What significant event happened to Moshe the Beadle, and what story did he tell upon his return? How did Moshe escape this wretchedness?

Moshe the Beadle is a religiously devout Jewish mystic who appears in the first sentence of Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir Night. Moshe's character is significant because Wiesel opts to spend the opening pages of his narrative chronicling Moshe's religious devotion, his poverty, and his unpopularity with the people of Sighet. The mystic's influence on Wiesel was so significant that Wiesel claims that he became "convinced that Moshe the Beadle would help me enter eternity." This peaceful status quo is interrupted when all foreign Jews are expelled from Sighet by the Hungarian police, with Moshe among them.
Most of the Jews of Sighet—while sad to see Moshe and others forced into exile—do not sense their impending doom. One Hasidic villager sums up the general mood when he states, "What do you expect? That's war." Life resumes as normal until one day, when the narrator spots Moshe sitting forlornly on a bench near the synagogue.
Moshe then tells the story of the fate of Sighet's foreign Jews; he reports that they had been herded into a forest, forced to dig a trench, and shot. He claims that he survived by "a miracle" and had mustered all of his strength to return to Sighet to warn his friends and neighbors of their impending fate. He cites the examples of "Malka, the young girl who lay dying for three days, and that of Tobie, the tailor who begged to die before his sons were killed."
Moshe's warnings go unheeded as the Jews of Sighet "not only refused to believe his tales, they refused to listen." The reader never learns the eventual fate of Moshe, but we do know what happens to the Jews who ignored his message. Wiesel ends his account of Moshe with the ironic statement, "And so we, the Jews of Sighet, waited for better days that surely were soon to come."
Wiesel includes the memorable character of Moshe the Beadle to foreshadow the horrifying fate that awaited Wiesel and the remaining Jews of Sighet. This episode also demonstrates that the atrocities that were committed during the Nazi's Final Solution did not come without warning; signs of the impending Holocaust took many forms and were tragically ignored, even by the would-be victims.

Moshe the Beadle, who only appears in chapter one of Night, is introduced in the story as a kind and father-like figure to the narrator, Elie Wiesel. His character is important to the story in several ways. One of them is that he provides a foil for Elie's biological father, which becomes important as the story progresses and makes Elie and his father's relationship a focal point of the memoir as a whole. The other way that Moshe is important is in the foreshadowing that his experience provides for the memoir. In the first chapter, Moshe is expelled from his home in Sighet, because he is a Jewish foreigner, before the majority of people in the town. He escapes by being mistaken as dead due to a severe leg injury. Moshe comes back to the town to warn them of what he's seen and knows is coming. He tells them that he and many others were loaded into train cars. Once they were taken over by the Gestapo, the Gestapo forced the adults to dig huge graves before murdering them. He also describes the death of the babies by explaining that the Gestapo would toss them in the air to use as target practice for their machine guns. This traumatic experience dramatically and understandably changes Moshe's character but also gives "prophecies" to the people of Sighet, which they choose to ignore.

At the beginning of the story, Moshe the Beadle, a poor foreign Jew, is one of the first prisoners transported from the small town of Sighet by the Nazi troops. Moshe the Beadle is forced into a cattle car and taken to the Galician forest, near Kolomay, where he is forced to stand in front of a Nazi firing squad along with other foreign Jews. Miraculously, Moshe the Beadle is only shot in the leg and survives by pretending to be dead. Moshe then travels back to Sighet and warns the Jewish citizens about the Nazi atrocities. He tells his neighbors about the horrors he witnessed in the Galician forest and recounts how infants were being thrown into the sky and shot in mid-air. Moshe the Beadle also begs the citizens to leave Sighet immediately before it is too late but they dismiss his warnings. The Jewish citizens overlook Moshe and refuse to believe his stories about the Nazi atrocities. Moshe the Beadle's terrifying experience foreshadows Elie and the other Jewish citizens' experiences during the Holocaust.