The Shawl

The Shawl Summary | Detailed Summary

This story is Rosa's recollection of a death march to a concentration camp and later, life in the camp, with her newborn daughter Magda and 14-year-old niece Stella. Therefore, it begins, not with a journal entry but with a characterization of Stella tainted by events yet to come. "Stella, cold, cold, the coldness of hell."

Rosa cradles her tiny baby at her breast, wrapped in a shawl. No one knows she is there except Rosa and Stella. Magda is hungry and Rosa nurses her. Magda cries and Rosa comforts her blond, blue-eyed daughter, who could pass for the Germans who imprison them. Rosa imagines how she will spare her daughter the fate that awaits them, perhaps by pushing her bundle into the arms of a woman at the edge of a village they pass, but so much could go wrong. Instead, she imagines that Magda is safe so long as she is bundled in the shawl. Magda sucks on the shawl when there is no more milk and Rosa imagines that it is nearly magical in the way it nourishes her for the next three days and nights.

Meanwhile, Stella, described as "a thin girl of fourteen," is a child herself in need of comfort, jealous even of the tiny, weak infant. She longs to be wrapped in the shawl, hidden, sleeping, rocked by the march. She pronounces Rosa "Aryan" and Rosa thinks it sounds as if she says, "Let us devour her." Rosa fantasizes that Stella's hunger is such that she will eat the baby if she dies.

In camp, Rosa keeps Magda alive by giving almost all of her food to her, which causes her milk to dry up again. Stella gives nothing. Rosa is able to hide Magda in the shawl in the barracks, but when Magda begins to walk, Rosa knows she will not live much longer. Something will happen. One morning after Rosa has left for roll call, Stella takes the shawl because she is cold. Magda searches for it, walking out of the barracks.

Rosa sees her and hears her crying for the first time since the march. Rosa runs to find the shawl to conceal her. She tears it off Stella and runs back into the sunlight with dozens of images of death flashing before her eyes: meadows of flowers just outside the compound fed by human wastes, composted with remains, watered by a fatty smoke from the gas chambers. She hears the hum of the electric fence and in it voices telling her what to do next: to distract the guard by waving the shawl like a flag. However, already he is carrying Magda away, then hurling her toward the fence. "She looked like a butterfly touching a silver vine," Rosa recalls. Moreover, although the voices in the fence urged her to run, to pick up her daughter, she knew she would be killed if she obeyed. Rosa stuffs Magda's shawl in her mouth to stifle the scream.