Night: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

On the evening of Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) the Jews in Buna gather for a prayer. Eliezer, who once lived for prayer and religious study, rebels against this. He feels that humans are, in a sense, greater than God, stronger than God, to still pray to a God who allows such horrors. "I was the accuser, God the accused… I stood amid the praying congregation, observing it like a stranger."

Eliezer shares a silent, powerful moment of sadness and understanding with his father. For Yom Kippur, when Jews traditionally fast, his father forbids Eliezer from fasting. Eliezer no longer believes in such rituals, anyway.

The prisoners must go through a "selection" when they come back from work. The veterans say the newer prisoners are lucky—not long before, corpses were collected by the hundreds each day, and selections took place every week. The head of the block tells them to move around beforehand, to give color to their skin and to show they are healthy. Dr. Mengele watches the prisoners go past him and occasionally writes down the tattooed number of one of them. A few of the feebler ones are written down, but Eliezer is not. However, no one is immediately taken away.

A few days later, the head of the block reads off the numbers of those who have been selected to die. Eliezer's father is among them, as is Akiba Drumer, the singer. His father hurriedly gives Eliezer a knife and a spoon, all that he owns. Eliezer is sent off to work. All day he wonders if he will ever see his father again. When he returns to the camp with his work group that evening, his father is still there, having convinced the Nazis that he is still fit for work.

During this period of selection, an old rabbi from Poland who used to pray constantly and recite pages of the Talmud loses his faith in God. So does Akiba Drumer, the religious singer, who gives up, and doesn't try to avoid selection. He asks the other prisoners to say a traditional prayer for him three days after his selection. They promise to, but then forget.

Winter arrives and the prisoners truly start to know what it is to be cold. Christmas and New Year's pass. In January, Eliezer's foot swells. He goes to see a doctor—a Jew and a fellow prisoner. The doctor tells him he needs an immediate operation or else amputation will soon be necessary.

The surgery is successful, and two days later Eliezer hears a rumor that the Red Army is only hours away and that the camp is being evacuated and the invalids will be left behind. However, Eliezer's neighbor in the hospital tells him that the invalids will be killed and sent to the crematorium. Eliezer doesn't know what to believe, but doesn't want to be separated from his father. He and is father confer—the doctor could enter his father onto the hospital roll as a patient and they could wait for the Russians. Eventually, they decide to leave with the evacuation.

After the war, Eliezer learns that those who stayed in the hospital were liberated by the Russian Army two days later.

Eliezer spends the night back in his block. The prisoners are given bread and margarine for the trip ahead. The next morning, the prisoners, wearing every layer of clothing they can find, are about ready to leave when the head of the block orders them to clean their living space, to show the liberating army that "there were men living here and not pigs."

The evening, surrounded by SS guards and dogs, with the snow falling heavily, the prisoners march out of the camp block by block. At last, Eliezer's block—Block 57—marches out into the darkness.