Rosa and Stella can be seen as two "types" of survivors. Rosa, with one young child, places all of her efforts into keeping Magda alive. As long as Magda is alive, Rosa does not need to eat, for her nourishment comes from the safety of her child. Stella, however, has no other life to protect and has no maternal instinct to override the desperate self-preservation brought on by the Holocaust. The cold that descends upon her, permeates her very heart. Stella has found that she must harden herself to resist the Holocaust. Eventually, when she steals the life-giving shawl from Magda, her only explanation is that "[she] was cold".

There may be a tendency to judge Stella harshly for her callousness in taking Magda's precious shawl. But Stella, we are reminded, is only fourteen; she is on the brink of starvation. More tellingly, Stella wants to return to childhood, wishes she were young enough to be like Magda, wrapped in a shawl, like an external womb, safe from the horrific outer world. Stella is more to be pitied for her action, for she is in the most difficult position of all, being old enough to understand her position yet unable to put aside her still childlike needs. There is also a sense that Stella is a survivor—that she will emerge from the concentration camp. Indeed, when Ozick continues Stella and Rosa's story after the war, we find that it is Stella who has been able to resume some sort of a normal life and who in fact is helping support Rosa financially. Meanwhile, Rosa continues to have mental and emotional problems that prevent her from living independently.

Magda's character seems the most interesting and contradictory. Initially, it seems that she of all people is most blessed. She, unlike most Jews, was born with "eyes blue as air, smooth feathers of hair nearly as yellow as the Star sewn into Rosa's coat." Moreover, her silence ensures that she is smart enough not to resist, to remain in the comfortable womb that Rosa supplies for her. Ultimately, however, it is Magda who seems to undergo the greatest transformation. When Magda loses her shawl, she is thrust into the Nazi conflict just as Stella and Rosa are. While before a baby, Magda in some respects enters the adult world when her shawl is ripped away from her. Her reaction to this event is defiance, in a manner that no one else in the concentration camp dares to display. Her howling is more than a mere clamor for a lost shawl. It is a shout of defiance against her silence, her hunger, and her diminished position. "Magda's mouth was spilling a long viscous rope of clamor." It is a tiny uprising, a moment of triumph and freedom. When Magda dies, it is a death on multiple levels—a death of Magda's innocence and childhood and the death too of the reader's false sense of security and comfort.

Magda

Rosa's daughter, Magda, is a nursing infant hidden in her mother's shawl at the beginning of the story, and a fifteen-month-old child when she is killed. Magda is the center of Rosa's existence: Rosa gives Magda most of her own food and focuses much of her energy on worrying about what might happen to Magda and on keeping the child alive. Magda learns as an infant not to cry when she is hungry; instead, she satisfies her hunger by sucking on the shawl. The shawl becomes the center of her existence, her "own baby, her pet, her little sister." She hides under it to keep...