Page 175 - Devil's Arithmetic by Jane Yolen

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 mid-
den 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 hot exist.
Rather, it is an amalgam of the camps that did: Au-
schwitz, 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, Da-
chau, Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Maut-
hausen, Ravensbruck. The toll is endless and anonymous.
Whole families, whole villages, whole countrysides dis-
appeared.
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

168