Character Analysis
Mrs. Schächter, like Moishe, is another prophet-like character. She is a middle-aged woman who goes crazy after she’s separated from her husband and packed into a cattle car headed to Auschwitz. Throughout the long nights in the train, she punctuates the imprisoned Jews’ journey with screaming and rambling about fire and flames, warning and begging the Jews to see the fire. Unwilling to listen to her warnings, the Jews beat her rather than acknowledge the danger they are in. She not only foreshadows the death that is to come for all of them, but the literal way everybody will die—their bodies burned in the furnace of Auschwitz.