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Although she only appears in one brief section of the novel, Madame Schächter’s character notably foreshadows the unimaginable horrors that the Nazis’ prisoners will face upon arriving at the concentration camps. Eliezer narrates that Madame Schächter is a woman from Sighet with three sons, two of whom were accidentally deported in an earlier transport alongside her husband. This separation completely destroys her once-demure personality, and she boards the cattle car having “lost her mind.” By highlighting Madame Schächter’s story even for just a moment, Wiesel calls attention to the extreme psychological distress that the Jews experienced even before arriving at the camps. Her uncontrollable sobs and wails, which many on board the cattle call dismiss as insanity, are an outward reflection of the unease that scores of others are attempting to suppress.
In addition to serving as an embodiment of her community’s collective despair, Madame Schächter also seems to prophesize their deaths and the fires of the crematoria. She repeatedly has visions of massive fires during their journey to Birkenau and cries out in an attempt to warn other Jews of their fate. For the reader, these episodes establish fire as a key symbol in the novel and foreshadow the unchecked brutality of the Nazis. The other cattle car passengers, however, repeatedly dismiss her warnings and even begin to physically abuse her in response. This dynamic allows Wiesel to highlight the moral decline of the Jewish prisoners, a decline which only appears after the Nazis begin dehumanizing them. The repeated attacks on Madame Schächter reflect a need to release pent-up anger and stress by any means necessary, and declaring her a madwoman signifies a lack of empathy for others. When the cattle car finally arrives at Birkenau and the passengers see the flames that she had envisioned, her hysterical warnings take on much more weight. This shift introduces the notion that even the unimaginable can become possible.
