Michèle Audin - One Hundred Twenty-One Days

Beautiful words, to describe the numbers he was studying, she had loved the irrational, the complex, the transcendental…

And impassioned words, sweet words, words of happiness.

She had so few of his words left. The words in the letter — a makeshift note, thrown at random to the will of the wind that would carry it far away from the tracks, away from the rain that would not destroy it, to the discretion or indiscretion of the person, a more or less considerate passerby, who would find it — friendly words, of course, but cautious words, so cautious that sometimes in rereading them, she doubted whether there had really been more passionate ones.

She had so few of his words left. She also had a couple of photographs, the note thrown from the train, a mathematics article, and the book he had let her borrow, which she hadn’t been able to return to the family. Almost all of the young, carefree people in the photograph from the picnic were dead: that scatterbrain Madeleine, Simone, and André, André who had said, “I’m totally safe because I’m publishing under the name of Danglars.” So few saved, so many drowned. A verse from André’s Dante came back to her as she looked at this photograph:

And thus the Yawning Deep forever o’er us closed.

in dodecasyllabic verse — even though the original Italian verses of the Divine Comedy all have eleven syllables. She had looked in the Sorbonne library for other translations of the end of Canto xxvi,

Until the sea above us closed again.

Hell and the sea, the meter of the poetry, the words and the numbers…

The numbers, in order, starting with the negatives:

— 25, the temperature (in degrees Celsius) in Upper Silesia in January 1945 during the evacuation of Auschwitz

0.577215…, Euler’s constant

0.625 or 5/8 Jewish would have been each of Mireille’s and André’s children

1 single bullet managed to remove one of M.’s eyes, his nose, and half of his jaw

1.414213…, the square root of 2, the length of the diagonal of a square with a side of 1

2 grenadiers returning to France in a poem by Heine

3 croissants for a breakfast at the Hotel Raphael

3.14159…, π, the constant allowing one to calculate the length and surface area of all circles

5 daughters (and one son) had Christian and Marguerite M.

6

TH

Artillery Regiment, the one in which Gorenstein was serving when he had the sense knocked out of him

7 kilometers, the distance between Monowitz and the main camp of Auschwitz

8 minutes, the length of time it took for Sacco to die on the electric chair

9 Rue de Médicis, the home of the Duvivier family

11, answered the nurse when the numeromaniac polytechnician asked her for a number

12, the number of syllables in a translation of one of Dante’s hendecasyllabic verses

12.3569111418…, Gorenstein’s constant

13

TH

of August, the date the uprising started in Paris in 1944

14 years old, Claude Yersin’s age when he was looking for his uncle’s remains on the battlefield

14.134725…, the imaginary part of one of the zeros in the zeta function

15 years old was the boy when they decided to send him to Paris

16 meters, the height of the cylinder Beckett describes in

The Lost Ones

17 years old, Kürz’s age when he enlisted in the navy

18

TH

of January, the day the Auschwitz camps were evacuated

19 years old, the age of the future great poet when he jumped out of a trench

20 years that Meyerbeer studied Gorenstein

22 years old, Gorenstein’s age when he committed a triple murder

23

RD

of June, the date Christian and Marguerite were married

24

TH

of June, the last day Andre and Mireille saw each other

25 the only square that becomes a cube when you add 2 to it

26, the canto number in the

Inferno

in which the sea closes over Ulysses and his companions

27 German physicists were winners of the Nobel Prize of Physics

28 is a perfect number

29 days had the month of February in 1916

31 years old, André’s age when he died in Mariahilf

39, the number of survivors from the convoy in which Silberberg was taken

40 prisoners were held in each cell of the Cherche-Midi prison

41, the largest dimension for which Kürz managed to demonstrate Silberberg’s lemma

42.8 meters cubed of rubble per person after the bombing of Dresden

48 hours that André and Sonntag marched side by side

50 meters, the circumference of the cylinder Beckett describes in

The Lost Ones

60, the number of the convoy that took André to Upper Silesia

65, the smallest integer whose square can be written in two ways as the sum of two squares

67 kilometers, the length of what became known as the Auschwitz death march

70 kilos, the weight of the bags of phenyl-beta that Klein had to carry while he was at the camp

80 victories (at least) had been achieved by Guynemer

103 years old, M.’s age when he died

120 pages of M.’s dissertation were recopied by Marguerite

121 days of happiness for André and Mireille

131 cities were attacked by the Royal Air Force

209, the number of the hospital where Gorenstein’s aunt worked as a nurse

250 years old was the University of N. in 1937

340 men in Convoy 60 were sent to Monowitz

400 individual detached houses could have been constructed for the cost of one insane asylum

475, the number of Mozart’s Fantasia in the Köchel catalog

479 is a prime number and one quarter of 1916

491 men and women from Convoy 60 were taken by SS officers and dogs and immediately gassed

600 barricades were erected during the Parisian uprising

800 meters, the track event in which André was university champion

1000, the number of Jews in the convoys

1796, the year Bonaparte made his entry into Milan at the head of his young army

1800 meters, the total length of the cylinders in which the V-2 rockets were constructed at Dora

1801, the year Beethoven composed his fourteenth sonata

Quasi una fantasia

1821, the date Heinrich Heine evoked the books burned during the Reconquista

1858, the opening of the Kaffeehaus & Konditorei Korb & Schlag in N.

1926, the year Vito Volterra invented a model for predator-prey systems

1933, the date the books of Heinrich Heine were joyously burned in public squares

1949, Gorenstein’s death

1950, the lovely summer evenings were started again in N.

2066, the year M.’s writings will enter the public domain

8000 meters high, they say, was the height the smoke reached after the bombing of Hamburg

14521.8 square kilometers of Germany were allocated to France by the Versailler Diktat

116800 Reichsmarks would have been the cost of a mentally ill patient if he had been looked after for forty years

157034, the number tattooed on a survivor’s arm and jotted down on a page from a blue notebook

From a blue notebook, torn pages: notes from another visit to N., notes on Kürz and M. from the information given and the archives lent by Pierre Meyer, with various documents attached… all rearranged in chronological order and divided into eighteen pouches in a red binder.

POUCH 1

NOTES ON PIERRE MEYER

Met for the first time in September 2006. Born January 13, 1915. M.’s son-in-law and Silberberg’s friend. A great eyewitness. Several interviews recorded in November and December 2006.

Summary: born and raised in Strasbourg, studied mathematics, worked at the library before the war. Friend of Silberberg, involved in anti-Nazi resistance groups. Mobilized (in an anti-aircraft defense unit, near Nevers). After the Armistice with Germany, demobilized, decides not to return to Strasbourg: Alsace, annexed by the Reich, is too dangerous for him, with his name listed and put on file for his political actions (his father was Jewish, even though he was killed in the German uniform in 1915). In Paris, false papers, works in the offices of the French national railway (SNCF) under a false identity. Transportation of leaflets and more, for a Resistance network, on bicycle or on foot. Takes part in the fighting for the liberation of Paris. Wounded in the arm, he cannot rejoin the army. Stays in Paris and goes back to studying mathematics, after five years’ interruption. Classes with Pariset and M. at the Sorbonne. Through Pariset, meets Mireille Duvivier. By chance, also meets Bernadette, a medical student and his future wife. Coincidentally, she is M.’s daughter.