Winning Essays
 

Topic: Reading changes your life

By Leeanne Tobler

          A book I was inspired by was The Devil’s Arithmetic, by Jane Yolen.  It is the story of a Jewish girl, Hannah, who hates going to her family’s Passover Seder.  This year, though, her holiday experience is special.  When she opens the front door to symbolically let in the prophet Elijah, she is mysteriously transported back in time to Poland, in the year 1942.  Hannah is in a small wooden house, with a woman named Gitl and her brother Shmuel who is getting married to a beautiful and kind young woman named Fayge the next day.  They all seem to think Hannah is a different girl named Chaya, and that she is from Lublin.  Hannah is confused, because that is her true Yiddish name.  Gitl has told Hannah that she almost died from the same sickness that killed her parents.  Gitl and Shmuel are her family now.  At Shmuel and Fayge’s wedding, the Nazis soon rampage into the small town where Hannah is staying, and take her and her new friends to a work camp. 

        After they have all of their precious hair shorn off, and numbers are tattooed on their arms, they are put right to work, with no time to rest.  Hannah soon meets a girl named Rivka, who becomes her best friend and a guide through the hardships of the camp.  Rivka and Hannah’s other friends protect her; teach her the rules of the camp, how to survive, and what the codes and terms are.  They also teach her where to hide if the Nazis come looking for them-the midden (garbage dump).  When prisoners are being condemned to death, three of Hannah’s friends, including Rivka, are chosen to go to the gas ovens.  Hannah bravely goes in Rivka’s place, and follows the soldier leading them to the gas ovens, telling her friends a story to calm them and herself.  She and the others are ordered to take off all of their clothes before setting foot into the ovens.  When she enters the door to the chamber, she is suddenly transported back to her own time, holding the front door open at her family’s Passover Seder.

          The story of Hannah really changed the way I look at the world.  It made me notice that man can be despicable, that they can do things that make a lot of people cringe in horror and fear.  We don’t have the right to take a life, the most precious thing in the world.  We are different, and that is what makes us beautiful.  The objective of life isn’t to be at the top, or to destroy another’s sense of self, like the Hitler’s Nazis did.  These people of the Holocaust, outraged by the extreme injustice of past actions, feel the anger for the ones who bravely died and were treated like dirt. 

         When I say past actions, I mean the actions of massacre and slaughter.  I also mean the actions that were never taken, the ones that could have changed everything.  Those who survived the hideous torture of the concentration camps were left with the numbers on their arm, and the memories that would give them nightmares for years to come.  These people’s minds, bodies and spirits are forever scarred, and parts of their lives are wasted, wasted in the Devil’s place on earth.  They, and also the six million Jews that died, have taught us to persevere, to help others in any possible way, and to stick to what you believe in.  There is a lot of good in the world.  It will swell to a great size, that neither gauges nor miles can measure.  This is what the survivors of the Holocaust have showed us.  The book The Devil’s Arithmetic really changed my outlook on the world.  It’s packed with so much feeling and emotion, but it’s the dramatic lesson that is steadily taught throughout the book that makes it such a great story.

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