The climax of Wiesel's memoir arrives in his fifteenth year, a time when he begins to view life from a mature perspective. He describes overwhelming emotional turmoil and the illusion of power over God during the prayers of the devout on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. The pace of the prose quickens into a bitter diatribe, an accusation of a deity who allows six crematories to devour Jews day and night, Sundays and feast days. Wiesel permeates his outburst with rhetorical questions:
Why, but why should I bless Him? . . . How could I say to Him: "Blessed art Thou, Eternal, Master of the Universe, Who chose us from among the races to be tortured day and night, to see our fathers, our mothers, our brothers, end in the crematory?"
The ascending note of anguish presses Elie further into blasphemy and further from the naive young cabbalist who defied his father and sought out the Beadle as a mentor to guide him in the study of the deepest of humanistic questions. As Moshe the Beadle warned, the answers lie in the soul but remain uninterpreted by the frail mind of man, especially one encumbered with a child's expectation of justice. The age-old quest for an explanation of suffering threatens to subsume Elie, heart and soul.
The dilemma that follows in mid-January grates on the author, who blames himself for choosing to join evacuees to an undisclosed destination rather than to remain in the infirmary and petition the doctor to allow his father to pose as patient or nurse. The sound of gunfire in the distance impedes the internees' sleep the last night at Buna. Elie's decision derives from his distrust of the SS, who may kill all in a final gesture of faith in Hitler's intended annihilation of Jews. The courage to walk through the snowy night on a crudely bound and bleeding foot demonstrates Elie's strong survival instinct. Offsetting his human strength is the brutal weather, which symbolizes the relentless force of nature that has as little mercy on prisoners as Hitler and the SS. Again, there is "rain on the just and the unjust."
