The Mathematician's Shiva by Stuart Rojstaczer

Author:Stuart Rojstaczer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2014-08-11T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

From A Lifetime in Mathematics by Rachela Karnokovitch: The Flesh of a Bear

In this country, people buy T-shirts extolling their survival skills after snowstorms and heat waves. I used to get angry about this behavior, which I considered to be a childish display of false endurance. How can a country be so weak to think that a little snow or a little spike in a thermometer is actual hardship? But now, and maybe this is because of the mellowing of age, I’m almost pleased to see these T-shirts appear every few years. Now they indicate to me that this country is so secure and wealthy that actual hardship for many is almost impossible. These celebrations of minor calamities are in essence a signal that the people of this country feel so safe that they’ve turned survival into a silly game. Unfortunately, most nations are not like the United States. Danger is real for almost everyone most anywhere else, including in the nation where I grew up.

We buried my mother in April 1941. I do not know the exact day. Later, I picked the seventeenth as her yahrtzeit, which would have been the twentieth of Nisan, during Passover. We didn’t celebrate any holidays, of course, Jewish or otherwise. We simply tried to live. To breathe another day was our goal. Survival, to my mind, implies a finite probability that without luck and cunning, you will perish. Given that definition I can definitely say that we tried to survive. My mother, however, did not possess the strength of will of my father and me. We tried to prop her spirits up, tried to keep her physically well, but we failed. It is a failure that I cannot and will not forget.

The level of sanitation in our camp was abysmal. We carried buckets of water from a hand-dug well. The pits for human waste were perhaps twenty meters away. In the wet of spring, the pits overflowed, and the mess washed along the ground. We tried to skirt the raw sewage as we walked in the camp. My father was aware of the potential danger, and made sure that my mother boiled the water before any use. But other families weren’t so cautious and the extra wood necessary for precautionary boiling was almost impossible to find. Cholera erupted that spring, and it’s likely that my mother, who would occasionally visit other women at the camp, had taken a drink of water from somewhere outside our apartment.

Given that manpower was so necessary for the war effort—the Soviets counted on beating the Germans’ technical superiority and splendid troop training with horrible weather, long distances of travel, and superior numbers—one would think that even a work camp for minor prisoners of the Soviet state would have been designed to keep those workers alive. But the Soviet system was always chaotic and inherently lazy, a continuation of the tsarist system. The average citizen’s life, even in times of peace, was made bearable only by the presence of vodka.

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