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Ruth Smiley Sender's The Cage

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“We wait for a miracle to end this nightmare. But no miracle comes. The sun rises warm and bright. The bloody Nazi raids begin again” (Sender 128). In the book The Cage by Ruth Minsky Sender, Riva a sixteen year old girl has to take care of her younger brothers after their mother is taken by the Nazis to a brutal labor camp. As the Nazis try to destroy Riva and her brothers lives the only thing that they can do is cling onto hope as they face the fear of being killed in their own homes everyday. “We live in constant terror of being caught and separated. The Nazis are emptying the ghetto quickly, with brutal force. The food rations are running out. We have no weapons to fight with them. For five years we have fought for survival and dignity, living like human beings in spite around us. I look at the closed curtains that hide the books, the source of our strength. They nourished our minds even while our bodies where withering. They helped us believe in a better tomorrow” (Sender 130). Although, Riva and her siblings were close to death by the lack of food and disease they still managed to hold onto hope. Riva and her siblings could be punished to death if the Nazis found out they where hiding the books. The reason they kept the books was because when Riva and her brothers read them …show more content…

Riva and her brothers watch the painful sight of their mother being taken away by the Nazis in the beginning of the book, “I hear Mama’s agonizing scream, and the wagon disappears from sight. Moishele and I help Motele lup. He is bleeding. I wipe the blood with my sleeve. We stare at one another in shock three bewildered kids in the middle of an empty world” (Sender 38). Riva a sixteen year old girl now has to step up to be the mother figure for her three younger brothers who are not coping well with the death of their

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