Chapter 3 Summary

Once they get down from the cattle cars, the SS guards separate the prisoners—the men go to the left and the women on the right. Eliezer and his father stay together, and this is the last time he sees his mother and younger sister Tzipora. They meet an inmate who advises them to lie about their age. Eliezer, not yet 15, should say that he is 18, while his father, who is 50, should say that he is 40. Another prisoner angrily asks them why they allowed the Nazis to bring them to Auschwitz peacefully. He finally tells them that they have been brought to Auschwitz to be burned and killed. The young Jews think of rebelling but the elders advise calm and proceed to the selection process.

Eliezer meets Dr. Mengele, to whom he states that he is 18. He hides the fact that he is a student and claims to be a farmer. He motions him to go left, and Eliezer is relieved to join his father. As the prisoners move through Birkenau, they are horrified to see a huge pit where babies are being burned, and another for adults. His father begins reciting the Jewish prayer, the Kaddish, for the dead, and Eliezer feels the start of his anger against the Almighty.

The men are assigned into their barracks where they are asked to shave, and then shower, after which they wear ill-fitting prison uniforms. A Nazi officer lectures them that they have two options—hard work or the crematorium. When Shlomo asks for a bathroom, he is slapped. Eliezer is appalled at not being able to defend his father’s honor. The prisoners are marched from Birkenau to Auschwitz, where they are quartered for three weeks. Their prison numbers are tattooed on their arms. Through it all, the Jews continue to keep their faith in God, hoping they would be saved. They finally reach Buna, which will be their labor camp.

Chapter 3 Analysis

This section introduces the prisoners to the horrors of the Nazi camps. They are informed by the other inmates about their doomed fate, and yet they do not revolt. Night is an extraordinary work of a psychological study—it begs the question that even when the Jews knew they would perish, why did they allow themselves to be herded like this? The question is answered in the sequence of events that occur in this section. The prisoners have already witnessed the pits and the chimneys. The Nazis have already made it evident that they hold their lives in their hands. Next, when they are shaved, doused in petrol, and given identical clothes to wear, they are stripped of their individual identities; they are reduced to being animals, who can no more be distinguished from one another. Their senses are blunted, and as Eliezer says, “We had ceased to be men.” Further, the Jews must have faith that they will survive the concentration camp. When the young men want to revolt, the elders advise peace stating that they shouldn’t lose faith even when the sword of death hangs over their heads.

However, retaining faith in this horrific atmosphere is a tremendous challenge, and Eliezer records the first trace of anger against God—If God is benevolent and all-powerful, how can the evil of concentration camps exist?

We also see how Night cannot be strictly confined to any literary genre. Unlike fiction, all the characters in the book do not reach a conclusive ending. For example, Eliezer sees his mother and Tzipora for the last time in this section, and the reader doesn’t know what happens to them at the end. Probably they die in the Holocaust, but they disappear from the story and even Eliezer’s memory, never to be mentioned again. This can also be interpreted as a selective action of the brain, where memory is suppressed in case of extreme trauma, which works as a survival method. It also shows us the immediate sequence of events that unfold from Eliezer’s firsthand experience. This is not an omniscient narrator. His limited perspective and lack of extended information make the story even more terrifying as Eliezer truly doesn’t know what will happen to him or what had already happened to his loved ones.