God’s existence, but he
condemns a God that permits such atrocities.
• Eliezer sees a second ditch and it seems that he is
being directed toward it.
• Deciding that he wishes to be the master of his
own fate he quickly plans to break ranks and
throw himself against the electrified fence.
• He offers a final prayer.
• Two steps before the ditch, the prisoners are
herded into the barracks instead.
•
The prisoners are quickly stripped of independence and
individuality and are left naked and vulnerable as their captors
examine them.
•
Kept awake through the first cold night, broken, sickened, and
weeping, prisoners are forced to run for what seems like an
eternity the next day.
•
They are dosed with disinfectant, showered and dressed in illfitting prison garb.
•
Eliezer’s father receives a savage beating for asking to go to the
bathroom; even Eliezer does nothing to help his father.
•
They are to work and if their work is not satisfactory they will die.
• The prisoners offer total submission to their
captors.
• They lose the independent will to object to their
treatment, and they are willing to turn on other
prisoners to save themselves.
• In using prisoners to maintain order, the Nazis
are able to easily control large groups of
people.
• An unidentified prisoner advises Eliezer and his father on
the ages they must reply to survive the selection.
• Many prisoners cling to hope and humanity through
religion. They are able to accept the existence of the camps
by rationalizing that God is testing them.
• Often the prisoners in charge are as brutal as their captors.
The Polish block leader is an exception; he offers kind words
and emphasizes that prisoners must not lose their faith or
abandon each other.
• Eliezer lies to a relative who asks him about his wife and
children. Eliezer gives the man the last happiness he ever
knows by saying that he has not heard from them.
• Buna is a labor camp and the two Wiesels are
selected for labor.
• Upon leaving Auschwitz the prisoners march
for hours to Buna.
• With so many Germans fighting in the war the
workforce has been depleted; the workforce is
supplemented with prisoners, and Eliezer
works at a warehouse with civilians.
• As the child dies, one of the prisoners asks,
“Where is God?” At that moment the child,
who is silently suffering a prolonged,
agonizing, public death on the gallows,
symbolizes God to Eliezer.
• Kapos are prison officials in charge of the work
crews.
• They are characterized as being brutal, sadistic,
and having enough power to be corrupt.
• The prisoners realize that a single bomb could kill
hundreds of prisoners, but they welcome the
bombs joyfully.
• Periodic air raids mean that the war is moving
closer to the camp, and when the front line reaches
the camp the surviving prisoners will be liberated.
• One air raid lasts an hour and Eliezer wished it
would last one hundred hours. Prisoners
cheerfully clear away the ruins of the raid.
• Upon facing the possible death by Allied
bombs Eliezer says, “…we were no longer
afraid of death, at any rate, not of that death.”
• A death that would also bring about the death
of their captors is not frightening after what
they endured.
• Eliezer’s anger towards God deepens.
• Eliezer admonished God for tormenting the other
prisoners’ minds with his continued presence.
• Eliezer accuses God of active responsibility for
torturing the Jews.
• Eliezer’s rebellion against God leaves a profound
void in his heart.
• The prisoners run about in preparation for the
display to get some color in their flesh.
• They run past Mengele to create an illusion of
strength and to prevent Mengele from being
able to note their identification numbers.
• Father gives Eliezer his only belongings: a knife
and a spoon.
• Eliezer’s father believes that this will be his
final good-bye to his son.
• Eliezer tries to refuse them, but his father
insists, and Eliezer takes his “inheritance.”
• Eliezer’s foot becomes painfully swollen during the
January cold.
• The doctor says the he needs an operation. Another
patient warns him that being hospitalized makes one
prime target for selection.
• Faced with possible amputation if the foot is not cured,
he accepts the danger of the hospital.
• The operation is done without anesthetic. He learns
that his foot will heal, but he must recover for two
weeks, making him vulnerable to the next selection.
• Two days after the operation, rumors spread that
the Russian army is on its way to liberate Buna.
• The prisoners learn that they will be marched from
the camp.
• Eliezer leaves the hospital to find his father.
• They must choose either: Eliezer leaving the
hospital and joining the father in the march, or his
father joining Eliezer in the hospital. They choose
the march believing that the Nazis will surely kill
any prisoners left behind.
• The realization that his death would leave his
father alone helps Eliezer summon the strength
to continue.
• The two Wiesels take turns inspiring each other
to continue.
• Eliezer prays that he should not do the same to
his father.
• It is difficult for Eliezer to fight the feelings that
his own chances for survival would increase
without his father to support.
• Speaking with the abandoned Rabbi helps
refocus Eliezer’s commitment to his father.
• As the elder Wiesel is sent to the left with the
obviously weak, Eliezer creates a confusion that
allows him to bring his father back to the right.
• Since the Nazis are pressed for time because of the
approaching Russian army, the selection process
breaks down.
• Many prisoners are killed in the process, but
Eliezer and his father survive.
• An elderly man’s son lunges at him for a morsel of
bread, even as the father tries to share it with him.
• The two incite the other hungry prisoners, and
after the fight, the father and son are both dead.
• If the bond between father and son is broken, then
genocide is realized even if the crematory fires are
extinguished; they no longer need the fires to kill
them; they are destroying each other.
• Eliezer’s father suffers from dysentery and will
surely die; the doctors see no point in treating
him.
• Caregivers are no longer willing to “waste”
any resources on the dying.
• Eliezer feels intense guilt and blames himself
for doing nothing when the guard attacks his
father.
• Eliezer’s father is gone after their phenomenal
struggle, yet Eliezer cannot cry. Worst of all he
cannot fight the feeling that he is “…free at
last.”
• Eliezer cannot save his father, so his feelings of
guilt are irrational.
• As the front approaches the surviving Jews are
ordered to gather in the camp. News spread
that they will be executed on the spot.
• The camp resistance movement interferes with
the execution, and instruction is given to ignore
the order.
• Five days later the resistance movement stages
a rebellion , freeing the prisoners shortly before
liberation by the American army.
• The prisoners eat.
• “Our first act as free men was to throw
ourselves onto the provisions. We thought
only of that. Not of revenge, not of our
families. Nothing but bread.”
• After surviving the selection, the abuse, and
the starvation of the camps, Eliezer nearly dies
of food poisoning after liberation.
• Ironically, the very sustenance he needs to
survive almost kills him when he finally gets it.
• Eliezer has not looked at himself in the mirror
since deportation from the ghettos.
• When he finally regains enough strength to
look at himself in a mirror, he says he sees a
corpse.
• Physically he is alive, but Eliezer’s spirit has
died.