<u><em>Wiesel tells Oprah that</em></u>: <u>Before they were mass murdered, the Jews had been told they would be resettled in Eastern Europe</u>.
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The families arrived at Auschwitz with their most precious belongings stored in suitcases</em></u>. On the outside of each case, the unsuspecting owners wrote their names and dates of birth believing that their things would be returned.
<u><em>But nothing is further from reality</em></u>, because the systematic process of determining who would live and who would die was known as "<u>selection</u>". The SS officers briefly evaluated each arrival.
<u><em>Those considered capable of forced labor</em></u>, such as 15-year-old Elie Wiesel and her father, entered the labor camp. <u>All the others were sent immediately and unknowingly on the way to the four gas chambers of Auschwitz</u>.
<u><em>The people selected to die were told that they were receiving showers, and then they were sent to the cameras by the thousands</em></u>. Bins of the deadly chemical Zyklon B were thrown in. As the toxic granules mixed with the air, cyanide gas was released. Death took about 15 minutes to arrive and it felt like suffocation.
<em><u>The dreadful task of burning the corpses</u></em> in underground furnaces was left to the Jewish prisoners. Forced into this horrible work, they temporarily evaded their own death.