The Cage

When the factory closes for Christmas, Helen asks Riva to read poems to entertain the guards, at the commandant’s orders. The doctor is worried that the commandant will send Riva back to work at the factory if she sees her out in the world, but Riva feels ready to “help calm the beasts for a while” (185). When she enters the barrack for the show, “four hundred voices cheer,” all of whom “prayed for” Riva and participated in her struggle; when she won, they did, too (186).

During the show, the women “dance and sing for their captors,” their “dried-out bodies […] in a world of their own, a world of beauty” (186). Karola recites a poem in Yiddish that “tells of a regime that brings slavery and misery to a people and of a new regime that pays back the oppressor with the same misery it caused” (186-7). The dangerous message is a mystery to the commandant and the guards, who do not punish Karola, for they cannot understand her words.

Riva recites a poem about her mother, also in Yiddish, that is both personal and “the message of the four hundred Nazi victims in this camp to four hundred mothers crying for their children” (187).