Jade Thiraswas

Both Cynthia Ozick and Charlotte Delbo's writings about life in concentration camps are morbid and intensely serious tragedies. While reading, for some reason I suspected a somewhat positive ending to occur after all the descriptions of suffering and misery. But I was incorrect about both stories. In "The Shawl" the horrific event of the baby dying was illustriously described in the last paragraph of the story. So full of metaphors and imagery, I had to re-read to understand what had actually happened. I had heard stories of this happening in concentration camps and it is such a horrifying thought, but I found the language Ozick uses to be very interesting, describing the sight with words of beauty, "She looked like a butterfly touching a silver vine. And the moment Magda's feathered round head and her pencil legs and balloonish belly and zigzag arms splashed against the fence, the steel voices went mad in their growling..." (Ozick 2301). The "steel voices" being the sounds of the high voltage electric fence.