The Cage

“Within seconds” after the Nazis order them out of the barrack, the women housed with Riva, “a strange mass of weird-looking creatures,” are in a line (124). The newcomers ask where they are and ask what Auschwitz is, but the voice that responds merely says: “You are lucky! […] You are alive!” (124). They are told to listen to orders and warned that they will “go up in smoke” if they are sick or disobedient (124). Riva notices the smoke in the distance and wonders what it comes from.

The Nazis “count the standing bodies again and again” and then “count the dead bodies on the ground,” a process that lasts “hours and hours” (125). Later, the women crowd a cauldron of soup, and then, at the order of a man behind the bullhorn, “the hot soup is poured on the women in the front rows” (125). When the next soup comes, no one moves, but it is not a trick: each person receives foul soup in a can.

When the time to use the toilet comes, Riva stays with her friends for the march. They are told that they have five minutes, but Riva is shocked that she is surrounded by masses of “rag-clad women” who “stand with their legs apart,” and she exclaims that she “cannot” go to the bathroom in such a space (126). But Tola tells her that she “cannot afford to be bashful,” and though Riva feels “like an animal,” she moves toward a hole, at which point she is pushed out and the next group moves in, “some hardly able to hold out any longer” (126).

One night, in the barrack, the women are suddenly ordered outside. Terrified, they wait “for hours,” uncertain for what or whom, until “night gives way to dawn” (127). When, eventually, they can reenter the barrack, they must step “over the bodies of those who did not survive the night’s ordeal” (127). After the scare, Riva and her friends join together, thankful that they are still alive, and work to get sleep.

Riva’s sleeping world is full of nightmares, in which she is “surrounded by living skeletons, their eyes bulging from their heads and their bony arms reaching out” as if to “embrace” her (128). When she jumps out of the dream, though, she wonders if the skeletons were part of her reality or part of her nightmare. The next time they are ordered out of the barracks, still more remain “half dead […] motionless, waiting for the end to come and free them from this hell” (128). A young girl tries to coax her mother outside, pulling her from a bunk, but the mother asks her daughter to leave her behind, for she is “young”: she tells her daughter that she “must live” (128).

Some women eventually pull the girl away, telling her simply that her “mother is gone” and carrying her, screaming, outside, where “the sun is hot” (129). The women are given a slice of bread and some coffee, which must last until evening, “if you are still here,” and then they are forced to “stand for hours and hours in the hot sun” (129). After some women faint, lying on the ground “waiting to die,” a prisoner in charge (calledkapos) shoots a powerful garden hose at the crowd, which knocks down some women. As prisoners try to drink some of the water, the stream disappears, and they are sent to the barrack again, where “the bodies of the dead have been taken away. The empty places are filled with new arrivals” (129).