Rosa did not feel hunger; she felt light, not like someone walking but like someone in a faint, in trance, arrested in a fit, someone who is already a floating angel, alert and seeing everything, but in the air, not there, not touching the road.
Rosa’s strength is about to expire, she is not able to feel hunger or much else anymore. Her state is described as a blurry smoke, something hovering incorporeally over everything that is happening. She may have no more physical strength to hold on, but she still is full of inner strength, the source of which is her daughter Magda. The shrewd wit with which the author describes emotions and feelings strikes the reader; Ozick uses few words and terse, succinct prose, but within the words and the penumbras the horror of the Holocaust is clear.
Rosa was ravenous, but also not; she learned from Magda how to drink the taste of a finger in one’s mouth.
In the brief text we see some changes occurring in Stella and Rosa. Stella seems to lose her humanity, her ability to be sympathetic. Rosa has not. She surely as well as Stella is starving and exhausted, but she does not lose her maternal impulse and will to endure. Magda is some kind of anchor holding Rosa moored to life, almost mirroring Rosa as a mother in her treatment of the shawl, which was "Magda's own baby, her pet, her little sister."
...Rosa heard real sounds in the wire: grainy sad voices. The farther she was from the fence, the more clearly the voices crowded at her. The lamenting voices strummed so convincingly, so passionately, it was impossible to suspect them of being phantoms.
The eerie voices contained within the fence are the only ones that "speak" in the text, even though Ozick only has them do so in Rosa's consciousness. They are the voices of the dead, the mourning Greek chorus observing the horrors of the Holocaust. They urge Rosa to "hold up the shawl, high; the voices told her to shale it, to whip with it, to unfurl it like a flag," which is a form of resistance. They then echo Magda's screams in that chorus fashion, "chatter[ing] wildly" the word "Maamaa." Finally, they urge Rosa to commit the suicidal action of running toward the dead Magda, but she knows that she cannot join them yet—she must live on and bear witness.
One mite of a tooth tip sticking up in the bottom gum, how shining, an elfin tombstone of white marble gleaming there.
Normally a child's first tooth would be a joyous occasion, but there is little of that here. Magda is growing up amidst the horrors of the Holocaust, and her life is enmeshed with death. Ozick frequently uses motifs and symbols and images of both life and death when describing Magda in order to convey how perilous her situation is. For example, even though the shawl is "magical" and keeps Magda alive, it is described like a burial shroud. And here, the comparison of the tooth to a tombstone is jarring, a description that foreshadows Rosa's conviction, stated a little later, that "[she] knew Magda was going to die very soon; she should have been dead already."
