Monica-Summary #1

INTRO: pages 1-17

The story takes place around the 1940s where Eliezer, the narrator, is a 15 year old boy who lives in a town called Sighet. His parents own a shop and he is the only son int he family with three sisters name Hilda, Bea and Tzipora. Eliezer meets Moshe the Beadle, a local pauper who teaches him the Jewish mystical texts of the Kabbalah. After some time, the Hungarians expel all foreign Jews, including Moshe. Moshe somehow escapes and returns to the town and tells all the people how the deportation trains were handed over to the Gestapo, or German secret police, at the Polish border. He explains that over there, the Jews were forced to dig graves for themselves and were killed by the German police. The townspeople refuses to believe his story and declares that he is just a crazy man who talks nonsense.

In the spring of 1944, the Hungarian government falls into the hands of the Fascists, and the next day the German armies occupy Hungary. Soon, the Germans invade Sighet and arrests the community leaders, takes the Jewish valuables, and forces all the Jews to wear yellow stars. Eventually, the Jews are brought to small ghettos, crowded together into narrow streets behind barbed-wire fences. Eliezer’s family is one of the last to leave Sighet. They watch the other Jews on the streets walking and carrying some of their belongings in their bags. The Nazis and their henchmen, the Hungarian police, herd the last Jews remaining in Sighet onto cattle cars that are headed to a concentration camp in Auschwitz.