It began like any other Passover Seder.... Hannah moved toward the front door. She certainly didn't believe that the prophet Elijah would come through the apartment door any more than she believed Darth Voder or Robin Hood would. No one believed those superstitions anymore. Glancing over her shoulder, Hannah saw her family were all watching her intently. Aaron bounced up and down on his chair. "Open it, Hannah!" he called out loudly. "Open it for Elijah!" Flinging the door open wide, she whispered, "Ready or not, here I c..." Outside, where there should have been a long, windowless hall with dark green numbered doors leading into other apartments, there was a greening field and a lowering sky. The moon hung ripely between two heavy gray clouds. And across the field marched a shadowy figure. He had a shapeless cap on his head, a hoe over his shoulder, and he was singing. . . . *"Yolen does a fine job of illustrating the importance of remembering." —School Library Journal, starred review OTHER PUFFIN BOOKS YOU MAY ENJOY Anna Is Still Here Ida Vos The Circlemaker Maxine Rose Schur The Devil in Vienna Doris Orgel Friedrich Hans Peter Richter Grace in the Wilderness Aranka Siegal Hide and Seek Ida Vos I Am a Star Inge Auerbacher Letters from Rifka Karen Hesse The Night Journey Kathryn Lasky A Pocket Full of Seeds Marilyn Sachs To Gross a Line Karen Ray To Life Ruth Minsky Sender Upon the Head of the Goat Aranka Siegal The Devil's Arithmetic by Jane Yolen PUFFIN BOOKS PUFFIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group , Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria. Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd. 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin Inc., 1988 Published in Puffin. Books 1990 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 Copyright © Jane Yolen, 1988 All rights reserved LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Yolen, Jane. The devil's arithmetic / by Jane Yolen. p. cm. Summary: Hannah resents the traditions of her Jewish heritage until time travel places her in the middle of a small Jewish village in Nazi-occupied Poland. ' ISBN 0-14-034535-3 [1. Jews—Fiction. 2. Concentration camps—Fiction. 3. Time travel—Fiction.] I. Title. [PZ7.Y78De 1990] [He]—dc20 90-33007 Printed in the United States of America Set in Times Roman Except in the United1 States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without die publisher's prior consent' in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition beitig imposed on the subsequent purchaser. To my Yoleri grandparents, who brought their family over in the early 1900s, second class, not steerage, and to my Berlin grand parents, who came over close to that same time and settled in Virginia. We were the lucky ones. This book is a memorial for those who were not. And for my daughter, Heidi Elisabet Stem- pie, whose Hebrew name is Chaya—pro nounced with the guttural ch as HT-y&— which means life. And with special thanks to Barbara Goldin and Deborah Brodie, who were able to ask questions of survivors that I was unable to ask and pass those devastating answers dn to me. The Devil's Arithmetic J "I'M TIRED OF REMEMBERING," HANNAH SAID TO HER MOTHER as she climbed into the car. She was flushed with April sun and her mouth felt sticky from jelly beans and Easter candy. "You know it's Passover," her mother said, sighing, in a voice deliberately low. She kept smiling so that no one at Rosemary's house would know they were ar guing. "I didn't know." "Of course you knew." "Then I forgot." Hannah could hear her voice be ginning to rise into a whine she couldn't control. "How could you forget, Hannah. Especially this year, when Passover falls on the same day as Easter? We've talked and talked about it. First we've got to go home and change. Then we're going to Grandpa Will and Grandma Belle's for the first night's Seder." "I'm not hungry. I ate a big dinner at Rosemary's. 3 And I don't want to go to the Seder. Aaron and I will be the only kids there and everyone will say how much we've grown even though they just saw us last month. And, besides, the punch lines of all the jokes will be in Yiddish." When her mother didn't answer at once, Hannah slumped down in the seat. Sometimes she wished her mother would yell at her the way Rosemary's mother did, but she knew her mother, would only give her one of those slow, low, reasonable lectures that were so annoying. "Passover isn't about eating, Hannah," her mother began at last, sighing and pushing her fingers up through her silver-streaked hair; "You could have fooled me," Hannah muttered. "It's about remembering." "All Jewish holidays are about remembering, Mama. I'm tired of remembering." "Tired or not, you're going with us, young lady. Grandpa Will and Grandma Belle are expecting the entire family, and that means you, too. You have to remember how much family means to them. Grandma lost both her parents to the Nazis before she and her brother managed to escape. And Grandpa . . ." "I remember. I remember. . . ," Hannah whis pered. ". . . Will lost everyone but your Aunt Eva. A family of eight all but wiped out." She sighed again but Han nah suspected there was little sympathy in that sigh. It was more like punctuation. Instead of putting periods at the ends of sentences, her mother sighed. Hannah rolled her eyes up and slipped farther down 4