The CAGE

A teenage girl recounts the suffering and persecution of her family under the Nazis, in a Polish ghetto, during deportation, and in a concentration camp.

Grade 9 Up This reflective Holocaust memoir presents a series of brief scenes from 1939, when the author was 12 and Hitler invaded Poland, through the Russian liberation of the Mitelsteine labor camp in 1945. Like many other survivors of the Holocaust who have written accounts, Sender presents harrowing descriptions of life and death in the ghetto and concentration camps, and gives fervent testimonials to the love, strength, and dignity that helped make her survival possible. However, this telling stands out in other, equally important respects. Riva's widowed mother is arrested early on, and much of the first part of the book concerns the then 16-year-old's courageous efforts to preserve a family with her younger brothers. Later, after a brief ordeal in Auschwitz, Riva is transported to a slave labor camp, where she becomes seriously ill. Remarkably, a camp doctor is able to convince the S.S. commandante that Riva should be treated in a hospital outside the camp. This extraordinary situation allows Riva, and readers, rare glimpses of wartime German civilian life, and of the small sparks of compassion and humanity still present in her Nazi captors. Older students with previous knowledge of the subject will find Sender's narrative moving and thought provoking. But because of the book's sparse, impressionistic writing style, and its highly selective content, The Cage should be purchased only as a supplement to well developed and much used Holocaust collections. Ruth Horowitz, Notre Dame Academy Girls High School, Los Angeles
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