The Cage

Outside of the camp, Riva and those around her march in a “darkness” which “covers the long, winding road,” through “a sleepy, peaceful village” (144). The harsh shoes are painful on Riva’s feet, but another girl is beaten when she tries to remove the shoes. Slowly, they approach “a row of low buildings,” but Riva sees “no chimneys” among them (145).

The women enter a factory, where an instructor teaches Riva how to assemble and test an electric drill. She worries that she “cannot see well without glasses,” and fears that she will be sent to Grossrosen (145). But because of Riva’s small stature, she can’t work at this machine, and so she joins a group of “rejects” in the corner (146). These women are marched through a door for “a dark tunnel” with dim, “yellowish shadows” cast by gas lights (146).

Given pails and shovels, the girls march toward the voice of a Frenchman, “a slave laborer,” who tells them that they “are building here an underground shelter for the Germans to hide from bombs” (146). Riva notes the “deep resentment in his voice” as he explains that, after he and his “comrades” dig, the girls will “fill the buckets with clay and pass them on from one to another” until “the last one in the chain will take them outside” (147).