Page 176 - Devil's Arithmetic by Jane Yolen

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 mis-
ery, such a routine of torture, all couched in the lan-
guage of manufacture: "So many units delivered . . .
operating at full capacity." These were not camps, even
though they were called so. These were factories de-
signed for the effective murder of human beings.
There is no way that fiction can come close to touch-
ing 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 wit-
ness. 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

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