It is a cold day and women are walking in a bleak landscape. Rosa is carrying her daughter Magda, a baby of fifteen months wrapped in a shawl. Another girl, Rosa’s niece Stella, is also walking with them. She is fourteen years old, and sometimes is very jealous of the shawl that keeps her cousin warm. They all are very hungry.
It becomes clear that these women are Jewish (Rosa wears a yellow star), and they all must have been in a Holocaust camp, and/or are walking to one, because while walking Rosa dreams of giving up Magda to any woman she might meet in villages they pass by. However, she is afraid that if she moves out of the line, the officers will shoot.
Magda has already abandoned sucking Rosa’s teats as there is no milk, but she suckles her shawl instead and makes no noise. It is implied that Magda’s father was a Nazi soldier, and Stella calls her “Aryan”; her chilling tone gives Rosa the impression that Stella would gladly eat Magda.
Rosa always keeps Magna wrapped in the shawl so no one can find her. Magda in her turn is mute, so no one knows of her. But Rosa understands that Magda will die anyway, and would have been dead already if not for the “magical” shawl.
Every day Magda is concealed under the shawl against a wall when everybody else is put into the line. But one day Stella takes Magda’s shawl to put over herself, and Magda begins to cry and goes outside of the barracks to find it. She begins to howl.
Rosa hears the howling and knows it is Magda. Though she quickly fetches the shawl, it is too late. She can do nothing while a guard picks up the child and hurdles her into the electric fence, killing her.
Rosa cannot scream or make a move because she knows she will be killed as well, so she stuffs the shawl into her mouth to muffle her screech.
