The mathematics of language has always enthralled me, the way it calculates. But the language of mathematics has always eluded me. Still there are those — of genius it is said — who hear in its impenetrable formulae music of the spheres. In its infinitude, they maintain, its clarion call to the reason of numbers is the sweetest music of all.
Ghettos:
86,800
Pogroms:
43,000
Einsatzgruppen (death squads):
500,000
Children:
1,000,000
Camps:
3,333,000
Death Marches:
250,000
Liberation:
67,600
13,000 corpses unburied,
10,000 dead from typhus or malnutrition over following weeks.
Death Toll:
5,869,169
Light broken in prisms, pastel chalk paintings washed away by the rain.
So what if just 1,000 of the six-year-olds had lived till the age of 80? 74,000 more years on earth for them. Even if each bore only one child. 1,000 more children. What if the rest of the 5,000,000 had, on a sliding scale commensurate with their age, lived another 20, 30, 40, 50, or 60 years? What if all of them had only been granted a fraction of that, say another 20 years each? That adds up to 100,000,000. One hundred million years. Unlived.
Remember when Abraham argued with God about Sodom and Gomorrah?
Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Abraham asked. What if there are fifty righteous people in the city?
What if there are forty?
Thirty?
Twenty?
Ten?
‘Even for the sake of ten, I will not destroy it,’ God promised.
Archaeologists posit there were up to 1,200 people living there at the time and not ten righteous among them, not even one percent.
So God, are you claiming that among the 6,000,000 souls you could not find one per cent of the righteous in whose names you could have spared them all?
I believe your 13 attributes of mercy are a sham.
I believe you bury your face in your hands in shame (pretending you just didn’t see).
I believe you mock us with your gift of mathematics, stealing its grace until it’s reduced to ash.
I believe you have never understood….
No.
I do not believe.
I do not believe.