Discussion Topic
Fayge's fate and the person who carried her in The Devil's Arithmetic
Summary:
In The Devil's Arithmetic, Fayge is tragically executed by the Nazis. She is carried to her death by her fiancé, Shmuel, who is also being executed. This moment underscores the brutal reality of the Holocaust and the deep bonds between the characters.
What happens to Fayge in The Devil's Arithmetic?
In Jane Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic, Fayge is engaged to Hannah/Chaya's uncle Shmuel. On their wedding day, however, the Nazis arrives and deport the Jews to concentration camps. Shmuel and Fayge's wedding never happens. Instead, they are forced into trucks and eventually into boxcars. They are deprived of all their possessions. Fayge's beautiful wedding dress is ruined.
When the Jews reach the camp, the men and women are separated. Their heads are shaved, and they are given shapeless, rough clothing. Fayge nearly stops responding to anyone or anything. She is so shocked and terrified by what has happened that she can hardly function. Yet Fayge manages to recover herself, and she begins to tell stories meant to raise everyone's hopes.
Then the unthinkable happens. Shmuel participates in an escape attempt and is caught. As he is about to be executed, he says Fayge's name. Suddenly, Fayge cries out...
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and pushes her way through the crowd. She falls at Shmuel's feet and refuses to move. She looks up, smiles at him, and says, "The sky is our canopy. God's canopy. The sky." Fayge knows that she would much rather die with Shmuel than live without him. Shmuel kisses the top of Fayge's head, and then the gunfire begins. The couple dies together, finally united, their love unable to be shaken.
Who carried Fayge in The Devil's Arithmetic and what was his job?
In the wake of a failed escape attempt from the concentration camp, the Nazis brutally gun down a number of Jewish prisoners. Among the dead are Shmuel and Fayge, whose wedding was suddenly interrupted when the Nazis descended upon the village of Viosk to take away all its Jewish inhabitants.
Shmuel had bravely led the escape attempt, and in killing him, the Nazis want to make an example of him. But in their indiscriminate brutality, they also kill Fayge, the woman he was about to marry when the Nazis showed up in their village.
Once the murder has been committed, it's the job of a Sonderkommando, a unit of Jewish prisoners formed to carry out grim tasks in the concentration camps, to dispose of the dead bodies. One member of the Sonderkommando is Wolfe, Rivke's brother. He bends down and gently picks up Fayge's body, carrying her as if she were a loved one.
Elsewhere in the book, Wolfe is described as one of the walking dead. What this means is that, although he's alive, he might as well be dead, given that his job entails the disposal of dead bodies. And not just any dead bodies, but the dead bodies of his fellow Jews.