by Jane Yolen
Gitl and Yitzchak had emigrated to Israel, where they lived, close friends, until well into their seventies. Neither of them ever married. Yitzchak became a politician, a member of the Israeli senate, the Knesset. Gitl, known throughout the country as Tante Gitl and Gitl the Bear, organized a rescue mission dedicated to salvaging the lives of young survivors and locating the remnants of their families. It later became an adoption agency, the finest in the Mideast. She called it after her young niece, who had died a hero in the camps: CHAYA.
Life.
WHAT IS TRUE ABOUT THIS BOOK
ALTHOUGH THE STERNS’ SEDER IS NOT STRICTLY A traditional one, it is a mirror of the Seders my family used to hold. My Uncle Louis was the one who always said, “And how do I know? Because I was there!” while hiding the afikoman in plain sight under his chair for the youngest to find and hide again. The word Seder literally means “order,” but my family’s religious life was not an orderly one. Like many American Jews, it was one of rough-and-tumble choices and lots of love. We were Jews because we were born Jewish, not because of following strict rules. When I had to memorize Hebrew and history for my Confirmation, I continually complained how tired I was of remembering. However, there is an orderly progress to a Seder that a perusal of its guidebook, the Haggadah, will show to the curious reader.
All the facts about the horrible routinization of evil in 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 midden 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 not exist. Rather, it is an amalgam of the camps that did: Auschwitz, 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, Dachau, Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Ravensbruck. The toll is endless and anonymous. Whole families, whole villages, whole countrysides disappeared.
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 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 misery, such a routine of torture, all couched in the language of manufacture: “So many units delivered . . . operating at full capacity.” These were not camps, even though they were called so. These were factories designed for the effective murder of human beings.
There is no way that fiction can come close to touching 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 witness. 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 attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks.
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