Elie is a Jewish teenager who, when the memoir begins, lives in his hometown of Sighet, in Hungarian Transylvania. In the spring of 1944, the Nazis occupy Hungary. Elie and the Jews of his town are soon forced into small ghettos within Sighet. After a while all the jews are hauled away on cattle carts and brought to Birkenau the gateway of Auschwitz. One Elie and his family arrived at the camps they were all split up. Elie and his dad stayed together, but they were separated from his mother and sisters. Elie had never seen them again. Elie had to adjust to this his new “home” Auschwitz and he didn’t know anyone there except for his father. Elie often feared that he and his father would be separated, this highly frightened him because his father was all that he had, and he knew that if something had happened to his father he would have to go through Auschwitz all by himself with no one there to help him survive.
The way of life at Auschwitz was very different compared to way people in Sighet lived before the holocaust. As soon as Elie had arrived at Birkenau he and every other jew were stripped, shaved, disinfected, and treated with almost unimaginable cruelty. One this had occurred Elie knew it was not going to be easy to adapt to this new environment. A vicious foreman had forced Eliezer to give him his gold tooth, which is pried out of his mouth with a rusty spoon. Elie had to adapt to this new way of life, by knowing