The Cage

“I have the job of cleaning our windows for the holidays, and I see Mrs. Gruber standing under the tree, proud and stately, just like that old oak tree. I see the tree covered with big, green leaves, spreading out its branches like a beautiful umbrella even now, when it is first beginning to sprout.”

Riva first describes Mrs. Gruber’s oak tree as a haven for her community. In this first description, she also connects Mrs. Gruber to the tree, noticing the pride that they both share. The interconnectedness of humans and nature, Jews and non-Jews, in these early chapters creates a community that is historical and “stately,” able to protect its own from the harsh sun and renew itself year after year.

“Mrs. Gruber, you took our homes, you took our belongings, you took our pride […] Take the tree. The dead tree will help us remember what you became.”

When the oak tree comes down, it represents the loss of the community for Jews in Lodz. In Riva’s mother’s eyes, “the dead tree” is a symbol of the connections that brought people together before the rise of Nazism. Because Mrs. Gruber threatens to cut it down, Riva’s mother blames her for this loss, and she curses Mrs. Gruber with blame for the destruction that results from her actions.

“Like a revelation, bright and clear, it comes to me. The bravest person I have ever known is Mama.”

Riva’s mother is the guiding influence in her life, and so, as she increasingly needs courage to face rising oppression in the ghetto, she turns to her mother’s words to comfort her. This “revelation,” when Riva is thirteen years old, is a simple truth, “bright and clear,” that contrasts with the chaos and questions that plague her throughout her adolescent journey.

“This day will come, my darling brother. You’ll see, you’ll see. We’ll walk out of this cage, free to build a new life, a new world. No more hunger. Freedom, happiness. A world of brotherhood. A world of love and peace.”

As Laibele suffers from tuberculosis in their Lodz apartment, he and Riva bolster one another’s confidence. This is the first moment at which Riva refers to the ghetto as “this cage,” a place with an inside and an outside. She describes their coming freedom to Laibele by imagining and projecting a future without that wall, a practice that she continues throughout the story.

“With his hot tears pouring over my face, I know I am no longer a sixteen-year-old girl. I am a mother now.”

As Riva takes on the care of her brothers, she increasingly takes on the role of mother. This moment of recognition is pivotal for Riva, whose mother is the central figure of her life; she takes the role seriously. Becoming a mother (legally, eventually) pushes her into premature adulthood: she is “no longer a sixteen-year-old girl” because she takes on the tears of another, instead of seeking comfort for her own.

“I feel sorry for the helpless doctor. I feel sorry for Moishe and his wasted effort. I feel sorry for myself.”

As both her sickness and the conditions in the ghetto worsen, Riva begins to feel a kind of pity that complicates her can-do attitude. When Moishe, the “crazy person,” takes her allthe way to the doctor, who cannot help her, Riva begins to see how much human effort and knowledge is wasted. Moreover, she recognizes that her case is hopeless with the resources available in the ghetto, and, for the first time, she must sadly accept her condition and seek hope despite it.

“Good homes for my brothers! A good home for me! Do you think a little more bread, an extra piece of meat will take the place of brotherly love, give us the warmth of our home? Our house is empty without Mama, but our hearts are not. The love for one another that she planted there will always be with us. We can only be happy together. Please do not destroy us! Leave us alone. Please…”

Riva’s rebuttal to the Children’s Agency representative demonstrates the definition of family that she and her brothers develop once they live together in the ghetto. The need for food does not compare to the comforts of a family: its power as currency is not enough to convince Riva of its value as compared to the value of family. In this moment, Riva also articulates her sense that her mother lives on and remains present, “planted” inside of her regardless of where her mother is physically.

“Why are they behaving like this? They, too, are Jews, in the same cage, fighting for survival and the strength to hold out until tomorrow, a tomorrow that will bring us all freedom and dignity. So why do they act as if they were the masters and we were the slaves?”

Riva’s concern with loyalty and betrayal grows out of her mother’s fierce loyalty to the Grubers and their subsequent betrayal of the Jews in their community. Within “the same cage,” the Jewish police adopt a role “as if they were the masters and [other Jews] were the slaves” that disrupts a sense of community and comes off as betrayal to those who they hurt. Even in Lodz, the “cage” is a place that corrupts the normal order and sense of allegiance between people. Riva’s sense of loyalty and community leads her to question the motives and actions of those who abuse her.

“Don’t ever speak of dying! You are giving up? Don’t you ever, ever give up. There is a tomorrow for us! We will live to tell our story to the whole world. We must teach mankind what evil, hatred, and prejudice can do. We must make a better world by not letting them forget what has happened here. So, you keep on writing, and never stop being yourself.”

Yulek is Riva’s greatest peer and encouragement in Lodz, the first person outside of her family to intervene in her hopelessness. Because they both take on the burden of raising siblings, they feel ready to be open with one another. Yulek’s words to Riva focus on the “story” that she carries with her, capitalizing on her instinct to record and remember. He encourages her to persist. The idea that someone must add a story of the Holocaust to the collection of books (which Yulek and Riva enjoy so much together) is a central motivation, for Riva, to continue through the rest of her journey, long after Yulek leaves.

“Learning takes the place of food now. The books give us hope, strengthen our will to live, to plan for a better, brighter tomorrow. The knowledge they bring to our hungry minds gives new energy to our weak bodies.”

Like family, learning is an essential part of survival for Riva, her siblings, and her friends in the Lodz ghetto. Hunger is not only physical; satisfying mental cravings can also bring “new energy” to “weak bodies” when food is scarce. Because a lack of food is, eventually, the reason why Riva and her brothers leave the ghetto, the vital quality of learning and books (equal, for Riva, to the importance of food) focuses the reader’s attention on the importance of the written word and literary tradition for her.

“When I was a child, it was the symbol of freedom, a time to rejoice. But now it brings only the sad reality that we are still slaves—not in a faraway land, Egypt, but in the land of our birth, Poland. Will we, too, have a Moses to lead us to freedom, as our forefathers did? Is there a Moses among us?”

The Passover, or Pesach, is initially a time of joy and rebirth for Riva and her siblings. But the more that they suffer, and the more that they lean on learning from the stories of their ancestors, the more that Riva starts to identify with the peril of her ancestors, rather than their victory. Using the stories from the Jewish tradition, Riva frames her struggle to believe as part of a long tradition, a repetition of a past cycle of suffering. Like the seasons, which return to frozen ground and eventually find their spring, so, too, does the “freedom” and “rejoicing” give way to a familiar “slavery” that makes Riva wonder if she, and her family, will cycle back around to freedom.

“For five years we have fought for survival and dignity, living like human beings in spite of the savagery around us. I look at the closed curtains that hide the books, the source of our strength. They nourished our minds even while our bodies were withering. They helped us believe in a better tomorrow. What do we do with them? What will happen to the books now?”

As Riva, Motele, and Moishele leave the ghetto, Riva struggles to leave behind the apartment, and the books within it, that hold the memories of her suffering. The “savagery” and treatment that they experience in the ghetto only becomes worse when she arrives at the camps, and she recognizes, as she looks at the books, that she is leaving behind something that gives her strength. While she wonders about the books’ future, she is also wondering about her own future without them.

“We all walk together. Shots echo from the distance. A parade of ghosts marches through a city of death. Empty homes bid us their last good-bye.”

As Riva and her family prepare to board trains to the labor camps, their landscape begins to reflect the nightmares with which Riva begins her story. The “parade of ghosts” in “a city of death” prefigure the coming onslaught of skeletal bodies and landscapes of death that they walk toward; the “shots” that “echo from the distance” seem to call them closer in to violence. Homes bear character, just like people, and the ability to say good-bye: they are as important to Riva’s childhood as people, and that place is a home that she connects with on an intimate level, the loss of which she mourns just like she mourns the loss of a friend.

“Days turn into nights and nights into days again. The cracks in the walls let in some rays of sunlight to tell us it is a new day. The rays of moonlight coming through the cracks let us know it is night again. We doze, resting our heads on one another’s shoulders, awaken startled by nightmares to find that the nightmares are real.”

On the train to Auschwitz, night and day, nightmare and reality, begin to blend. Because they are shrouded in darkness, Riva and her companions seek just the smallest signs that can order time and help them to orient themselves in the world. But the dark conditions prevent them from knowing anything more than the smallest orienting detail, and the overwhelming darkness pushes them away from the orienting logic of day, free from nightmares, and instead reminds them that nightmares are constant, whether they are awake or asleep.

“They count the standing bodies again and again. They count the dead bodies on the ground. The count goes on for hours and hours. It is some sort of cruel game they are playing to see who can last longer. Is this their amusement? Are we their playthings?”

In Lodz, Riva is accustomed to mourning dead or lost bodies, but in Auschwitz, the soldiers emphasize the mass of dead bodies: Riva enters a new era, one in which death is the norm. Again, she asks many questions internally, as if unable to believe that the guards could be cruel enough to play a game with life and death. Just as the darkened cattle car that transports her to Auschwitz prevents her from seeing time clearly, this sense of repetition across “hours and hours” expands time into a long, unending dying all around her.

“I close my eyes and drift off to a different world. I am surrounded by living skeletons, their eyes bulging from their heads and their bony arms reaching out toward me to embrace me. I jump up, horrified. Was I asleep? Or was that real? Cold sweat covers my body.”

The experience of lifelike nightmares, which Riva explains in Chapter 1, becomes real in the labor camps, where the “skeletons” are her friends. Her full confusion over the blurred line between sleep and reality emerges here, and sleep becomes a dangerous place to go. Riva continues to avoid sleep in her bunks that feel like coffins, for sleep seems close to death, but sleep also feels just as horrifying as reality.

“I must remember my number. But I must not forget my name. I must not let them wipe out my name. Riva Minska. Number 55082. I whisper my name and number as I march into the barrack. Riva Minska. Number 55082.”

The dehumanizing number given to Riva in Mittelsteine is a tool, for her, one that seems critical to her survival. For Riva, there are two kinds of survival: physical and spiritual. Her number is vital to her physical survival, but her name is critical to her spiritual survival, the survival of her family, community, and individuality. As she repeats her name and her number, she asserts her desire to live, not only as a body, but as a person.

“The guard ignores me. My face feels hot. I have waited too long. I cross my legs, pressing them tightly together. I feel a warm flow slowly dripping down my crossed legs. I wish I could die. For once I am grateful for the darkness that surrounds me.”

Riva’s shame, when she first arrives at Auschwitz, emerges as her body becomes one of many, made naked and forced to fulfill its bodily functions among others, like an animal. Using the communal toilet, at Auschwitz, is traumatic for Riva, and control over her bodily needs is one of the most difficult parts of humanity to abandon as a prisoner. As she works in the tunnel at Mittelsteine, she expresses a deep sense of shame when she must wet herself without a private place to do so. Wanting to “die,” and feeling “grateful for the darkness,” are unfamiliar, and dramatic, ideas for Riva. In the most dehumanizing moments of her journey, Riva feels the most despair.

“The train empties. We wait. The people pass me by, looking the other way. A little girl, about seven years old, blond pigtails dancing on the collar of her brightly colored coat, stops and stares at me. She whispers something to the finely dressed lady holding her hand. I hear the woman say nervously, “Jew, Jew,” as she pulls the child closer to her side and quickly leaves the train. I suddenly remember childhood stories of monsters and boogeymen. Am I their boogeyman?”

Riva’s sense that she is haunted, no matter whether she is awake or asleep, transforms into a sense that she is the one doing the haunting on her trip to Glatz. Because Jews are turned into skeletons, half-dead creatures that appear to be the figures of nightmare, they haunt one another. But when Riva enters the world outside of her “cage,” she realizes that not everyone occupies the nightmare: her terrifying physical state contrasts more powerfully with the world outside, and she can recognize the intense abnormality and injustice of the dark spaces to which she can, at times, feel accustomed.

“Some of the people glance in my direction and turn their heads quickly. I feel so strange, taking cover from planes whose arrival I welcome. I feel strange hiding with the Germans. At the factory we are left standing outside during air raids, while the Germans take cover. Here, if a bomb should hit, we will all die together.”

Riva injures her hand while digging a bomb shelter that she cannot use, but in Glatz, she becomes one of many, in the dark space, hiding from the greater warring forces overhead. No one wants to recognize that Riva is in the room, and they “turn their heads quickly” to avoid the idea that they share a space with the kind of person who their regime seeks to punish and destroy. The idea of dying together is the greatest affront to the Nazis, who repeatedly claim that they will kill the Jews before the enemy will kill them. Riva seems to recognize the irony that being equal in death (dying at the same time) would be a kind of victory for her, an assertion that she and those in the bunker with her are equally human.

“Slowly words take shape on the paper she brings me. I write again. I hear the whistle outside my little world calling for head count. I hear the sound of the whip, the shouts. I cover my ears. I am lucky. I am in the sickroom, and I write.”

Throughout The Cage, sounds and environments shape Riva’s experience. The soundscape of Mittelsteine is repetitive and disorienting: it causes the prisoners to lose sense of progress, future, and hope. The distance of those sounds, as Riva recovers, allows her to feel safe, and gives her space to hope that her writing can be useful.

“My voice cracks. My personal message to Mama is the message of the four hundred Nazi victims in this camp to four hundred mothers crying for their children. My voice becomes stronger.”

Riva’s sensitivity to the mother-child relationship is the inspiration for the poem that she shares on Christmas. Though sadness, which causes her voice to crack, is her initial reaction to the memory of her own mother, the idea that sharing her message is a way to represent others gives her new courage. Throughout the text, Riva’s encouragers point her attention to the fact that her writing is not just a record for herself, but a collection that has use to educate and inspire others in the world. Her sense of the purpose of writing restores her hope when the actual memories that inspire her work bring her down.

“I take a deep breath. I am still safe. I dip my head into the warm water. What delight. How wonderful it feels to wash my hair in warm water. How much we take for granted. I hurry out of the tub. I must not get Katia into trouble. Smiling, I stand before Katia with a towel around my wet hair. Her face glows with joy. ‘We did it, Riva! You look so fresh, so clean, so new. We will do this again.’”

The warm bath that Katia gives to Riva allows her to be “new” for the first time in years. After her hand injury, which leaves her scarred and “damaged” permanently, her body bears markers of pain that will last. The Pesach “newness” with which the story begins feels impossible. By offering the feeling of being “new,” Katia shows Riva that such sensation is possible, despite the bodily destruction brought upon her.