The Cage

Immediately after disembarking the train at Auschwitz, men and women are separated, “so fast, like in a horrible dream” (119). Though she desperately calls for her brothers, she loses them immediately in the pushing crowds, and her calls are lost amid all the others calling after their loved ones. Riva watches Mrs. Boruchowitch be pulled to a side group and watches as her daughter, Rifkele, is kicked away from that group. Another neighbor, Karola, encourages Riva that her brother and Riva’s brothers were together when she last saw them. Karola’s mother is pulled away from them. All around the young women, voices rise, repeating: “You must not lose hope!” (120)

Riva hopes “that it is all a horrible nightmare” (120), “but the nightmare continues” (121). The sounds of whips and blows, and the pain they create, circle around Rifkele, Karola, and Riva. They are ordered into a barrack and must undress; “like a zombie,” Riva follows orders, feeling “suddenly blind” when she loses her glasses, “left all alone in the darkness” (121). A woman “in striped prison clothes” shaves her head, for fear of lice, in a room full of “mountains of hair” and “piles of clothing” “growing bigger and bigger with each passing row of new arrivals” (121).