The Cage

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Middle Grade | Published in 1986

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Chapters 21-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 21 Summary

For months after Yulek and Faygele leave, they hear nothing from them, because the ghetto still receives “no news” from the outside world (98). Increasingly, Riva notices signs advertising an extra loaf of bread for those who volunteer to leave for the labor camps. Eventually, the S.S. ghetto commander gives a speech, which workers are required to attend, in which he encourages Jews to leave Lodz for the labor camps; he wants to “protect [them] from the Russians” because the S.S. does not want them “to suffer” (99). Riva believes he sounds honest and caring in his speech, so that the question of whether or not to leave grows only more complicated for the Jews who hear his words and his apparent sympathy.

Mr. Berkenwald finds Riva, though, and begs her: “do not trust the Nazis. Hide” (100). His advice spreads in the crowd. The soldiers continue to take people away from Lodz, even pulling those who leave their homes into wagons, and their “screams and cries fill the warm summer air” (101). Everyone ceases to attend work, and they remain anxious throughout the day. Food rations begin to run out.

One day, the Nazis come earlier than usual, at dawn, yelling “Jews, out!” (102). Riva and her brothers “sleep half dressed” and are well practiced at hiding in their cellar, and so they hide “in moments. Precious moments” (102). They hold hands, and Riva remembers her mother as she works to have courage. As they hear footsteps walking to the cellar door, the siblings squeeze each other’s hands tighter. But the voice at the door belongs to Laibish, a neighbor, who has come to check on them.

Chapter 22 Summary

As the “brutal force” of the Nazis picks up, everyone lives in “constant terror of being caught and separated” from their families (104). “For five years,” Riva reflects, they have “fought for survival and dignity,” encouraged by the books that they protect (104). She wonders what will happen to the books and fears that they will be destroyed, but Moishele encourages her, and she realizes that “the wonderful ideas for a better world” within the books “will survive” (105).

Motele, who is nearly caught by the Nazis several times, begins to look defeated after his trips out to meet up with the family’s remaining friends. He announces that the family has “no choice,” that “the Nazis will find [them] soon,” and that when they are found, they may be killed (105). As always, the siblings look at each other “for a glimpse of hope” and “for strength,” but they recognize that they must volunteer to leave the ghetto if they hope to survive (105).

Motele arranges for all of the neighbors to come to their house and volunteer together, so that they can “all leave together, as a family” and hope to “remain together” (106). As they pack, the siblings want to take everything, but they settle on “just a few” family photographs, in particular one of their mother, which Riva lingers on (106). Riva rejects Motele’s suggestion that she take her writings with her, but both boys insist, echoing their mothers’ words: “If hope is lost, all is lost” (107). Riva gives in and packs her journal with her clothes for their “journey into the unknown” (107).

Chapter 23 Summary

The siblings stay up all night talking, hoping for “a miracle to end this nightmare,” but “the sun rises warm and bright” and “the bloody Nazi raids begin again” (108). Mrs. Boruchowich, one of their neighbors, arrives and embraces Riva, telling her: “You are all my children. I cannot live without my children,” which makes Riva sad, as she remembers that her mother said the same words just before she was taken (109). Mrs. Boruchowich remembers her child, Chanele, and cries freely about Chanele’s and Laibele’s graves, which they must abandon.

They leave the apartment, wary of leaving so many books behind, and they “lock the door” to proceed forth “in deadly silence, like a funeral procession” (109). More neighbors meet them in the street, and more “small groups of people with bundles on their shoulders or in their arms” slowly join the crowd (110). In this moment, Riva can see that their small group “are not the only ones still here” in Lodz (110).

She runs into an old neighbor, a tailor, who carries the head of an old sewing machine, which he never surrendered to the Nazis. He tells her that he “kept it for the day when there is a world again and I have to start a new life” (110). As they walk, “a parade of ghosts marches through a city of death,” and the “empty homes” seem to say “their last good-bye” (110).

Chapter 24 Summary

At the railroad station, people stand prepared for “a mass pilgrimage” (111). Motele works to keep their group together, but everyone at the station is “full of panic” when they see the cattle cars that await them. Riva and her siblings try to wave goodbye, and she notices their eyes, which are “petrified, aghast” (112). As rumors spread that “they stopped the deportation,” the cars fill with people, and “each wagon is locked” (112). The guards rush groups on board, and their group is summoned by voices that grow “angrier and louder” (112).

As people fall and struggle, the Nazis threaten, forcing fast and urgent movements. Motele and Moishele hoist Riva into the cabin, and then the group confirms that they all made it into “the crowded wagon,” “worn out from the horrible ordeal but relieved to be all together again” (113) As the doors shut, the family “are all in total darkness,” set into “ghastly shadows” where “rays of light break through” cracks in the walls (113). Some in the wagon draw the parallel between the wagon and a grave.

A conversation about faith, God, and hope ensues, and “bitter voices, angry, heartbroken, wailing” fill the wagon. Amid this despair, though, Riva and Motele strategize about what to do if the guards separate women and men; after they establish a plan, the siblings cry together, and Mrs. Boruchowich looks up to affirm that she will “watch over” her children (115).

As they travel, “days turn to nights and nights into days again” (115). The cracks in the wall tell of the passage of time. They “doze” and “awaken startled by nightmares to find that the nightmares are real” (115). The buckets for sewage are overflowing. People suffer. After three “long, horrible days and three terrifying nights,” the train stops, and music greets the train riders (116). Over a loudspeaker, a voice repeats: “Welcome to Auschwitz, Jews,” and “the living crawl out” while “the dead are pulled out” of the trains (116).

Chapters 21-24 Analysis

While a sense of fear slowly builds in Sender’s text, in the final chapters of Part One this fear develops into the nightmares that begin the book. Food, which acts as currency, dwindles, and death catches up with them: Riva leaves a place where each individual death or absence is mourned, and when the train pulls in to Auschwitz, “the dead” are an anonymous number equal in magnitude to “the living” (116). The border between life and death, between waking and nightmare, is blurred. This experience begins when the children hide in their dark cellar in Lodz, which is a precursor to the dark cattle car in which they ride out of the ghetto.

During the family’s last days in Lodz, they are preoccupied with hiding. Books are their lifeblood: education is not only just a way of perpetuating past traditions, but a way of connecting individuals to their futures. Motele and Moishele describe Riva’s journal as an emblem of hope when they use their mother’s phrase, “If hope is lost, all is lost,” to persuade her to bring it with her on the train (107). Though throughout their experience in the ghetto books replace bread, the lack of bread calls them to the fact that books are vital but replaceable; as Moishele reminds Riva, even if the books are lost are destroyed, “the wonderful ideas for a better world” within them “will survive” (105). The physical artifact, or “body,” that carries the idea is less important than the message that it leaves in a person’s memory.

This sense of “message” and idea mimics the legacy of the children’s mother, whose voice and words continue to assert themselves into the minds of Riva, Motele, and Moishele. Though they physically draw together for comfort as they confront fear, it is the internal, mental comfort of their mother that helps their bodies move forward. However insular their memory is, in the large numbers of Jews who crowd the streets and the train station on this last day, Riva sees that the image of a mother’s love, the need to learn from and live from memory, and the sense of intense doom that she feels are not in isolation.