Page 101 - Devil's Arithmetic by Jane Yolen

The barber was clearly a prisoner. His own head was
shaved, and with the bones so prominent on his face,
he looked to be all forehead and nose. He cut their hair
without any discernible skill, often pulling great clumps
out with the blunt scissors. Shifre's two pale braids came
off whole, landing with a soft thud-thud on the floor.
She touched one with a bare foot, as if the plait were
some sort of unknown animal. Fayge's curls, tight from
the shower, scattered across the floor like patterns in a
rug. Little Tzipporah screamed in terror at her turn
until a woman held her tightly.
When the man came to Hannah, she bit her lip so as
not to cry and kept her eyes closed the entire time. She
concentrated on what was to happen next—after the
showers and the hair-cutting, remembering from the
lessons in Holocaust history in school. But as the scis-
sors snip-snapped through her hair and the razor shaved
the rest, she realized with a sudden awful panic that
she could no longer recall anything from the past. /
cannot remember, she whispered to herself. / cannot
remember. She'd been shorn of memory as brutally as
she'd been shorn of her hair, without permission, with-
out reason. Opening her eyes, she stared at the floor.
Clots of wet hair lay all about: dark hair, light hair,
short hair, long hair, and two pale braids. Gone, all
gone, she thought again wildly, no longer even sure
what was gone, what she was mourning.
She looked up and couldn't recognize anyone in the
room. Without their hair, all the women looked the
same.
"Gitl," she cried out, speaking the one name she

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