Night: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

The train goes on through the night. When light comes, Eliezer is unable to tell who is alive and who is dead in the car, including his father. Eliezer feels there is no reason to live.

The car stops in a field and SS soldiers shout at the people in the cars to throw out their dead. People in the car look for the dead, take their clothes and push them out. When two men try to take his father, Eliezer snaps out of his daze and slaps his father until his father's eyelids begin to move. Twenty bodies are thrown out of the car.

The train trip seems to last an eternity. The train moves slowly and the people are not fed—they eat snow to stay alive. They pass through German towns where Germans watch them. One day a German worker throws a piece of bread into a car to watch the people fight each other to the death for it.

Other workmen watch this spectacle, and begin to drop pieces of bread from their lunches into different cars to observe the starving prisoners fight for them. When a piece is dropped in his car Eliezer doesn't fight for it, but sees a younger man beat up his own father for it. The old man dies, and then the son is set upon and killed before he can swallow the bread.

A man named Meir Katz saves Eliezer's life when someone tries to strangle him. One of the most vigorous men left, Meir Katz is put in charge of the train car, but he breaks down and weeps for his son who was taken at the first selection. He can't go on any longer. He wonders why the Nazis don't just shoot them. The train arrives at Buchenwald late at night and the living disembark. Meir Katz stays with the dead on the train.