Chapter 4 Summary

Eliezer is told that Buna is a better concentration camp and that they should try and avoid being placed in the building unit. He and his father are assigned to work at a warehouse of electrical materials. Here, Eliezer meets Juliek, a Jewish violinist, and the brothers Yosi and Tibi. The two brothers and Eliezer plan to move to Palestine after the war is over. Akiba Drumer, another prisoner who has immense faith in God, predicts that deliverance from the camps is imminent.

Idek, their Kapo in charge of the work crew, is prone to savage fits of anger and picks on the prisoners mercilessly. One day, he thrashes Eliezer without any reason, after which a French girl working at the warehouse comforts him. Years later, he meets this girl at the Metro in Paris, who then tells him how she was a Jew but forged her papers and pretended to be Aryan. Another day, he beats Shlomo too. Eliezer, at this stage, painfully confesses how his priority has changed to his own survival and he begrudges his father for not being able to dodge Idek’s fury.

Franek, the foreman, notices that Eliezer has a gold tooth, which he demands. On his father’s advice, Eliezer refuses to give this up. To teach him a lesson, Franek mocks and beats Shlomo until Eliezer eventually gives up. Eliezer also accidentally witnesses Idek copulating with a young girl, for which Idek thrashes him till he is unconscious. A while later, Idek and Franek along with the other Polish prisoners are transferred to another camp.

Once, during an air raid, the prisoners are ordered inside and in the ensuing chaos, two soup cauldrons are left outside. One prisoner crawls toward the cauldrons and he is shot. Hundreds of men watch as a dying man crawls toward the soup, thrusts his head into the liquid, and then dies.

A week later, the SS officers set up gallows for execution ceremonies. Several people are executed for perceived crimes they have committed. Eliezer and the rest are so surrounded by death that after some time this stops affecting them. However, one incident stands out where a young boy, who was much loved by the prisoners and had the face of a sad angel, is hanged. As he is not heavy, he hangs on the rope for half an hour, alive, and the prisoners are made to watch. That day, everybody weeps in the camp, and Eliezer notes that his soup tastes like corpses. As he writes, this is where God is, hanging from the gallows.

Chapter 4 Analysis

This section ends with the traumatic scene of a young boy’s murder, symbolically enacting the murder of God. Eliezer questions the existence of a just God. How can a child be killed in such a cruel fashion, if God really exists? “Where is He?” Eliezer asks rhetorically, and then answers, “He is hanging here on this gallows.” This incident pushes Eliezer to the lowest point of his faith. While the Nazis kill indiscriminately on a daily basis, the murder of this boy seems to cross a line in human cruelty which shatters all hope and faith in both divinity and humankind. This incident also marks the end of Eliezer’s innocence. He is a young boy too at the concentration camp, but the enormity of the atrocities he witnesses pushes him to acknowledge the violent beast that rests inside men, including himself. In a world where survival is the only goal, he admits how he lives to feed himself. He has no pity for his father when he is beaten up, terrified at that moment that he would be beaten too, and rather gets angry with him for not being able to save himself.

Eliezer’s relationship with his father is critical for both of them. At this stage, they have lost everybody in the family apart from each other. They hang on to each other desperately, but this relationship too becomes tenuous confronted with the cruelty of the camp. When Eliezer recounts the tale of a 13-year-old boy beating his father for making the bed improperly, it serves as a cautionary tale. He is afraid that the camp will rob him of his affection for his father and that he might turn against him to ensure his survival.

In this section, Eliezer also describes the economic system of the concentration camp. As the prisoners do not possess any money, they create a barter system amongst themselves. Extra rations of bread or soup become their currency. The SS officers and prisoners in authority positions sometimes participate in the barter system, but they also have the power to entirely circumvent it at their will. Eliezer’s gold tooth allows him some extra food. Then some boys who are sex slaves are allowed better food. As hunger is their constant companion, food is the highest currency at the camp. The spectacle of the dying man crawling to reach two cauldrons of soup is perhaps the most haunting image of the novel. It is enormously disturbing to realize how the Nazis successfully reduced the Jews into animals, solely concerned with food and survival, bereft of any human dignity.