Night how long were they at gleiwitz

The road seems endless, but finally after many hours they are at last ordered to rest. To sleep means death. Death is all around them. Many people do in fact die while they sleep. Snow falls on the corpses. Eliezer and his dad work to keep each other awake. This is his admission that his father hovers between life and death. It is only a matter of time.

Rabbi Eliahu comes looking for his son. Eliezer utters a prayer that God will never let him be so cruel to his own father. They continue marching. It continues snowing. At last, they reach a camp, Gleiwitz, and they enter the barracks to sleep. There are so many people that they are stacked on each other to sleep. Eliezer feels himself being crushed. He is seeking air. At last he fights until he reaches some air. Then he hears the violin—Juliek playing Beethoven through the long night.

When he wakes up, Juliek is dead and his violin is crushed beside him. Rabbi Eliahou, a kindly and beloved old man, finds his way into the shed where Eliezer and his father are collapsed. The rabbi is looking for his son: throughout their ordeal in the concentration camps, father and son have protected and supported each other. Eliezer falsely tells Rabbi Eliahou he has not seen the son, yet, during the run, Eliezer saw the son abandon his father, running ahead when it seemed Rabbi Eliahou would not survive.

At last, the exhausted prisoners arrive at the Gleiwitz camp, crushing each other in the rush to enter the barracks. In the press of men, Eliezer and his father are thrown to the ground. Fighting for air, Eliezer discovers that he is lying on top of Juliek, the musician who befriended him in Buna.

Eliezer soon finds that he himself is in danger of being crushed to death by the man lying on top of him. He finally gains some breathing room, and, calling out, discovers that his father is near. Eliezer falls asleep to this music, and when he wakes he finds Juliek dead, his violin smashed. After three days without bread and water, there is another selection. In the confusion that follows, both Eliezer and his father are able to sneak back over to the other side.

The prisoners are taken to a field, where a train of roofless cattle cars comes to pick them up. The prisoners are herded into the cattle cars and ordered to throw out the bodies of the dead men. The train travels for ten days and nights, and the Jews go unfed, living on snow. As they pass through German towns, some of the locals throw bread into the car in order to enjoy watching the Jews kill each other for the food. Eliezer then flashes forward to an experience he has after the Holocaust, when he sees a rich Parisian tourist in Aden a city in Yemen throwing coins to native boys.

Eliezer then returns to his narration of the German townspeople throwing bread on the train. An old man manages to grab a piece, but Eliezer watches as he is attacked and beaten to death by his own son, who in turn is beaten to death by other men. One night, someone tries to strangle Eliezer in his sleep. Meir Katz is among the dead. In these sections, we are told two particularly striking stories about sons and fathers.