In Elie Wiesel’s memoir *Night*, Elie is placed in the camp hospital at Buna because his foot becomes severely infected from the cold. The sole of his foot swells with pus, and a Jewish doctor warns that without immediate surgery, Elie risks losing his toes or even his entire leg to amputation.
The Infection and the Doctor’s Warning
While working as a forced laborer at the Buna concentration camp (a subcamp of Auschwitz), Elie develops a painful infection in his foot caused by prolonged exposure to freezing conditions. The swelling becomes serious enough that he visits the camp’s prisoner hospital, where a Jewish doctor examines him. The doctor’s assessment is blunt: if they don’t operate right away, amputation is the likely outcome.
This moment in Chapter 5 carries enormous weight. Going to the hospital in a concentration camp was a terrifying gamble. SS physicians routinely decided which prisoners were still fit for labor and which would be sent to the gas chambers. Prisoners who appeared too sick or weak to work faced “selection,” a process that by 1943 and 1944 had become a core duty of SS medical staff across the camp system. Checking into the infirmary meant making yourself visible as someone who couldn’t work.
The Surgery Without Anesthesia
The Jewish doctor operates on Elie’s foot the following day. Elie receives no anesthetic. He remains fully conscious as the doctor cuts into the sole of his foot to drain the infection. The pain is so intense that Elie eventually passes out during the procedure.
When he wakes up, Elie’s first terrified thought is that his foot has been amputated. The doctor reassures him: the sole of his foot had been filled with pus, and the surgery involved opening and draining it. Nothing was removed. The doctor tells Elie the operation went well and that he should be completely recovered and walking again within two weeks.
Why the Timing Matters
Elie’s hospitalization happens at one of the most critical moments in the book. While he is still recovering, word spreads through the camp that the Soviet army is approaching. In mid-January 1945, the SS begins evacuating Auschwitz and its subcamps, forcing tens of thousands of prisoners on a brutal winter march that would later be known as the death march from Auschwitz.
Elie faces an impossible choice. He can stay in the hospital with his still-healing foot, where patients will be left behind as the SS retreats. Or he can join the evacuation march on a foot that hasn’t fully recovered. No one knows what will happen to those who stay. Some prisoners fear the SS will kill everyone left in the infirmary before abandoning the camp. Others suspect the march itself will be deadly.
Elie and his father choose to march. In hindsight, this decision haunts the memoir. The patients who remained in the hospital were liberated by Soviet forces just days later. The march, by contrast, killed thousands of prisoners through exhaustion, cold, and SS shootings along the route. Elie’s foot surgery, a relatively small medical event, becomes the pivot point for one of the book’s most agonizing decisions.
The Prisoner Hospital at Buna
The hospital where Elie has his surgery was staffed largely by prisoner doctors, many of them Jewish. These doctors worked under impossible conditions, trying to provide real medical care inside a system designed to work people to death. Both Elie Wiesel and the Italian chemist and writer Primo Levi, another prominent Holocaust survivor, received treatment at this same prisoner hospital in Buna-Monowitz.
The Jewish doctor who treats Elie is portrayed as genuinely caring. He explains the diagnosis clearly, performs the surgery with skill, and offers honest reassurance about recovery. In a place defined by dehumanization, this small act of competent medical care stands out. The doctor treats Elie as a patient, not a number, even though the environment around them reduces prisoners to exactly that.