The Cage

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

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Symbols & Motifs

The Cage

Riva’s initial poem, the Prologue of The Cage, establishes the idea that she is in a “cage,” surrounded by “barbed wire,” from which she hopes to escape to rise “like a free bird.” Though she writes this poem from Mittelsteine, Riva inhabits many cages throughout the text: the walls of her apartment, the Lodz ghetto, and the labor camp all serve as cages that try to prevent her from speaking out.

In Lodz, Riva describes the ghetto as a “cage” whose walls continue to close in on her and her brothers. She keeps Laibele’s hope alive by describing a time that she imagines, in the future, when they will “walk out of this cage, free to build a new life, a new world” (29). The Jewish police are “in the same cage,” seeking the same “tomorrow,” though they act differently because of their role in the community (61). The walls change the abilities of those within them, and they also change their capacities for love, loyalty, and friendship.

Riva moves from cage to cage within the text, and even the wagons and cattle cars that transport her are cages, always barred with doors and covers. When she walks to the train station to be treated at the hospital in Glatz, she feels strange left open in space with just a guard trailing behind her; later, when the guards abandon her with her fellow prisoners just before the woods, they return to “the open gates of the cage,” because the cage is the only space that seems safe or familiar (208).

Those trapped in these cages are strained, but they adapt with the tools that they have: fellowship, singing, and writing help Riva and those around her to live their lives despite the bars that surround them. With each other’s help, they can remember that the strange order inside the cages (that deprives victims, drains oppressors of emotions, and dehumanizes all involved) is not natural like the cycles of nature happening outside of the cage. By interrogating those outside of the “cage” at Grafenort, Sender asks her reader to consider which “cages” exist in the world around them from which they avert their gaze.

Nightmares and Dreams

Sender’s story begins just after a nightmare that she reveals is a recurring one. Her nightmares “fill most of [her] nights and stay with [her] through most days,” a haunting that blurs the line between waking and sleeping, fact and fiction (3). Sender’s novel, which reads like fiction, is also her autobiography, but what is “real” and what is “imagined,” in her own mind, become scrambled, because nightmares assert themselves without her control.

Riva starts to feel that she is living in a “nightmare,” and as she exists Lodz, she is part of “a parade of ghosts [that] marches through a city of death” (110). The “skeletons” around her, at Auschwitz, Mittelsteine, and Grafenort bridge the gap between living and dying, but they are also the haunting figures of nightmares. These haunting images stay with Riva just as much as the words from her mother linger in her mind, suggesting that the past is not the past, that nightmares are not limited by the boundaries of sleep, and the evil cannot be reliably controlled.

Even as nightmares play a constant role in Riva’s life throughout her teenage years, blurring with reality more and more as she moves from camp to camp, dreams are also an important part of her survival. Riva’s active imagination enables her to envision a future that she shares with those around her, a future of survival that eventually comes to her. Though Nancy is part of her nightmares, she is also part of her dreams, and they both, though out of her control, are part of the narrative that she tells.

Food

Food becomes the central concern of Riva’s story quickly, mostly because the walls of her “cage” tend to keep it from flowing in or out. In the Lodz ghetto, food is currency: Motele and Moishele trade their bread rations for tangerines and tailor services to take care of Riva, who takes care of the brothers. Food’s scarcity calls attention to the body, which relies on it for energy, but it also calls attention to the other sustaining features of the ghetto: its libraries, its family photographs, and its people. As books provide a different kind of nourishment for Riva and her family, they emphasize the importance of feeding a person, both literally and figuratively.

Possession of food is also possession of power, and when the Auschwitz guards pour hot soup on their prisoners, they are able to waste what is precious in order to display their power and authority. When Faige goes “crazy,” her madness emerges during her punishment for stealing mere potato peels (135). In response to the spectacle of Faige beating her sister, the commandant withholds food from all of the prisoners, as a warning. Later, after Riva recovers from her infected wound, Katia feeds her nourishing food, but only in secret.

Darkness and Light

Throughout Riva’s trying Holocaust experience, she experiences dramatic shifts between light and darkness. In the cattle car, on the way to Auschwitz, she experiences total darkness, desperately seeking “rays of sunlight” through cracks in the walls to signal the coming of a new day (115). Riva’s subsequent transportation experiences enclose her in darkness, and she is barely able to tell the time. Even her bunk feels like a “coffin” (140) at Mittelsteine, where she works in a “clay grave” (148). These dark spaces constantly elicit the idea of death, for Riva, and the shock of emerging from them into “bright sunshine,” which so often shines upon tragedy, is jarring (136).

Indeed, light is not necessarily relief from evil as much as it is a way of illuminating the suffering that Riva otherwise cannot see. Just as nightmares blur the line between reality and fiction, night and day blur, and with them, the symbolic “evil” of darkness and the “hope” of the light. Riva loses track of the time and date as she descends into the “hell” of the labor camp, because these marked cycles do not mean relief from evil or conflict.

Darkness is also connected to blindness, especially the blindness that Riva feels when robbed of her glasses at Auschwitz. That darkness obscures her ability to recognize her friends and familiar faces within the camp. In the camps, darkness is not just a natural cycle, but the product of conditions that humans impose on one another. Darkness, then, enhances the sense of disorder and disruption of the natural during the Holocaust.