The Cage

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

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Download PDF

Chapters 42-44Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 42 Summary

When the factory closes for Christmas, Helen asks Riva to read poems to entertain the guards, at the commandant’s orders. The doctor is worried that the commandant will send Riva back to work at the factory if she sees her out in the world, but Riva feels ready to “help calm the beasts for a while” (185). When she enters the barrack for the show, “four hundred voices cheer,” all of whom “prayed for” Riva and participated in her struggle; when she won, they did, too (186).

During the show, the women “dance and sing for their captors,” their “dried-out bodies […] in a world of their own, a world of beauty” (186). Karola recites a poem in Yiddish that “tells of a regime that brings slavery and misery to a people and of a new regime that pays back the oppressor with the same misery it caused” (186-7). The dangerous message is a mystery to the commandant and the guards, who do not punish Karola, for they cannot understand her words.

Riva recites a poem about her mother, also in Yiddish, that is both personal and “the message of the four hundred Nazi victims in this camp to four hundred mothers crying for their children” (187). Riva feels strengthened and continues with her poem, but after the final line, she faints on the stage (189). As the doctor comforts her, in the sick room, the commandant arrives and orders the doctor to leave.

The commandant does not punish Riva, but instead pulls Riva’s journal from her pocket and gives it to her, telling her that she does “not have to hide [her] poetry” (190). She thought that she had “killed” the prisoners’ emotions, leaving behind only hunger, but the commandant admits that “You still feel. You still dream” (190). She admits that Riva’s poem reminds her of her own mother, and then she leaves the room. Riva thinks that she “must be dreaming” that “there is something human in that woman” (190). She reaches for her notebook again and again, to check that “it is real” (190).

Chapter 43 Summary

On January 19, 1945, the doctor tells Riva that she must go to the factory the next day, for the commandant’s inspector will come to the camp soon. Fearfully, Riva remains in the small sick room until the morning whistle, which summons her outside into “the icy air” (191). The other young women whisper “Good luck, Riva” (191). Standing in line, Riva reflects that three months have passed since her last trip to the factory. As the march begins, she struggles to walk.

At the factory, a guard pulls her away while the other young women go to work. She is assigned to the first aid station, where a woman with a Russian accent, Katia, gives orders to “help wash, sterilize, and reroll the bandages to be reused” (193). Katia tells Riva that the commandant sought this easier work specifically for her, and that she is lucky to take on this post.

Like the camp doctor, Katia’s husband was ordered into the German army. She has not heard from him “for a long time now” (194). After telling her story, she asks Riva about herself. When Riva tells her that she is from Poland, Katia tells her: “You will go back home, but I will never go home” (194). Katia tells Riva that they “will be friends” and that she would like to hear, to be called, by her Russian name (194).

Chapter 44 Summary

When Riva returns to her barrack, her “fifty roommates” greet her warmly and welcome her into her “old bunk” (195). “It feels strange” to be back in that space, where the bunk above “looks as if it will fall down” on top of her (195). Helen and the doctor come to check on Riva, to ease their worries about her safety. The commandant is “very unpredictable,” they explain, and so they did not know what work she would assign to Riva (196). Riva wonders about how the commandant can “act human to one person and be such an ugly beast to others” (196).

After long marches through the snow, Katia bandages Riva’s “half-frozen feet” and expresses her anger at the “Nazi murderers” who drag them through the snow. Sometimes, Katia sneaks food to Riva, watching “with pleasure” as Riva quickly swallows the food (196). One day, she sneaks Riva into the warm bath, just the idea of which causes Riva’s voice to break. She worries about the risk they both take, but she enjoys the “delight” of the warm water in her hair. When she emerges, Katia exclaims that she looks “so fresh, so clean, so new” (197). As they rejoice in her cleanliness, they run into a suspicious German guard. Though Katia explains that Riva slipped in the tub and “got all wet” while she was cleaning it, the guard menaces them both, telling Riva not to “be such a clumsy oaf” (198).

Katia tells Riva that the Russians are approaching. She is afraid that they will think of her as a “traitor,” insisting that the Russians “will not forgive” her for following her husband to battle. Riva is sad for Katia that the “price to pay for loving her husband” is “never to see her family again” (199). But even thinking about family makes Riva cry, and Katia comforts her.

Chapters 42-44 Analysis

The commandant extends Riva mercy after her illness, but Riva still struggles to understand her arbitrary decision to keep her safe when so many others suffer by her hand. As Riva must re-enter Mittelsteine, she recognizes that mercy, just like power, is arbitrary. In her case, though, the words that have given her hope also save her: they are the single means by which she reaches the commandant and garners sympathy from her.

Another serendipitous kindness comes from Katia, who, like the camp doctor, feels regret for her lost husband. The bath that Katia provides for Riva offers her a symbolic rebirth that she has lacked since before the deportations began. Though this rebirth inspires “joy” in Katia (197), it also inspires Riva to “smile” again (198). Where Riva’s illness showed the damage that a body can experience, the bath symbolizes the possibility that a body can emerge cleansed and refreshed. Riva’s body becomes a symbol of hope achieved through collaboration.

Motherhood and womanhood are, again, the major vehicles for sympathy and connection. Riva’s poem about motherhood is for both herself and the “four hundred mothers crying for their children” who live with her at Mittelsteine (187). But the subject of motherhood is what connects with the commandant, what inspires her to return Riva’s poems to her, what pulls her “human” characteristics forth. The solidarity of women, connected to their mothers, does not only keep Riva hoping, but actually saves her life.