Previous
Chapter 4
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
Soon, airplanes start dropping bombs on Warsaw. Stopthief and Uri stay in their basement during the day, only venturing outside at night to see the rooftops on fire. On some nights, they walk into empty shops and take whatever they like. Sometimes, they join the other orphans in the stable to wrestle and share food.
Stopthief and Uri adapt to their environment further: paradoxically, the chaos of war has made the struggle for survival easier on them in certain respects, shielding them from getting caught.
Themes
One day, the sirens stop. Uri takes Stopthief outside, where they find people hurrying down the street. Stopthief can’t help but run—and as he does so, he senses a deep rumbling in the earth and hears a beating like thousands of drums. When he reaches the front of the crowd, he sees endless lines of black, shiny boots. He realizes these are the “Jackboots” he’s heard Uri speak about.
Warsaw has fallen to the Germans at this point, and the Nazi soldiers are marching in to occupy the city. So far, to Stopthief, this is just another adventure—he doesn’t understand what the Nazi takeover means for the city or himself.
Themes
Stopthief is spellbound by the high-stepping boots and the men wearing them. At one point, a smiling soldier pulls Stopthief to his feet and greets him as a “tiny little Jew.” Stopthief corrects him, holding up his necklace and explaining that he’s a “Gypsy.” The soldier seems delighted by this. Then, his smile vanishing, he salutes and rejoins the parade.
Stopthief innocently regards his ethnic identity as a simple fact about himself that he wants this stranger to get right; he’s unable to see anything ominous in the soldier’s smile. In reality, being a “Gypsy,” a Roma person, was little better in the eyes of the Nazi regime than being Jewish.
Themes
Eventually, Uri joins Stopthief. Stopthief doesn’t know why neither Uri nor anyone else in the crowd cheers for the Jackboots. Soon, huge gray tanks roar down the street, and Stopthief can see that stopping the tanks with sandbags was a silly idea.
Stopthief regards the arrival of the Nazi occupation as a parade—something exciting to celebrate, so he doesn’t understand the somber mood of the rest of the crowd. His childish view heightens the ominous sense of what’s about to befall Warsaw—especially the city’s more vulnerable people, like Stopthief himself.
Themes
Get the entire Milkweed LitChart as a printable PDF.
