What happens in Section 5 – Hanging of the Child and Rosh Hashanah of Night?
Section 5 begins with the execution of three prisoners—two adults and a child whom the SS suspects of sabotage linked to the Dutchman Oberkapo. The adults die quickly, but the child, too light to break his neck, hangs in slow agony for over half an hour while thousands of inmates are forced to march past and look him in the face. Eliezer, asked by the man behind him where God is, hears a voice within himself respond: He is hanging here on this gallows. The section then shifts to Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Ten thousand men gather in the Buna block to pray, and Eliezer finds himself unable to join in the blessing of God's name. He accuses God of weakness and indifference, listing the crematoria and the children turned to ash as proof that the Almighty has abandoned His covenant. Yom Kippur follows: most prisoners fast despite the camp's meager rations, but Eliezer eats deliberately, an act of defiance against a God he no longer recognizes. By the end of the section, he feels completely alone—distanced from his community by his rebellion, and from God by his grief.
Analysis
Wiesel crafts Section 5 as a crucial turning point for the entire memoir. The hanging of the child stands out as the most meticulously controlled scene in the book: Wiesel stretches time through rich detail—the soup that tastes like corpses, the half-hour of dying—forcing the reader, like the inmates, to confront the horror. The child's drawn-out death makes tangible the question that has lingered throughout: where is God? Eliezer's internal response—that God is on the gallows—serves both as a mourning act and a radical rethinking of theodicy. It doesn't deny God's existence but rather asserts His death alongside the child, framing the Holocaust as both a deicide and a genocide.
The Rosh Hashanah passage uses liturgical rhythm in a subversive way. Wiesel takes the familiar phrases of Jewish prayer—"Blessed be God's name"—only to reject them, transforming the call-and-response format of communal worship into a monologue filled with accusation. The escalating rhetoric ("Why should I bless Him?… because He had thousands of children burned in His pits?") reflects the Psalms of lament while flipping their resolution on its head.
The Yom Kippur act of eating is Wiesel's most concentrated symbol: fasting is a form of protest; eating here is also protest, but turned inward, representing a self-inflicted refusal of solidarity. Wiesel's control over tone is meticulous—grief, rage, and a stark clarity coexist within the same sentences without negating one another.
Key quotes from Section 5 – Hanging of the Child and Rosh Hashanah
“Where is God now? And I heard a voice within me answer him: 'Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows…'”
Eliezer responds inwardly to a fellow prisoner's anguished question as the child continues to die on the rope.
“Why should I bless His name? The Eternal, Lord of the Universe, the All-Powerful and Terrible, was silent. What had I to thank Him for?”
Standing among ten thousand men at the Rosh Hashanah service, Eliezer articulates his open rebellion against the God of his childhood.
“I no longer accepted God's silence. As I swallowed my bowl of soup, I saw in the gesture an act of rebellion and protest against Him.”
On Yom Kippur, Eliezer deliberately breaks the fast, transforming a physical necessity into a conscious theological defiance.
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Create an accountSign inVocabulary in Section 5 – Hanging of the Child and Rosh Hashanah
- gallows
- A wooden frame used for execution by hanging — here, the structure erected in the camp where prisoners were publicly hanged as punishment and as a warning to others.
- pipel
- A young boy who served as a personal servant or aide to a Kapo or SS officer in the concentration camps — the term is used specifically in this text for the child who is hanged.
- Rosh Hashanah
- The Jewish New Year, a solemn religious holiday — observed even in the camps, it becomes a moment of crisis of faith for Eliezer as he questions God's silence.
- Yom Kippur
- The Jewish Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the year, traditionally marked by fasting and prayer — Eliezer's relationship to fasting on this day reflects his collapsing faith.
- Kaddish
- A Jewish prayer of mourning traditionally recited in memory of the dead — its presence or absence in the camps marks the breakdown of religious ritual and communal grief.