The Devil's Arithmetic (19 page)

“Sam, don't hurry the child so. She's doing her part.” The woman who spoke had a plain face lit up by a special smile. “Come, sweetheart, sit by Aunt Eva.” She patted an empty chair next to her, then reached over and picked up her glass of wine. “You look so white, Hannahleh. Like death. How can we fix that?” She raised her glass, looked at Hannah. “
L'chaim.
To life.” She took a sip.

Hannah slipped into the chair, knowing it was the one the family reserved for the prophet Elijah, who slipped through the centuries like a fish through water. She watched all the grown-ups raise their glasses.

“L'chaim.”

Aunt Eva turned toward her, smiling. Her sweater was pushed back beyond her wrist. As she raised the glass again, Hannah noticed the number on her arm: J18202.

“Hannahleh, you're staring,” whispered Aunt Eva as the talk began around the table: Uncle Sam arguing about the price of new cars, Grandpa Will complaining about the latest government scandal, her mother asking Aunt Rose about a book.

“Staring?” She repeated the word without understanding.

“Yes, at my arm. At the number. Does it frighten you still? You've never let me explain it to you and your mother hates me to talk of it. Still, if you want me to . . .”

Hannah touched the number on her aunt's arm with surprising gentleness, whispering, “No, no, please, let me explain it to you.” For a moment she was silent. Then she said: “
J
is for Jew. And
1
because you were alone, alone of the
8
who had been in your family, though
2
was the actual number of them alive. Your brother was a
Kommando,
one of the Jews forced to tend the ovens, to handle the dead, so he thought he was a
O.
” She looked up at Eva, who was staring at her. “Oh! Your brother. Grandpa Will. That must have been him carrying Fayge. So that's why . . .”

Aunt Eva closed her eyes for a moment, as if thinking or remembering. Then she whispered back, “His name was Wolfe. Wolfe! And the irony of it was that he was as gentle as a lamb. He changed his name when we came to America. We all changed our names. To forget. Remembering was too painful. But to forget was impossible.” Her coffee brown eyes opened again. “Go on, child.”

Hannah took her hand from her aunt's arm and dropped it into the safety of her own lap. She couldn't look at her aunt any more, that familiar, unfamiliar, plain, beautiful face. “You said . . . ,” she whispered, “. . . you said that when things were over, you would be two again forever. J18202.”

They sat for a long moment in silence while the talk and laughter at the table dipped and soared about them like swallows.

At last Hannah looked up. Her aunt was staring at her, as if really seeing her for the first time. “Aunt Eva . . . ,” Hannah began and Eva's hand touched her
on the lips firmly, as if to stop her mouth from saying what had to be said.

“In my village, in the camp . . . in the past,” Eva said, “I was called Rivka.”

Hannah nodded and took her aunt's fingers from her lips. She said, in a voice much louder than she had intended, so loud that the entire table hushed at its sound, “I remember. Oh, I remember.”

AUNT EVA TOLD HANNAH THE END OF THE STORY MUCH
later, when the two of them were alone, because no one else would ever have believed them. She said that, of all the villagers young Chaya had come to the camp with that spring, only two were alive at the end of the war. Yitzchak, who had indeed escaped, had lived in the forest with the partisans, fighting the Germans. And Gitl. When the camp had been liberated in 1945, Gitl weighed only seventy-three pounds because she had insisted on sharing her rations with the children. But she was alive.

The
blokova
and all the villagers from Viosk were dead, but among the living, besides Gitl, Yitzchak, and Rivka, were Leye and her baby, a solemn three-year-old.

Gitl and Yitzchak had emigrated to Israel, where they lived, close friends, until well into their seventies. Neither of them ever married. Yitzchak became a politician,
a member of the Israeli senate, the Knesset. Gitl, known throughout the country as Tante Gitl and Gitl the Bear, organized a rescue mission dedicated to salvaging the lives of young survivors and locating the remnants of their families. It later became an adoption agency, the finest in the Mideast. She called it after her young niece, who had died a hero in the camps: CHAYA.

Life.

ALTHOUGH THE STERNS
'
SEDER IS NOT STRICTLY A
traditional one, it is a mirror of the Seders my family used to hold. My Uncle Louis was the one who always said, “And how do I know? Because I was there!” while hiding the
afikoman
in plain sight under his chair for the youngest to find and hide again. The word
Seder
literally means “order,” but my family's religious life was not an orderly one. Like many American Jews, it was one of rough-and-tumble choices and lots of love. We were Jews because we were born Jewish, not because of following strict rules. When I had to memorize Hebrew and history for my Confirmation, I continually complained how tired I was of remembering. However, there is an orderly progress to a Seder that a perusal of its guidebook, the Haggadah, will show to the curious reader.

All the facts about the horrible routinization of evil in
the camps is true: the nightmare journeys in cattle cars, the shaving of heads, the tattooing of numbers, the separation of families, the malnutrition, the
musselmen
and the
Kommandos,
the lack of proper clothing, the choosing of the victims for incineration. Even the midden pile comes from the camp experiences of one of my friends.

Only the characters are made up—Chaya, Gitl, Shmuel, Rivka, and the rest—though they are made up of the bits and pieces of true stories that got brought out by the pitiful handful of survivors.

The unnamed camp I have written about did not exist. Rather, it is an amalgam of the camps that did: Auschwitz, with its ironic sign
ARBEIT MACHT FREI
, was the worst of them, where in two and a half years two million Jews and two million Soviet prisoners-of-war, Polish political prisoners, Gypsies, and European non-Jews were gassed. Treblinka, where 840,000 Jews were killed. Chelmno, with its total of 360,000 Jews. Sobibor, with its 250,000. There were other camps, and their count is the Devil's arithmetic indeed: Belzec, Majdanek, Dachau, Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Ravensbruck. The toll is endless and anonymous. Whole families, whole villages, whole countrysides disappeared.

At the time of the Holocaust, it seemed impossible to imagine, for the scale of slaughter was difficult to grasp. Today, a lifetime later, we can echo Winston Churchill, who wrote: “There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible single crime
ever committed in the whole history of the world.” And yet it is
still
impossible, unimaginable, difficult to grasp. Even with the facts in front of us, the numbers, the indelible photographs, the autobiographies, the wrists still bearing the long numbers, there are people in the world who deny such things actually happened.

After all, how can we believe that human beings like ourselves—mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers—could visit upon their fellow humans such programmed misery, such a routine of torture, all couched in the language of manufacture: “So many units delivered . . . operating at full capacity.” These were not
camps,
even though they were called so. These were
factories
designed for the effective murder of human beings.

There is no way that fiction can come close to touching how truly inhuman, alien, even satanic, was the efficient machinery of death at the camps. Nor how heroism had to be counted: not in resistance, which was worse than useless because it meant involving the deaths of even more innocents. “Not to act,” Emmanuel Ringelblum, a Jewish historian of the Holocaust, has written, “not to lift a hand against the Germans had become the quiet passive heroism of the common Jew.” That heroism—to resist being dehumanized, to simply outlive one's tormentors, to practice the quiet, everyday caring for one's equally tormented neighbors. To witness. To remember. These were the only victories of the camps.

Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can
attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks.

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