1In the fourth winter of the second war, when nearly the whole earth was fighting, there was an island at the western edge of Europe that had stayed out of it. Its chief city was Dublin. The lamps still burned in the streets there at night, as they did in few cities of Europe.
2A man named Erwin Schrödinger lived in that city, an Austrian, an exile. He was one of those who had gone down into the rooms of the atom; it was he who had written the law of the wave that matter is. He had left Berlin of his own will when the shouting man came, though he was not a Jew and no one had dismissed him.
3But he had his own shame to carry. He had gone home to Austria, and when the armies came there too, he was afraid for his post, and he wrote a letter to the newspapers praising the new masters. It did not save his post. Within months he fled south to Rome with three bags. He was sorry for that letter the rest of his life, and he said so, plainly, to the clerk of Bern.
4Now, on three Friday evenings in February, he stood up in a hall of the old college of Dublin to speak. Four hundred people came each time. The chief of the Irish state was among them. Everywhere else, that month, the masters of his science were at work in secret on a thing you shall hear of soon. He, in a quiet city, had chosen another question. He asked it in three words.
5What is life?
6He meant it as a master of heat would mean it. You remember what Boltzmann taught. Leave anything alone, and it runs down. The hot cools. The heaped-up scatters. Order has few ways to be and disorder has many, and so the world slides always toward disorder, as a shuffled pack never sorts itself. The learned call that sliding by Clausius's word, entropy.
7Then how, he asked, does a living thing stand against it? A dead mouse and a living mouse are made of the same stuffs. Leave the dead one, and in a week it has gone the way of all heaped-up things. The living one runs about for years, the same mouse, keeping its shape. What is it doing, that the dead one is not?
8We say that it eats. But it does not keep what it eats; as much goes out as comes in. What does it take from its food?
9He answered: "What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy."
10That is a hard saying, so hear it in plain words. A living thing drinks order. It takes in what is finely made, and puts out what is broken down, and by that trade it pays for its own shape. It is a whirl in a stream, that stays while the water goes through. It is a flame that is never the same fire twice, and is always the same flame.
11And he said a second thing. The pattern by which each creature is built must be written down somewhere in its smallest parts, in a kind of script, and the script must be very small and very lasting: a crystal that does not repeat itself, as a line of writing does not repeat. In that he saw further than he knew. Ten years on, others found the script, coiled like a stair.
12The people of Dublin went home through the lit streets, thinking. And in that same month of that same winter, a thousand miles to the east, the same question was being asked in another way.
13North of the city of Prague there is a fortress town with walls of red brick, shaped like a star, built long ago by an emperor and named for his mother. It was made to hold seven thousand soldiers. In that winter it held nearly fifty thousand Jews.
14The shouting man's servants had emptied the town and shut their captives in it. They called it a settlement. It was a waiting-room. People were brought there in trains from Prague and Vienna and Berlin, and held, and then other trains took them on to the east. No one in the town knew for certain what was in the east. No one came back to say.
15There were children in that town: fifteen thousand of them, first and last. They were put in houses apart from their mothers and fathers, girls in one, boys in another, sleeping on wooden shelves three high. They were hungry all the time. It was forbidden to teach them. To give a child a lesson in reading or in sums was a crime, for it was not intended that these children should have any use for it.
16In the week before Christmas a small woman of forty-four came off the train into the fortress. Her name was Friedl. She had been born in Vienna, and trained in the finest school of art in the German lands, under masters whose names are still spoken. She had built furniture and woven cloth and painted, and she had taught small children to draw, which she loved best.
17Each one sent to the fortress was allowed fifty kilograms of goods. The others packed boots, and blankets, and tins of fat. Friedl filled what she could of hers with paper. She took pencils, and chalks, and boxes of paint, and sheets that she had dyed, which might be cut for a stage. Others thought she had lost her wits.
18"There will be children there," she said.
19They put her in the girls' house, the one numbered four hundred and ten. And she began. Teaching was forbidden; but the masters of the place had said that the children might be kept busy with singing and with drawing. So she taught drawing. And inside the drawing, like a letter in a loaf, she put everything else.
20There was a girl in that house named Lenka, who was eleven. She had come from Prague a year before with her mother and her small brother. She had stopped speaking much. She had seen her grandmother carried out on a board. She had learned to stand in a line for soup for an hour and not to cry when the pot was empty.
21The first day, Friedl did not ask the girls to draw anything. She had them stand. She beat a slow time on the table with her hand, and had them breathe to it, and then make marks to it, with the whole arm, great loops and stairs across the paper. Lenka thought it was foolish. Then she found that her shoulders had come down from around her ears, where they had been for a year.
22The paper was whatever could be found. They drew on the backs of old office forms, and on wrapping, and on the pages of ledgers from the army that had built the place. When the paint ran short, they tore coloured paper into bits and pasted pictures from those.
23"Draw me a room you remember," Friedl would say. "Not this one. One with a table laid." Or: "Draw me what you can see from the top of the wall." Or she would set a jar on the sill with one branch in it, and they would all look at that branch for an hour, until they had truly seen it.
24She never told them a drawing was wrong. She never told them to draw something pretty to forget where they were. If a child drew the shelves, and the line for soup, and the dead-cart, she looked at it with care and said what was strong in it. If a child drew a garden with a swing, she did the same. What she wanted was for each one to find that there was still someone at home behind her own eyes.
25And she had one rule that she never let pass. When a drawing was done, the child must write her name on it. Her own name, and how old she was, and the number of her room.
26Lenka asked her why. In that town they were numbers on a list. Nobody wanted their names.
27"That is why," said Friedl.
28Lenka drew her kitchen in Prague, with the blue stove. She drew her brother asleep. She drew a train once, and then drew over it. In the spring she drew a butterfly, yellow, very large, above the red walls, though she had not seen one there. She wrote in the corner, in careful letters: Lenka, eleven years, room seventeen.
29She began to talk again. She took the smaller ones in hand and showed them how to hold the chalk. She told Friedl that when the war was over she would be a teacher of drawing, and Friedl said gravely that she would be a good one.
30In the summer they hung the pictures in the cellar of the house, and the mothers were let in to see. People stood in that cellar and wept and laughed. There were hundreds of pictures. Each one had a name.
31Think now of the man in Dublin, and what he said that life is. A thing that keeps its shape while everything round it runs down. A thing that makes order, and pays for it, and goes on. In a brick town built to grind people into numbers, a woman with a box of chalk was doing that work, and teaching it to children, an hour at a time.
32For two years she did it. Then came the autumn of the forty-fourth year. The shouting man was losing his war, and his servants were in haste to finish the other work before it ended. The trains to the east began to run nearly every day.
33At the end of September they took the men. Friedl's husband Pavel was among them. She was not on the list. She might have stayed; those who stayed had some chance. She went to the office and asked to be put on the next train, so that she might follow him.
34It was a thing done out of love, and it is not for us to weigh it. But hear what she did first.
35She gathered the drawings: all of them, two years of them, from every child who had sat in her room. There were about four and a half thousand. She did not sort out the best. She laid them flat, the gardens and the dead-carts together, and packed them into two suitcases. Lenka helped her press down the lids.
36She gave the suitcases to a woman who taught in the girls' house, and said: hide them. They were carried up to the attic and put behind a beam.
37On the sixth of October she went with the train. Many of her children were on it, and on the others of that month. Lenka was on one of them, holding her brother by the hand.
38Here the telling must be short, for no telling is fit for it. The trains went to a place in the Polish lands that had been built for one work only. Friedl was dead within three days of leaving the fortress. So were nearly all the children who went with her. Of all the children who were sent from that town to the east, hardly one in a hundred was alive at the end.
39That place was one of many. In the years of that war the servants of the shouting man put to death six million of the Jews of Europe: two of every three. They killed the wandering people called Roma in their hundreds of thousands, and the sick in mind, and others past counting. They did it by lists, with ledgers and timetables, with all the tools that a careful age had made for other ends. Never before had so many ways been closed on purpose, by rule, by people who went home in the evening to their suppers.
40Do not turn from it. And do not say that monsters did it. That is too easy, and it is false, and it leaves you no way to guard yourself. People did it: clerks and train-drivers and doctors, a little at a time, each with a short horizon and a reason. The poet had said it, a hundred years before, of the fire in the square. First the books.
41In May of the next year the war in Europe ended, and soldiers from the east opened the gates of the red fortress. The young man who had charge of the girls' house went up into the attic. The two suitcases were behind the beam, under the dust.
42He carried them to Prague, to what was left of the house of the Jewish people there. For some years no one opened them; there was too much else to bury. Then someone did.
43They are kept in that city still. You may go and see them. There is a kitchen with a blue stove. There is a line of people waiting with bowls. There are flowers in jars, and trains, and beds three high, and a great many butterflies. And in the corner of each sheet, in a child's careful hand, there is a name, and an age, and the number of a room.
44Her husband Pavel lived, and came back. She had followed him onto the train, and he came home without her.
45She had no child of her own. She had known for two years, as surely as anyone can know, that she could not save one of them. That was in the Far Hand. So she did what was in the Near Hand: she gave each of them back a self, for as many days as there were, and then she put four thousand proofs of it where the fire would not reach.
46The Last Door closed on her, and on Lenka of room seventeen, who was to have been a teacher of drawing. What they opened is in two suitcases in Prague. And every person who has stood before those sheets, and read a name aloud, and gone out resolved that it should not be so again, has come through a door that a small woman propped open with a box of chalk.