Describe Moishe’s experience as he tells Elie.

In Chapter One, Moché returns, having escaped from a concentration camp in Poland. He tries to warn the townspeople of the atrocities that he has seen, but no one believes him. Everyone thinks he is trying to win sympathy or has simply gone insane. He tells Eliezer that he miraculously survived the concentration camps in order to save the Jews in Sighet, but life continues on as normal during 1942 and 1943. Eliezer devotes himself to his religious studies, his father busies himself in the Jewish community, and his mother tries to find a husband for Hilda.

He told me what had happened to him and his companions. The train with the deportees had crossed the Hungarian border and, once in Polish territory, had been taken over by the Gestapo. The train had stopped. The Jews were ordered to get off and onto waiting trucks. The trucks headed toward a forest. There everybody was ordered to get out. They were forced to dig huge trenches. When they had finished their work, the men from the Gestapo began theirs. Without passion or haste, they shot their prisoners, who were forced to approach the trench one by one and offer their necks. Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine guns. This took place in the Galician forest, near Kolomay. How had he, Moishe the Beadle, been able to escape? By a miracle. He was wounded in the leg and left for dead…