Thinness of the characters
The author is not very generous with character description, but what draws attention the most is the meagerness of the characters. Stella’s “knees were tumors on sticks, her elbows chicken bones,” and when Rosa comes for Magda’s shawl Stella was “heaped under it, asleep in her thin bones”. Rosa herself feels like she is only air now, giving us an image of trauma, incorporeality, vanishing.
And Magda who was “only fifteen months old” could not stand “because the spindles of her legs could not hold up her fat belly, which was fat with air”. Even though the author does not describe in details the appearance of the characters, this is enough to comprehend all the wretchedness of their state.
Barracks
Ozick's portrayal of the barracks where the Jews had to live gives quite an image of its horror: “excrement, thick turd-braids, and the slow stinking maroon waterfall that slunk down from the upper bunks, the stink mixed with a bitter fatty floating smoke that greased Rosa’s skin." The conditions are beyond deplorable; they reduce the inhabitants to worse than beasts and demonstrate how little the Nazis thought of the Jews.
