Describe Mrs. Schachter.

Mrs. Schächter appears in section 2 of Elie Wiesel's memoir, Night. She is a middle-aged ("in her fifties") Jewish woman who, along with her ten-year-old son, is deported on the same train as the story's narrator, Eliezer.
Eliezer first sees Mrs. Schächter "crouched in a corner," and explains that "Her husband and two older sons had been deported with the first transport." Eliezer says that this separation from her husband and two older sons "had totally shattered her."
Mrs. Schächter is further described as a "quiet, tense woman with piercing eyes" and later as "like a withered tree in a field of wheat." Eliezer also knows that "It was she who supported the family." Now that she has lost her family—except for her youngest son—Mrs. Schächter is "shattered" and seems to lose her mind.
While in transit to the concentration camp, Mrs. Schächter has nightmares and screams about fires outside the windows. Her fellow passengers look and see nothing but the night. They conclude that she is mad, that her screams are "hysterical," and that she is "possessed by some evil spirit"—or that she is "hallucinating because she is thirsty." Tragically, when they later arrive at Auschwitz and see the furnaces, Mrs. Schächter seems less like a mad woman and more like a prophetess.
While they are on the train, however, her fellow passengers try (unsuccessfully) to restrain and gag Mrs. Schächter so that she cannot alarm them any more with her screams. After she breaks free of the restraints the first time, she is beaten up by some of the boys on the train. They inflict "several blows to the head, blows that could be lethal."
This reaction to Mrs. Schächter from the other passengers indicates how they have been reduced by their conditions. They have been crammed into trains (which were meant to transport cattle) and forcefully separated from their loved ones. Under such conditions, people inevitably become more intolerant, more aggressive, and less civil. Indeed, Eliezer acknowledges that, if they had been under these conditions for a few more days, "all of us would have started to scream."
On a symbolic level, Mrs. Schächter foreshadows the horrific, inhumane deaths that await all of the passengers at Auschwitz. She also personifies and represents the experiences that were common to many Jewish people at this time. She represents mothers who were separated from their husbands and children, and more broadly all of the families that were torn apart and sent to their deaths.
However, perhaps more than all of this, Mrs. Schächter serves as a reminder as to how precarious and relative our basic notions of humanity can be. Under conditions of stress, we—like the passengers who mistreated Mrs. Schächter—are prone to abandon traits like empathy, compassion and kindness and instead adopt more primitive, animalistic traits like fear, hostility and aggression. Mrs. Schächter is an unnerving reminder that we all have this more primitive side to us.