The greatest irony in Cynthia Ozick's powerfully poignant story lies in the fact that the protagonist, Rosa, takes care of a child (Magda) who seems to be the progeny of a member of the same race as Rosa's persecutors and captors. The story is set in a Nazi concentration camp and Rosa and Stella are Jewish.
Rosa, who is starving, suckles Magda who drains her breasts dry. She wraps Magda in a shawl and keeps her warm. She also gives all the food to the baby. Magda is, therefore, comfortable and she is described as
...a squirrel in a nest, safe, no one could reach her inside the little house of the shawl’s windings.
Stella, a fourteen-year-old girl and the third character in the story, states that Magda is Aryan. Nazi ideology proposed that Germans were of Aryan stock and, therefore, of a superior race who held...
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the highest position in the racial hierarchy. We know that Magda is different because the story mentions that her face was
not Rosa’s bleak complexion, dark like cholera, it was another kind of face altogether, eyes blue as air, smooth feathers of hair nearly as yellow as the Star sewn into Rosa’s coat. You could think she was one of their babies.
In essence, then, Rosa was taking care of a baby whose father was probably German and giving the child everything she had even though she had no reason to, while her German captors were indiscriminately murdering her kind. Truly ironic.