Part I: Literary Terms
1. Foreshadowing: • “ Night. No one Prayed, so that the night would pass Quickly. The stars were only sparks of the fire which devoured us. Should that fire die out one day, there would be nothing left in the sky but dead stars, dead eyes.” (18) -Elie Wiesel’s quote explains how in the end, fire would be the ending to many people in the concentration camp. • “crammed into cattle trains by Hungarian police, they wept bitterly. We stood on the platform and wept too. The train disappeared on the horizon; it left nothing behind but its thick, dirty smoke.” (3) - The smoke represents the remains of the Jewish people in the camps and how the SS guards on German gestapo wont have mercy on any of their lives. • “Jews, listen to me! I can see fire! There are juge flames! It is a Furnace!” (23) - Madame Schachter says this to warn the cattle wagon prisoners of their tragic futures of the crematories at the concentration camps.
2. Similes: • “Physically, he was as awkward as a clown.” (1) Wiesel is describing the physically appearance of his mentor Moshe the Beadle. • “ He looked us over as if we were a pack of leprous dogs hanging onto our lives.” (36) - The Angel of Death, or the gestapo, is judging the men in the group and is making a decision for his next selection. • “They take me for a madman,” he would whisper, and tears, like drops of wax, flowed from his eyes.” - This description of Moshe the Beadle shows how fake the mans tears look as if everything he experienced wasn’t real but of how he is being serious and of how real the tears are.
3. Metaphors: • “We’ve got to do something. We cant let ourselves be killed. We cant go like beasts to the slaughter. We’ve got to revolt.” (29) - This is an explanation of how the people were willing to go and die in the crematories, like how animals would walk to their deaths in slaughter houses. • “The days were like nights, and the