At the end of Ruth Minsky Sender's memoir, 'The Cage,' the survivors of the Nazi labor camp Grafenort are liberated by the Russians, but the hardship and suffering haven't ended for Riva. Struggling to find food and shelter and to hide from German and Russian soldiers who threaten rape, Riva makes her way to her home in Lodz, Poland, hoping in vain to locate surviving family. From Lodz she travels to Wroclaw, Poland, where Jewish transports from Russia arrive daily - and Riva finds love and, eventually, her older brother and sisters who escaped to Russia six years earlier. Then, in a displaced persons camps in, ironically, Germany, the family perseveres as they struggle to get clearance to emigrate to the United States to start a new life in the freedom they've dreamed of for so long.
