The tone is one of fear and hysteria, madness and delirium. The Shawl story represents her most vivid memory. Most are unable to comprehend the unfathomable horror suffered by Holocaust survivors but this is what haunts her mind most. Something so ordinary as a shawl, so simple an object so easily taken for granted, ended up prolonging the life of her child, and serving as a symbol of the preservation of life. It wrapped Magda, leaving her unexposed to the unbearable cold and to the mayhem and terror happening around them. It magically kept her safe like a protective shield; because“she should have been dead already, but she had been buried away deep inside the magic shawl”. It arouses feelings of envy and jealousy from Stella, feelings that a fourteen-year-old girl should never feel toward her baby niece keeping warm in a shawl. So much so that she takes away the shawl, killing Magda. Here Rosa becomes aware that Stella will now forever be cold to the world. “Stella wanted to be wrapped in a shawl, hidden away, asleep, rocked by the march.” At times Rosa is raving: imagining her niece with cannibalistic desires (“She was sure that Stella was waiting for Magda to die so she could put her teeth into the little thighs”), contemplating thoughts of giving away her child to some random village female (“Rosa, floating, dreamed of giving Magda away in one of the villages”). These were the particular events leading to Rosa losing her child, the most poignant of the nightmare in its entirety. She’s starving and mad. Like the studies had targeted, patients that had been exposed to “any extended period of stress resulting from incarceration, exposure, and malnutrition,” such exposures that Rosa had suffered from and continues to suffer from, resulting in the inability to escape from the past in order to resume and carry on some form of normal and stable existence.

She so romanticizes about her childhood in Warsaw, one that was “stolen” away from her by “thieves,” that she is unable to solider on. The difference was created because the actual story is about how she has been affected, how those human injustices had such a derailing effect on her life and it has spiraled out of control into an all-consuming and uncontrollable bitter form of cynicism, leaving no room for any kind of enjoyment. I am about halfway through the book. Perhaps she uses both of these different stories to concoct a way in which Rosa finally comes to terms with her existence and is able to move on with her life. Already she has been introduced to Mr. Persky who makes an honest attempt to reach out and infect her with a more positive outlook on life, letting her know that she isn’t alone with the hurt and the regret (She can go see Michael J. Fox, distinguished lecturer at SCSU and allow his “incurable optimism” to inspire her). Miami isn’t so bad he says, “Nazis we ain’t got, even Ku Kluxers we ain’t got.” Putting things into perspective, he makes a good point that evil is everywhere. He relays his own hardships: “I unloaded on you, now you got to unload on me.” She ends up retreating from Persky's company, but in introducing this relationship, along with this letter from Dr. Tree, the author opens up many possible directions for the novel.