Night Quotes sections 1&2

 “She pointed her arm toward the window, screaming: ‘Look!  Look at it! Fire!  A terrible fire!  Mercy!  Oh, that fire!’” (Weisel 34).

Foreshadowing is connected to this quote by the Jews arrival at Auschwitz.  Madame Schachter’s words seem like the incoherent thoughts of a crazy lady but she actually isn’t crazy in the slightest.  She has a premonition of what is happening deeper in the camp.  So she didn’t actually see the fire with her own eyes; she had a vision and tried to warn the Jews in the car.  These words foreshadow what is going to happen to most of the Jews in the car.  They will die from working or being gassed and then they be burned in the incinerator.  Earlier in the book, Elie talks of studying sacred texts; one of them may have been related to the old testament of the bible.  There, he must have learned about the Jewish exile to Egypt.  In one of the plagues sent down upon Egypt the Jews were warned by Moses to put lamb’s blood on their doors so that the angel would ‘passover’ that house and the first born son would be spared.  These types of warnings and premonitions were all over the old testament of the bible and sacred texts that the Jews in this book would have known; however, they totally disregarded Madame Schachter’s vision as any type of warning even though they had studied events such as this in the bible.  This foreshadowing is proven at the end of the section when it says specifically, “In front of us flames.   In the air that smell of burning flesh.  It must have been about midnight.  We had arrived –at Birkenau, the reception center for Auschwitz” (Weisel 37).

“At that time, it was still possible to obtain emigration permits for Palestine. I had asked my father to sell out, liquidate his business, and leave.  ‘I am too old my son,’ he replied. ‘I am too old to start a new life. I’m too old to start from scratch again in a new country so far away…” (Weisel 18).

By having this discussion with his father, Elie is showing that he felt an urgent desire to move very far away from the war and to the home of the Jews in Palestine.  He wants to leave for the safety of himself and his family.  There, he could also learn more about all parts of his religion.  I feel this is true because he specifically asked his father to sell out his business to others and start a new life in Palestine.  I think that in this quote Elie is very concerned about the deportation of foreign Jews, including Moche the Beadle.  After his deportation, Moche was able to escape since the Gestapo mistakenly presumed he was dead although only his leg was wounded.  I think Elie feels that what has happened to the foreign Jews could be a sign of things to come for all Jews.  Moche’s accounts of his deportation only add to the desperation Elie feels as he yearns for his family’s emigration to Palestine.