The long, inhumane flight on foot from Buna takes on a surreal quality as death seems preferable to ever-more torment. Elie recognizes death as a wrapping that sticks to his body, a palpable presence that fascinates him, luring him into an insensate state, "Not to feel anything, neither weariness, nor cold, nor anything." At intervals, he closes his eyes and sees "a whole world passing by, to dream a whole lifetime." In a demented state, he envisions himself a master of nature until the dark admits the light of the morning star. Like a benediction, the appearance of its rays precedes the announcement that they have run forty-two miles. Again plunged into a fight with a numbed body, the narrator depicts the eerie hellishness of the scene: "Not a cry of distress, not a groan, nothing but a mass agony, in silence. No one asked anyone else for help. You died because you had to die. There was no fuss." Among stiffening corpses, Elie begins to identify with the dead.
The unity of father and son, a motif from the first night at Birkenau, suggests the love between Abraham and Isaac in the book of Genesis and creates a hopeful scenario. Each agrees to awaken the other after a brief nap. Elie abandons his welcome of death, a personified enemy that slithers silently, peacefully among the sleepers, killing them effortlessly. Elie jostles his neighbors and awakens Chlomo. The reward for the son's diligence is a spontaneous smile from his father. The beneficence of the expression returns Elie to the persona of the questioning cabbalist. In the purgatory of doubt, he demands to know "From which world did it come?"
Elie experiences an epiphany after he recognizes selfish behavior in Rabbi Eliahou's son, who ran ahead to distance himself from his aged, limping burden of a father. Returned in spite of himself to oneness with the Almighty, Elie feels a prayer rise to God and pleads for strength to shelter his father. A later incident confirms the resilience of the human spirit—Juliek plays strains of Beethoven, a pure and uplifting melody. As welcome as a father's smile, as rejuvenating as the prayer that springs unbidden from a bruised spirit, the sweetness of Juliek's gift, a symbol of all art, is a generous restorative that the violinist readily bestows on fellow sufferers. To a shed of dying men, he glides his bow across the strings to produce a comforting strain, a lullaby to the moribund. In daylight, Elie acknowledges Juliek's "lost hopes, his charred past, his extinguished future."
