At Buna, the new camp, which is virtually deserted, Elie and his father undergo the usual shower, new clothes, and waiting period; then they wait in a tent. Their overseer seems humane. Veterans warn them to avoid the building unit. Following a three-day quarantine, three doctors examine the hundred inmates. One of the doctors searches for gold teeth. A band composed of congenial Jewish musicians plays a march as prisoners trudge to the warehouse to work. Elie enjoys Hebrew chants and songs with other Zionist youth and discusses immigration to Haifa.
Despair reigns as savagery becomes more prevalent. The camp dentist demands Elie's gold crown; he saves it by pretending to have a fever. Without warning one day in the warehouse, Idek falls into a murderous fit and lashes Elie, who restrains himself and remains silent. A French Jewess who passes as an Aryan soothes his bloody face. (Years later, he encounters her in the Paris subway and spends an evening reminiscing about their brief friendship and experiences at Buna.) Franek, the foreman, torments Chlomo for marching out of step as a means of preying on Elie's feelings for his father's suffering and thereby extorting the gold tooth. In desperation at his father's torment, Elie allows a dentist from Warsaw to extract his gold crown with a rusty spoon. On a Sunday, Elie angers Idek by laughing after seeing him with a naked Polish girl in a room adjacent to the warehouse. For this indiscretion, Elie is forced to lie on a box and receive twenty-five strokes. He faints and is forced into consciousness to promise to keep Idek's dirty secret.
On another Sunday at 10 A. M., block leaders secure prisoners as air-raid sirens wail. Elie remains unafraid as American planes bomb Buna for over an hour. The prisoners rally, even though they have to remove an unexploded bomb from the prison yard and clear away debris of damaged buildings. A week later, Elie and his fellow workers witness a pre-breakfast hanging of a young man from Warsaw who stole during the alert. Later, in retaliation for the sabotage of the camp power station, the SS torture a Dutch Oberkapo and hang three more people, including a small, angelic-looking thirteen-year-old. Elie is incensed by the fact that the boy is so undersized that he takes over half an hour to die of strangulation. A prisoner demands to know where God is; to himself, Elie replies, "He is hanging here on this gallows."
