Eliezer, a Jewish teenager in the town of Sighet, finds his instruction in the Torah unexpectedly terminated when his tutor is deported by the Gestapo, the German police. Although his instructor later returns and tells the town of an awful extermination of Jews by the Gestapo, no one believes him. In 1944, new repressive laws are imposed on the Jews in Eliezer’s town. Eventually, the Jewish residents are packed like animals into cattle cars and transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Here, Eliezer is separated from his mother and sister, whom he never sees again, and sent to be stripped, shaved, and re-identified as a prisoner of the camp. Eliezer realizes that not all prisoners are considered valuable enough to be kept alive when he sees truckloads of babies being burned to death by guards. Eliezer is categorized as an electrician and forced to slave away in a factory under dismal conditions. As time passes, the captives grow desensitized to pain and death. Prisoners are mercilessly beaten; they are forced to witness the executions and hangings of others and are subjected to ruthless humiliation at the hands of the guards. At one point, Eliezer is forced to give a guard his gold tooth, which was pried out of his mouth by the guard using a rusty spoon. Eliezer sustains a foot injury and, before he is fully healed, he and other prisoners are forced to march fifty miles during a snowstorm to another camp. They are then crammed into cattle cars where over eighty of the one hundred passengers die before they reach their final destination. Although Eliezer and his father both survive the trip, his father dies from the physical abuse and sickening conditions soon after reaching the new concentration camp. In April of 1945, American soldiers free the few remaining hostages, including Eliezer. He leaves the camp but feels himself to be only a fraction of the person he was when he arrived just over a year earlier.  Throughout his experiences in the camps, Elie Wiesel ponders the unanswerable question, “Where is God in the midst of these horrors?”