Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Milkweed, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Identity and Relationships
War, Dehumanization, and Innocence
Ingenuity, Resilience, and Survival
Family
Summary
Analysis
The Milgroms hear voices singing in the courtyard: it’s a group of children singing at windows for food. They family has nothing to give the children. As winter turns to spring, bodies are left on the streets and more smugglers are hung. Sometimes, Misha can’t find any food, just drippings of fat from the bottom of a garbage can.
Conditions in the ghetto are growing more dire than ever: Misha’s inability to find more than drippings shows how desperate things have become. By this point in the war, the Warsaw ghetto was approaching a death toll of 83,000 people.
Themes
However, even as Janina grows thinner, she becomes more like her old self. She starts following Misha again, and she even starts harassing the Flops. Misha tries to stop her, but nothing helps. Misha has always accepted the world as he finds it, whereas Janina resists it. Sometimes, Misha retreats to his favorite bomb crater just to get away from her, licking traces of fat from his fingers and dreaming of the days when he stole loaves of bread from rich ladies.
Misha and Janina have different ways of responding to the terrible conditions that confront them. Misha has always found ways of dodging obstacles and working around them; Janina resents and confronts them. Neither way is presented as better than the other, as both children are doing the best they can to survive circumstances that threaten to crush their humanity.
Themes
