physically free, but spiritually and emotionally, he doesn't know if he will ever be free again. Elie overcame the most horrendous of situations, but now he has to face living again. When he was in the concentration camp, Elie just did what he had to do to survive, but now he has to make an effort of really living.

The rising action begins when Moshe the Beadle returns from being expelled and tells the village of Sighet that all the others who were exiled have been killed. It continues with the train trip to Birkenau and then Auschwitz and finally to Buna where Eliezer begins to work at an electrical equipment warehouse. He and his father are brutally treated by the men in charge of the warehouse. Eliezer also witnesses the slow death of a child and Eliezar begins to really question God. Then, the Eliezar, his father and other men are transferred to Gleiwitz and finally to Buchenwald, where the climax of the story occurs. Eliezar's father dies and Eliezar finally feels freedom. To parallel that feeling of psychological freedom, the camp is finally liberated on April 10, finally giving Eliezar physical freedom as well.

It's difficult to find a traditional notion of "climax" in Wiesel's work.  It makes sense to a great extent because so much of what Wiesel has presented is so beyond traditional configurations.  I would say that a particular apex of action is reached when Eliezer's father dies.  There is so much in this moment that is haunting and reflective of Eliezer's own sense of change and development that the father dying is one of the last connections to his own past.  The father begging his son for water, asking why his son is being ignored, and Eliezer simply ignoring such cries only to wake the next morning to the bed of his father being empty is a climactic moment because it represents how different Eliezer's experience had made him.  From the boy who listened to Moshe's experience about wishing to ask God "the right questions" to a being where survival is all that matters and to one where the traditionalist notions of right/ wrong have been inverted to a level where all reality had lost the moral compass of ethical direction, the death of Eliezer's father is one of those moments where so much had transpired.  It also helps to bring out the full meaning of the ending whereby Eliezer does not fully understand the reflection that stares back at him.