In Night (1960) and All Rivers Run to the Sea (1995), Wiesel details camp life and the caprices of fate that saved ten to fifteen percent for enforced labor and destroyed others, sometimes whole convoys. After a midnight arrival, he joined his father in the men's line; his mother and sisters followed the women to separate confines. Sarah Wiesel and her youngest, Tzipora, apparently died in the Birkenau ovens; his older sisters survived. (Note: Wiesel avoids describing the ordeals of his sisters, which he considers private matters.) During idle moments in camp, he prayed, performed daily rituals, and recited from the Torah and Talmud. Dressed in shapeless striped prison garb, cap, and clogs at Auschwitz II, he and his father endured hard labor, cold, malnutrition, and arbitrary lashings. Barracks conditions were primitive and provided only skimpy straw or excelsior bedding on wooden slats and a night bucket for a toilet. Poor sanitation and a lack of soap and pure water spread intestinal bacteria, vermin, typhus, and cholera.
Upon transfer to Auschwitz III, the electrical warehouse at Buna, south of the Vistula River, father and son sorted electrical parts until Elie entered a camp infirmary in January 1945 for surgery to relieve an inflamed foot. (In All Rivers Run to the Sea, Wiesel describes the infirmity as a swollen knee.) On January 18, the threat of Russian troops forced the Germans to mount a chaotic camp evacuation forty-two miles on foot to Gleiwitz, Poland, to board roofless cattle cars for a ten-day journey northwest to Buchenwald in central Germany. There, two and a half months before American forces liberated the camp, Shlomo Wiesel died of dysentery, malnutrition, and a blow to the head, leaving his son to doubt God's existence and to mourn with the little strength he had left.
