Chapter 5 Summary

It is past midnight. The room feels crowded because Elisha sees all these dead people filing into the room. Some, he has known, others he has hated, admired, or forgotten. His parents are there and also the beggar. The grizzled master and the English soldiers of the convoy they ambushed at Gedera are also there; so, too, are people from Buchenwald and Auschwitz, including a boy who looks strangely like Elisha before the war, before the concentration camps. The room feels stuffy with so many people.

Elisha asks his father why all these people are here. His mother, standing beside him, looking very pale, murmurs, "Poor little boy, poor little boy!..." His father looks at him but does not reply. Elisha looks to his old master, the rabbi, but he doesn't say anything, either. Usually, his silence had been reassuring, but now it...