The Cage by Ruth Minsky Sender

The Cage by Ruth Minsky Sender

245 pages
(Non-fiction)

This book was truly amazing! I have read a lot of Holocaust survival memoirs before, but this book starts out in the ghetto of Lodz. I didn't know much about Jewish life at this point. I was moved by tears at their way of life, and the sacrifices they made for those around them. The one new thing I learned...many Jewish men in the beginning actually volunteered to go into the labor camps. They were manipulated into believing that their family back in the ghetto would receive better treatment and more food rations for the men volunteering.

(from back of book)
Motele is standing near the wagon, calling, "Mama, jump!" She is trying to jump into Motele's arms, but the two steel hands of a ghetto policeman hold her back. Motele tries to pull her away from the policeman, pull her off the wagon. The policeman kicks him to the ground and speeds up the wagon. I hear Mama's agonizing scream, and the wagon disappears from sight.
It is September 1942. For two years the Minsky family, along with 180,000 other Jews, have suffered hunger, fear, and degradation inside the barbed-wire cage that is the Lodz ghetto. But at least they have been a family. Now Riva and her brothers are alone.
At sixteen Riva becomes her brothers' guardian. She nurses the sick Laibele, recites the stories of Sholom Aleichem, sings to him. Together with Motele and Moishele, she hides him from the Nazis. And when he dies she thinks, "Now we are only three." She can hardly imagine that before long the Minskys will be deported to Auschwitz-and there will be only one.