Page 78 - Devil's Arithmetic by Jane Yolen

to climb into the truck with them, standing next to
Hannah.
Yitzchak handed his children up to Gitl one at a time,
and she kept her arms tight around the little girl, Tzip-
porah. There were finally so many villagers packed into
each truck, there was no room to sit down. So they
stood, the children up on the men's shoulders. They
looked like holidayers off on a trip. But they felt to
Hannah, all crushed together, like cattle going to be
slaughtered for the market.
The trucks barreled down the long, winding road,
their passengers silenced by the dust deviling up and
by the heat. After a bit, to keep the children in her
truck from crying, Gitl began to sing. First she tried a
lullaby called "Yankele" to quiet them, then several
children's songs. But as the truck continued without a
stop, carrying them farther and farther from Viosk,
onto roads most of them had never seen, she broke into
a song that, for all its wailing minor notes and the lalala
chorus, sounded angry.
Hannah tried to make out the words above the noise
of the truck. They were about someone called a chaper,
a snatcher or kidnapper, who dragged men off to the
army. One verse went:
Sir, give me a piece of bread,
Look at me, so pale and dead.

It hardly seemed a song to calm the children. But first
Shmuel, then Yitzchak, then several of the other men
in their truck joined in, singing at the top of their voices.
The children on their perches clapped in rhythm. At

71