Cold and starving, a 14-year-old girl named Stella and a young woman named Rosa walk along a road; the two women are Jewish, and they are being taken to a Nazi concentration camp. Rosa is carrying her baby girl, Magda, whom she has wrapped in her shawl: “a squirrel in a nest, safe, no one could reach her inside the little house of the shawl’s windings” (4). The shawl doubles as a pacifier, now that Rosa is too malnourished to breastfeed. Although Rosa is largely in a trance-like state as she walks, she’s aware that Stella is jealous of Magda and suspicious of her “Aryan” (5) features.

Rosa manages to keep Magda alive for some time even after they arrive at the concentration camp: “[Magda] should have been dead already, but she had been buried away deep inside the magic shawl, mistaken there for the shivering mound of Rosa’s breasts” (5-6). Nevertheless, Rosa fears that someone at the concentration camp will report Magda or even kill and eat her. She feels particularly uneasy when Magda begins to learn to walk.

One day, Stella takes the shawl away from Magda to protect herself against the cold.