Fire Symbol Analysis

Madame Schächter's visions of fire, after she has gone mad during the train ride to Auschwitz, are symbolic of the Nazi's power to deliver death to many of the Jews riding with her in the cattle car. When the train arrives at the death camp, the prisoners see fire leaping from the chimneys of the crematoria, where many of them will be burned. Later, Eliezer sees babies and children thrown into a fire burning in a ditch. In many religious teachings fire has the power to cleanse or to erase evil. For instance, God appeared to Moses in the form of a burning bush before helping the Jews escape Egypt in Exodus. But in Eliezer's experience it is the Nazi's, not God, who wield the firepower, another example of how Eliezer's traditional concepts of justice and divinity are fundamentally altered by his experience during the Holocaust.