The Cage

Riva finds “irony” in the fact that “Nazi victims” are assigned to dig “ditches for the Nazis so they can resist [the Jews’] liberators” (205). As they prepare the trenches for death, Riva notices the return of spring, of land “renewing itself” “while death is staring” at them (205). Fixated on this death, Riva sticks her “shovel deep into the ground in silent protest, ignoring the guard above” who asks her: “Are you crazy?” (205).

Girls around her scream, reminding her that they are “all alone, forgotten by the world, at the mercy of murderers” at Grafenort (206). Riva digs again, but as she hears distant bombs, she meditates on whether she should feel despair or hope. Though the guards say that “the bombs do not mean liberation,” for they will kill all Jews” prior to the Jew being liberated, Riva continues to hear her mother’s words: “as long as there is life, there is hope” (206).

Karola pulls her out of her thoughts by asking if she knows the date. Riva asks, “what difference does it make?” and Karola responds that “it is May 3, 1945,” Riva’s birthday (206). She suggests that “next year,” if they survive, they will celebrate, and not in a ditch (206). But Riva tells Karola that they “must” survive and repeats her mother’s refrain that “as long as there is life, there is hope” (206). The listening guard, though, shuts down the idea; he tells Riva: “this is your last birthday, Jew. By next year you will all be dead” (206).

Two days later, they are ordered out of the camp, “outside the cage,” to dig again, walking where “the white, serene homes look like something from a beautiful picture postcard” (207). As Riva wonders how those in their peaceful homes can watch them walk by each day, another prisoner notices that they are walking on a new road, that “there are more guards,” that “there is something going on” (207). They walk toward some woods, filling with “fear” and “horrible thoughts” (208).

Just before they would enter the forest, a soldier on a motorcycle stops the march. He announces that the Russians are behind the group, and the news makes the guards “take off,” leaving the prisoners “standing on the road, bewildered” (208). The girls discuss whether to move or not, but one finally shares the news she overheard: that the guards had planned to kill them in the woods. “Tears fall freely” over Riva’s “sunken cheeks,” as she thinks: “as long as there is life, there is hope” (209). But no one can figure out what to do; they still are not free.

Girls begin to knock on the doors of homes along the street, but they recognize that the inhabitants “are hiding” from them (209). They return to “the open gates of the cage,” which no one has the courage to leave (208). On May 7, 1945, “like a prince in a fairy tale, a Russian officer on a white horse” enters the gates, followed by “Russian soldiers, tired, muddy” (210). They “stare” “as if seeing ghosts coming out of a grave” (210). In Yiddish, he asks: “Are there any Jews here?” and they respond: “We are Jews! We are still alive!” (210) The officer, who reveals that he is also Jewish, cries, and he tells them that they are “the first Jews” yet found alive (210). He cries, shakes his head, and issues a cry out into the air.

In the book’s final last chapter, Sender/Rivareturns to the book’s present day in the 1980s, where she answers her daughterNancy’s questions. Nancy asks her whether something like the Holocaust could “happen here” or “happen again,” and Riva, after consideration, replies that “if we forget the past, it could happen again” (211). She warns Nancy “not to ignore the ugly signs, the danger signs,” as her family and those around them did.

Riva tells Nancy about the “long and hard journey” back to Lodz, where she hoped to find her family (211). A new woman lived in her old home, she found, which was still filled with the same furniture. She shouts at Riva, telling her: “This is my home now!” (212). The Polish woman says that she threw away all of the pictures and books left behind when she moved in, and Riva feels “a stabbing pain” to think that “the witnesses of [the] struggle for dignity” were put in the garbage (212). Jews took the books from the front yard, and when Riva stopped to look through the garbage, nothing familiar remained.

She found Laibele’s grave, and then she decided to make him a gravestone out of bricks and a metal headboard. She cried there, not only for Laibele but “for all those who have no grave, no traces,” for “the lonely survivors who must go on” (214). Nancy already knows that Riva found Mala, Chanele, and Yankele, her siblings who were sent to Russia, at a Displaced Persons camp in Germany, and that, from there, they emigrated to America together. Riva tells her: “you have a new life,” and tells her, “I love you, Mommy” (214). The text ends with a refrain of Riva’s mother’s words: “As long as there is life, there is hope” (214).