The Cage

The shouted orders to move in and out of barracks make Riva feel “as if [she has] been running in and out of this barrack for years,” though she has been there “only seven days” (133). Without her glasses, Riva struggles to recognize people she knows amid the masses of women. She follows a woman who she thinks might be her mother, but that woman is also just looking for someone else. Because no one can “move around freely,” Riva cannot “learn something from the other women” (133).

Each barrack is a “prison,” and the numbers overwhelm Riva. One day, a woman she encounters on her search tells her that her mother is dead or has been moved elsewhere. The woman encourages her to “stop searching” and “stop running after strangers,” for she will not find her mother at Auschwitz (134). Though Riva is angry with this young woman, she is angrier at the truth the woman conveys, that “here, it is the labor camp or the chimney,” and that “if you stay long enough, it is the chimney” (134). Riva’s persistence earns her a strange look from this woman.

In this moment, as Riva cries out, the group is called to line up, and Riva must rely on Motele’s voice in her head to keep her moving. In the line, the offices call “Right!” or “Left!” to decide, on a “whim,” “who shall live, who shall die” (134). Though Riva, Rifkele, Karola, and Tola are all with her on the right side, where they are loaded on a wagon for transport elsewhere, Riva feels “all alone,” recognizing herself, for the first time, as without her family. In this moment, she feels, “There is no one to live for” (135). But Rifkele, noticing her sadness, slips an arm around her and whispers her mother’s old adage: “If hope is lost, all is lost” (135). Riva submits and cries in Rifkele’s lap.

Again, Riva unloads from a cattle car, pulled “from the dark confinement […] into bright sunshine” (136). Riva struggles to justify holding herself up and continuing to walk, but she quickly notices the beautiful setting around her, with “majestic mountains” and a sun which “shines brightly, playing on the snow-covered mountaintops” (136). She imagines what it would be like to be free here, as the guards prod her into “the new cage” that waits, its gates open “to let us enter a new hell” (137). Though the armed guards look just as menacing, Riva notices that there are “no chimneys,” “no smoke,” and “no ovens” at this camp (137).

After the gates close behind their group, they open again for a German woman, who walks with a menacing German Shepherd. This woman tells them that they have arrived at Mittelsteine, and that she will be their commandant. Her dog, Fritz, will teach them “to obey” (138). She tells the group that she will assign some women to be elders or work in the kitchen, and that those women “will be the first to be punished” for transgressions of others; if the women are disobedient, they will go to Grossrosen, “where the chimneys are” (138).

The commandant pulls a young woman, Helen, out and whips her until she admits that she has no family left. Because she has “no one to steal for,” she is put “in charge” (139). Helen is told to give each woman a number and to assign them to the barracks. Under the command of a whip, Helen begins to give the numbers, as the commandant shouts at the women that they “are numbers now” and they must forget their names (139).

Though Riva responds to the number that Helen assigns her, she insists to herself that she “must not forget [her] name” (140). Walking toward her new barrack, she repeats both name and number to herself: “Riva Minska. Number 55082” (140). Riva’s new bunk feels like “a coffin” where she is “about to be covered,” and she cries once she is in it (140). When she and the other women are ordered out of the barrack, she discovers that Tola is in her barrack, and the reunion feels “like finding a long-lost relative” (141). Together, they call for Karola and Rifkele, and find out that they, too, are assigned to the same barrack.

The happiness subsides, though, when they find that “the commandant and guards are waiting with clubs in their hands, and “cries of pain” ring around them (141). They hand out supplies unlike what the women had before: “a skirt, blouse, slip, and shoes,” even “metal cups, spoons, and canteens” (141). To Riva, it feels “like in the army,” because they “are an army—an army of slaves” (141).

The women run to wash off in the icy water provided and change into their new clothes, though they are called again quickly, some while still “dripping wet” and “half-naked” (142). Someone begins calling out numbers, and Riva is anxious about hearing and remembering her number, as those who do not are beaten. Those who are called are marched away, and when one girl asks to accompany her sister, she is told to “be silent” (142). The girls are gone all night, and when they return, in the morning, outside the gates of the camp, everyone starts to ask where they went. As the chapter ends, those who remain inside “are marched toward the open gate while the returning group is lined up outside the barracks” (143).