How did the Jews change their behavior while on the train?

In this section of the novel, we catch our first glimpse of how human behavior changes when people are placed in extreme circumstances. After being confined in a small, cramped wagon with no food, water, or sanitation, the young people submit to their animal instincts and copulate without even considering the people around them. If people are not respected as individuals within society and are instead treated as animals, as the Jews are, then they will begin to act as animals, without regard to the usual social conventions and responsibilities. In addition to the physical torture and extermination that the Nazis submitted the Jews to, it is this kind of mental and psychological torture that may have proved most damaging to Holocaust survivors. Through a variety of methods that will be detailed in coming sections of the book, the Nazis denied the Jews (and other inhabitants of the concentration camps) their humanity and led them to behave in crude, brutal, and uncivilized ways. Confined in small spaces and denied their individuality, the Jews become anonymous beings concerned solely with their own survival. They were no longer people to the Nazis, and unable to prove that they were not simply animals, they began to act as if they were.

Another striking example of this theme occurs with the people's treatment of Madame Schaechter. Though she is a fifty-year-old woman and obviously unwell, she is beaten repeatedly about the head by young men trying to silence her. And her little boy says nothing: "They struck her several times on the head‹blows that might have killed her. Her little boy clung to her; he did not cry out; he did not say a word. He was not even weeping now." The people in the wagon treat her cruelly and inhumanely, as they undoubtedly would not have done under normal circumstances, but Wiesel does not condemn them for their brutal actions. Instead, his tone in this passage is very sad, full of regret and guilt. Since Madame Schaechter's hysterical shrieks was unnerving everyone in the car, he recognizes that it was necessary for their collective survival that she be silenced. At the same time, however, he seems to mourn the fact that such cruel behavior was necessary and that everyone, including the woman's own son, condoned such violent and vicious behavior. In this nightmare world that the Nazis have created for the Jews, survival is the only concern, and human emotions and affective ties become irrelevant.