The Cage

Riva starts to call her workplace “the clay grave” (148). The work is hard, and it is difficult to find relief; denied even a bathroom break, Riva wets herself on the job one day. In this moment, she is “grateful for the darkness” around her.

One day, she and her co-laborers are marched from the tunnel to the factory, where they line up with the factory workers. Riva marches next to a girl named Rosa, who is also from Lodz, and asks her what it is like to work in the factory. Rosa admits that “the foreman is very kind” and gave her an extra piece of bread wrapped in a brown bag the day before (149). Though Rosa saves the bread for her sister, who is in the other factory group, Riva asks if Rosa will give her the brown bag, so that she can write poetry on it.

In hopes that Riva’s poetry “will survive to tell our story,” Rosa grows excited and gives Riva the brown bag, pledging to “collect the brown bags the Germans carry their lunch in, after they throw them in the wastebasket” (150). She also tells Riva that she will ask the kind foreman for a pencil when no one is watching. As they continue to march, surrounded by the echoing, repeated calls to “March! Faster! March!” Riva forgets her “empty stomach” and feels her feet “seem lighter” (150).

As they return to the camp, Riva notices that Fritz, the dog, is “pulling on his leash angrily” and that her friends’ eyes look fearful (151). Someone tells her that “the whip has been in motion all day” (151). As Helen calls to line up, the commandant shouts to “bring the thieves forward” (151). Five girls, including two sisters who are in Riva’s barrack, move forward. The commandant forces them to tell the other women that they “stole potato peels from the kitchen garbage” (152).

Though they defend themselves by saying that they were hungry, the commandant laughs at them. She forces one sister, Faige, to whip her sister, Chanele, and Faige begs her sister for forgiveness. Watching Chanele dance, Faige “cries out, laughing hysterically,” to her mother, that she loves her sister (153). She asks her mother to “take Chanele’s hand” and her own so that they can “dance” and “sing” (153). Then, “whip in hand, she dances around her horrified sister” (153).

The commandant, disgusted, says that “she’s crazy,” “she’s lost her mind,” and orders the sisters away (153). Chanele says that her mad sister is “better off” than she is, and the two girls walk toward the elder’s room. As the commandant leaves the camp, she reminds the women that she did not beat Chanele, but that Chanele’s sister beat her, and then she commands that no one will eat that day. Horrified by the events, the women “crawl” into their bunks (154).

Some time passes until Riva next encounters Rosa, who promised her pencils and bags. Faige, who “lost her mind,” is rumored to be “kept in the tiny sickroom,” where a former medical student attends to patients. No one knows for sure, though, and they wonder if she was sent to Grossrosen (155). Despite the memory of the sad event that broke Faige, Rosa tells Riva that she stole a “small pencil on the foreman’s desk” for her (156). Riva asks why Rosa didn’t ask first, but Rosa explains that there is a new foreman who is not so kind, and so she needed to steal this “treasure” instead of asking for it.

A guard notices them talkingso Riva cannot protest or exclaim how happy she is. The promise of writing excites her as she walks, and after the head count, she races through her soup so that she can “write before they shut off the lights” in the barrack (156).

Riva folds the paper that she and her friends have collected “to form a booklet” and writes (156). She reads the poem she writes to herself, and she feels “at ease” (157). She turns to Tola and admits that she has a pencil and wrote a poem. Excitedly, Tola shouts this information to share with the barrack, and the women around ask her to read. She does, reading, “When my tormented heart can’t take any more […]”, and “sobs fill the room” (157). Tola tells her that her poem can “speak for all of us,” that “they cannot kill our spirit, our hunger to survive” (157).

Riva continues with her poems (158). When she can, she reads the poems in other barracks. As the seasons grow colder, and as the work at the factory “[saps their] last strength,” Riva begins to “feel only emptiness” (158). But one day, an older girl, Sara, says, “more to herself than to anyone there”: “Children, it is Hannukah” (158).

Together, the young women recall the story of Hanukkah and relate tales of childhood memories and traditions. A Hanukkah song begins, and “somehow strengthened” by the words that recall stories “of bravery and skill” and “of wonders long ago” wraps them into the story of Jewish “victories” (160). The “dream” of this past “arises brilliantly” (160). A guard shouts at the door to stop the women, but “the emptiness is gone” inside of Riva (160). She tells her neighbor that they “have just won a victory,” and they “press hands silently” (160).