The Devil's Arithmetic

by Jane Yolen

  It began like any other Passover Seder. . . .

  Hannah moved toward the front door. She certainly didn’t believe that the prophet Elijah would come through the apartment door any more than she believed Darth Vader or Robin Hood would. No one believed those superstitions anymore.

  Glancing over her shoulder, Hannah saw her family were all watching her intently. Aaron bounced up and down on his chair.

  “Open it, Hannah!” he called out loudly. “Open it for Elijah!”

  Flinging the door open wide, she whispered, “Ready or not, here I c . . .”

  Outside, where there should have been a long, windowless hall with dark green numbered doors leading into other apartments, there was a greening field and a lowering sky. The moon hung ripely between two heavy gray clouds. And across the field marched a shadowy figure. He had a shapeless cap on his head, a hoe over his shoulder, and he was singing. . . .

  “Yolen does a fine job of illustrating the importance of remembering.”

  —School Library Journal, starred review

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  The Devil’s Arithmetic

  by Jane Yolen

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood. Victoria. Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd. 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182–190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin Inc., 1988

  Published in Puffin Books 1990

  Copyright © Jane Yolen, 1988

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Yolen, Jane. The devil’s arithmetic / by Jane Yolen. p. cm.

  Summary: Hannah resents the traditions of her Jewish heritage until time travel places her in the middle of a small Jewish village in Nazi-occupied Poland.

  ISBN: 9781101664308

  [1. Jews—Fiction. 2. Concentration camps—Fiction. 3. Time travel—Fiction.] I. Title.

  [PZ7.Y78De 1990] [Fic]—dc20 90-33007

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Version_1

  To my Yolen grandparents, who brought their family over in the early 1900s, second class, not steerage, and to my Berlin grandparents, who came over close to that same time and settled in Virginia. We were the lucky ones. This book is a memorial for those who were not.

  And for my daughter, Heidi Elisabet Stemple, whose Hebrew name is Chaya—pronounced with the guttural ch as Hī’-yå—which means life.

  And with special thanks to Barbara Goldin and Deborah Brodie, who were able to ask questions of survivors that I was unable to ask and pass those devastating answers on to me.

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  Epilogue

  WHAT IS TRUE ABOUT THIS BOOK

  1

  “I’M TIRED OF REMEMBERING,” HANNAH SAID TO HER MOTHER as she climbed into the car. She was flushed with April sun and her mouth felt sticky from jelly beans and Easter candy.

  “You know it’s Passover,” her mother said, sighing, in a voice deliberately low. She kept smiling so that no one at Rosemary’s house would know they were arguing.

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Of course you knew.”

  “Then I forgot.” Hannah could hear her voice beginning to rise into a whine she couldn’t control.

  “How could you forget, Hannah. Especially this year, when Passover falls on the same day as Easter? We’ve talked and talked about it. First we’ve got to go home and change. Then we’re going to Grandpa Will and Grandma Belle’s for the first night’s Seder.”

  “I’m not hungry. I ate a big dinner at Rosemary’s. And I don’t want to go to the Seder. Aaron and I will be the only kids there and everyone will say how much we’ve grown even though they just saw us last month. And, besides, the punch lines of all the jokes will be in Yiddish.” When her mother didn’t answer at once, Hannah slumped down in the seat. Sometimes she wished her mother would yell at her the way Rosemary’s mother did, but she knew her mother would only give her one of those slow, low, reasonable lectures that were so annoying.

  “Passover isn’t about eating, Hannah,” her mother began at last, sighing and pushing her fingers up through her silver-streaked hair.

  “You could have fooled me,” Hannah muttered.

  “It’s about remembering.”

  “All Jewish holidays are about remembering, Mama. I’m tired of remembering.”

  “Tired or not, you’re going with us, young lady. Grandpa Will and Grandma Belle are expecting the entire family, and that means you, too. You have to remember how much family means to them. Grandma lost both her parents to the Nazis before she and her brother managed to escape. And Grandpa . . .”

  “I remember. I remember . . . ,” Hannah whispered.

  “. . . Will lost everyone but your Aunt Eva. A family of eight all but wiped out.” She sighed again but Hannah suspected there was little sympathy in that sigh. It was more like punctuation. Instead of putting periods at the ends of sentences, her mother sighed.

  Hannah rolled her eyes up and slipped farther down in the seat. Her stomach felt heavy, as if the argument lay there like unleavened bread.

  It wasn’t a particularly long trip from New Rochelle to the Bronx, where her grandparents lived, but the car was overheated as usual and Aaron complained the entire way.

  “I’m sick,” he said loudly. Whenever he was unhappy or scared, his voice got louder. If he was really sick, he could hardly be heard. “I’m going to throw up. We have to go back.”

  As her mother turned around and glared at them from the front seat, Hannah patted Aaron’s hand and whispered, “Don’t be such a baby, Ron-ron. The Four Questions aren’t that hard.”

  “I can’t remember all four questions.” Aaron almost shouted the last word.

  “You don’t have to remember them.” Hannah’s patience was wearing thin. “You’re supposed to read them. From the Haggadah.”

  “What if I can’t read it right?”

  Hannah began to sigh, caught herself, and turned it into a cough. “Y
ou’ve been reading right since you were three, Mr. Smarty.” She cuffed him lightly on the side of the head and he cried out.

  “Hannah!” her father called back in warning.

  “Look,” she said quickly to Aaron to shut him up, “it doesn’t matter if you make a mistake, Ron-ron, but if you do, I’ll be right there next to you. I’ll whisper it into your ear just like they do in plays when someone forgets a line.”

  “Like Mrs. Grahame had to do when you forgot . . .”

  “Just like that.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  She gave him a funny look and then pounced on him, tickling him under the arms and over his belly. When he tried to escape by turning his back on her, she got him again from behind. His laughter rose higher and higher until he almost did throw up.

  “Hannah!” her father said again and her mother stared at them so fiercely over the seat that they drew themselves into opposite corners, staring out their windows with expressions of injured innocence.

  A few miles farther on, Aaron begged, “Tell me a story, Hannah, please. Please. Please.”

  “For God’s sake, tell him a story,” her father said, pounding his right hand against the steering wheel. Driving in city traffic always made him cranky.

  Glad to be doing something she knew she was good at, Hannah began a gruesome tale about the walking dead, borrowing most of the characters, plot, and sound effects from a movie she’d seen on television the night before. Aaron was fascinated by it. The zombies had just marched into the hero’s house and eaten his mother when they arrived at the apartment house complex.

  While their father parked the car, Hannah and Aaron raced into the building. Because he was the youngest, Aaron got to press the elevator button.

  “That’s not fair . . . ,” Hannah began. But then she remembered how scared she’d been the first time she’d had to ask the Four Questions at the Seder and she stopped. Instead she reached out and held his hand tightly as the elevator rose to the ninth floor in a single great swoop.

  “Hannahleh, how much you’ve grown,” Aunt Rose said. “Twelve years old and already a beautiful young lady.”

  Hannah smiled and pulled away as soon as she could.

  “Thirteen,” she said. It was almost true. She didn’t ask Aunt Rose how anyone could be beautiful with mouse-brown hair and braces on her teeth. Aunt Rose thought everyone in the family was the most beautiful, the smartest, the greatest, even if it wasn’t true.

  Escaping Aunt Rose’s attentions by going into the bathroom, Hannah looked at herself in the mirror. There was a lipstick stain where Aunt Eva had kissed her on the forehead. She ran some water and tried to scrub it off, feeling guilty because Aunt Eva was her favorite aunt, the only one who preferred her over Aaron. Hannah was even named after some friend of Aunt Eva’s. Some dead friend. The lipstick wouldn’t come off completely. Brushing her bangs to hide the mark, Hannah left the bathroom worried that someone else might be lying in wait for her, and dreading it.

  2

  NO ONE EVEN NOTICED HANNAH’S ENTRANCE INTO THE living room. They were all in a tight semi-circle around Grandpa Will. He was sitting in the big overstuffed chair in front of the TV set, waving his fist and screaming at the screen. Across the screen marched old photos of Nazi concentration camp victims, corpses stacked like cordwood, and dead-eyed survivors. As the horrible pictures flashed by, a dark voice announced the roll of camps: “Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Chelmno, Dachau . . .”

  “Give them this!” Grandpa Will shouted at the TV, holding up his left arm to the set. The sleeve of his shirt was rolled up above the elbow. The photograph of a Nazi colonel, standing sharply at attention, flashed by. “I’ll give them this!”

  Aunt Eva was shaking her head as Uncle Sam snapped off the TV set. Then she murmured, “Please forgive him, please. It was the war.” Her voice was as soft as a prayer.

  Hannah sighed. “He’s starting again,” she whispered to Aaron.

  Aaron shrugged.

  Hannah could scarcely remember when Grandpa Will didn’t have these strange fits, showing off the tattoo on his left arm and screaming in both English and Yiddish. When she’d been younger, the five-digit number on his arm had fascinated her. It was a dark blue, very much like a stain. The skin around it had gotten old, but the number had not. Right after Aaron’s birth, at his bris party, when all the relatives had been making fools of themselves over him, Hannah had taken a ballpoint pen and written a string of numbers on the inside of her own left arm, hard enough to almost break the skin. She had thought that it might please Grandpa Will as much as the new baby had. For a moment, he’d stared at her uncomprehendingly. Then suddenly he’d grabbed at her, screaming in Yiddish Malach ha-mavis over and over, his face gray and horrible. Everyone at the party had watched them. It had taken her father and Aunt Eva a long, long time to calm him down.

  Even though they tried to explain to her what had upset Grandpa Will so, Hannah had never quite forgiven him. It took two days of hard scrubbing before the pen marks were gone. She still occasionally dreamed of his distorted face and the guttural screams. Strangely, though she’d never dared ask what the words meant, in her dreams she seemed to know. No one had ever volunteered to tell her. It was as if they’d all forgotten the incident, but Hannah had not.

  “Mama,” Hannah said when the TV was turned off and calm restored at last to the room, “why does he bother with it? It’s all in the past. There aren’t any concentration camps now. Why bring it up? It’s embarrassing. I don’t want any of my friends to meet him. What if he shouts at them or does something else crazy? Grandpa Dan doesn’t shout at the TV or talk about the war like that.”

  “Grandpa Dan wasn’t in the camps, thank God. He was born in America, just like you. That’s because my family came over to this country in the early 1900s, second class. Not steerage.” She got that faraway look that signaled she was about to recite another part of the family saga.

  Hannah knew there was only one escape.

  “I think I’ll help Aunt Eva in the kitchen,” she said quickly, and ran from the room before her mother could continue.

  Although it was Grandma Belle’s place to light the candles in her own home, over the years it had become a family tradition to let Aunt Eva do it, compensation for her not having a house or family of her own. Aunt Eva could have been married, not once but three different times even though, as Hannah’s mother had pointed out, she was no great beauty. But Aunt Eva had preferred living with her brother, Will, and his wife and helping them raise Hannah’s father when Belle was away at work.

  “Why did she do it?” Hannah had often asked.

  “Because she wanted to” was the only answer her father had ever given.

  “Maybe she likes kids,” Rosemary suggested once. “Maybe she likes cleaning house. I have an aunt like that.”

  “And what does she do?” Hannah had asked.

  “She’s a nun.”

  “Don’t be a jerk. Jews don’t become nuns.”

  “So they live with their brother and take care of his kids.”

  “His kid,” Hannah said. “My father’s an only child.”

  But none of the answers satisfied Hannah’s need for romance and a perfect story. Still, she eventually stopped asking the questions, and the only issues she ever brought up with Aunt Eva herself had to do with everyday things. Like how many teaspoons of sugar went into a glass of iced tea. Or what took a stain out of a leather skirt. Or how to knit a scarf. Or make potato soup. Or where to find a pair of old-fashioned shoes for the school play. Aunt Eva had always had the answers to those sorts of things.

  When Hannah had been younger, Aunt Eva’s answers had seemed magical. But as Hannah got older, the magic disappeared, leaving Aunt Eva a very ordinary person. Hannah hated that it was so, so she pushed the thought away.

  Still, when Aunt Eva lit the holiday candles, broad hands encircling the light, her plain face with its deep-set coffee-colored eyes took on a k
ind of beauty. The flickering flame made her look almost young. Watching Aunt Eva saying the prayers over the candles was the one moment in all the family gatherings that Hannah had always found special. It was as if she and her aunt shared a particular bond at those times, as if the magic was still, somehow, alive.

  “A yahrzeit for all the beloved dead, a grace for all the beloved living,” Aunt Eva always whispered to Hannah before reciting the Hebrew prayers. Hannah whispered along with her.

  Even Aaron tried to get in on the act, but he mumbled the words a full beat behind. Annoyed, Hannah poked him in the side, but he shifted away. In frustration, she caught up the fleshy part of his upper arm between her fingers and pinched. He cried out.

  “Hannah!” her father said sharply.

  Hannah felt her face grow red and she looked down at her plate.

  3

  DURING THE ENDLESS SEDER DINNER AND THE EVEN MORE endless explanations from the Haggadah, Hannah frequently glanced out the window. A full moon was squeezed between two of the project’s apartment buildings.

  Her grandfather droned on and on about the plagues and the exodus from Egypt. Maybe it was an interesting story if someone else told it, Hannah thought, but Grandpa Will had a voice that buzzed like the plague of locusts, and he made sour lessons at every pause. The Seder wasn’t even in the right order, not like they taught in Sunday school. When Hannah tried to protest, she was shushed down by Uncle Sam.

  “It’s Will’s way. Don’t make trouble,” he said.

  Hannah stared at the moon. Tomorrow they’d be going to Grandpa Dan’s for the next Seder. At least there would be three cousins her own age, all boys, but that couldn’t be helped. And they’d get to sit at the kitchen table away from the grown-ups. And Grandpa Will wouldn’t be there shouting and making a scene, only Grandpa Dan. Sweet, gentle, silly Grandpa Dan, who told stories in between the readings and said things like “How do I know? I was there!”