NIGHT CHAPTER 4 - SUMMARY
The leader of the camp and the head of Eliezer's tent both take a special interest in children and give them extra food. Eliezer explains that children are traded among homosexuals at the camp. When Eliezer arrives at the camp, it seems empty. As usual, the prisoners shower and are given new clothes. Veteran prisoners tell them that Buna is a good camp and that they should try to avoid being placed in the building unit. The head of Eliezer's tent is a fat and predatory-looking German. His assistant tries to get Eliezer's shoes by offering to put him and his father in the same unit, but Eliezer refuses, even after he offers an extra ration of food. The shoes are taken from him anyway. After a medical examination, Eliezer is randomly put in the orchestra block and befriends some musicians, who tell him that he has been placed in a good unit. All he has to do is count bolts and bulbs in an electrical warehouse, and he gets his father transferred to his unit. The only real hazard is Idek, the Kapo, who sometimes flies into violent rages. Eliezer befriends two Czech brothers named Yossi and Tibi. He hums Zionist chants and discusses Palestine with them, and they all plan to leave Europe as soon as they are liberated.
In this chapter Eliezer recounts a number of incidents that stand out in his memory. Each episode is brief, and the narrative is somewhat fragmented. The head of the orchestra block is a Jew named Alphonse who sometimes gives them extra soup. Once Eliezer is summoned to the dentist to have his gold crown removed, but he feigns illness two times and eventually gets to keep it. The dentist's surgery is shut down because the dentist is to be hanged for extorting some of the gold he extracted from patients. Eliezer plans to use his crown to buy bread and describes how his life had become focused around his stomach and food.
One day the Kapo, Idek, flies into a rage and starts beating Eliezer. A French girl who passes as Aryan comforts him in German, and many years later, Eliezer sees her again in Paris. She admits that she actually is Jewish and had false papers at the camp and that the only time she spoke German at the camp was to him.
Another day his father is beaten with an iron bar for working slowly, and Eliezer feels anger directed at his father only, for not knowing how to avoid the abuse. Then, Franek the foreman demands Eliezer's gold crown and begins abusing his father for two weeks when Eliezer refuses to give it to him. Franek torments Eliezer's father daily for marching out of time, and Eliezer tries to help his father practice marching, but his efforts are to no avail. Finally, Eliezer surrenders his gold crown. After first taking away his rations, Franek starts to give Eliezer extra soup. After a fortnight, however, all the Poles (including Franek) are transferred out of the camp.
On another day Eliezer walks in on Idek having sex with a girl. Knowing that Idek moved all the prisoners to a different building for this specific reason, Eliezer bursts out laughing. Later, he receives twenty-five strokes of the whip from Idek in front of everyone. Eliezer faints, loses control of his muscles, and is threatened by Idek never to tell anyone what he saw. On a Sunday, the air-raid sirens go off. Everyone was confined inside their blocks, and guards were ordered to shoot prisoners who were outside on sight. In the turmoil of the air raid, two cauldrons of soup are left outside on a path. The prisoners long for the soup but are terrified to leave the barracks. Hundreds of men watch as a single man crawls to the soup, thrusts his head into the liquid, and then dies. The planes begin to bomb the camp, and the prisoners are hopeful that Buna will be destroyed. They regain some hope. After the last bomb, the prisoners remember that they are still in a death camp, but they are cheerful and hopeful about the future.
A week later, the SS officers set up gallows and begin having hanging ceremonies during roll call. The first man to be executed had stolen two plates of soup. Strong and muscular, he is unafraid at his own execution and shouts "Long live liberty! A curse upon Germany!" right before dying. Although Eliezer is surrounded by death all the time at the concentration camps, he is overwhelmed by this man's solitary execution. Another man Juliek is jaded and just wants it to be dinnertime. After the execution, everyone is forced to march past the condemned man's hanging body and to look into his face. Eliezer remembers the soup being particularly good that night. Eliezer saw many executions, and the victims, having already lost their capacity for emotion, never cried. Only once did the jaded, dried-up prisoners weep at an execution. An Oberkapo and his pipel (a young boy who acted as his assistant) who everyone liked were suspected of blowing up a power plant on camp, but they refused, despite torture, to give any information about it. The little boy, who had the face of a sad angel, was sentenced to be hanged. The prisoner who usually served as executioner refused to perform his task and had to be replaced by an SS officer. When it came time for the execution, the child said nothing, and the whole camp observed in silence. Since the child was so light, he didn't die immediately when he fell, and he remained alive, hanging for half an hour. All the prisoners wept that day, and one man kept asking where God was. That day Eliezer's soup tasted like corpses.