The Devil's Arithmetic

When Hannah sees the Nazis at the wedding party, she asks what year it is, and the badchan, or professional jester, tells her it’s 1942. Hannah is in the middle of World War II and a genocide. The Nazis’ leader, Adolf Hitler, was a frustrated painter and soldier before he became the head of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. However, the Nazis weren’t socialists, and they lacked a sustainable ideology. In The Rise of the Third Reich (Penguin 2005), the historian Richard J. Evans argues that Hitler achieved success “by telling his audiences what they wanted to hear” (171). The Nazis gained control of the German government through democracy. People voted for Nazis in fair elections, and their popularity made Hitler the chancellor in 1933. He used his authority to replace democracy with totalitarianism.

With the other European countries depleted by World War I, the hyper-militarized Nazis invaded and occupied other European countries. In 1939, they declared war on Poland and began World War II. One of their primary goals was to kill the Jewish population in Europe. As Hannah says: “They killed—kill—will kill Jews. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. Six million of them!” (65). When Nazis gained authority over a country, they would then target the Jewish population. The Nazis target Hannah and her community during Shmuel and Fayge’s wedding.

To facilitate the mass murder of Jewish people, the Nazis created mobile killing units that could kill thousands of Jewish individuals at a time. The man in the cattle car tells Hannah and the others about Jewish people in Russia “made to lie down in trenches, like herring, head to foot. And then, Lord God, they were slaughtered as they lay there, by soldiers with machine guns” (79). This story is rooted in a historical fact. In one mass murder at the Babi Yar ravine in Ukraine (Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union during World War II), Nazis killed more than 33,000 Jewish people from September 29-30, 1941—a mere two days.

Gitl often calls the Nazis “monsters.” She thinks of them as otherworldly brutes, aligning with the thesis of political scientist Daniel Goldhagen. In Willing Executioners (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), Goldhagen argues that Germans harbored an uncommonly virulent strain of antisemitism that made the Holocaust possible. Conversely, the historian Raul Hilberg presents Hannah’s lethal oppressors as humans. In The Destruction of European Jews: Student Edition (1985), Hilberg argues that the death squads were disturbed by their genocidal orders. Hilberg quotes a death squad leader who describes his soldiers as “deeply shaken” and “finished for the rest of their lives” (137).

To accelerate and depersonalize the murders, the Nazis built gas chambers in the concentration camps where they imprisoned Jewish people and other purported enemies. The Nazis told Jewish people they were going to the shower when they were gassing them. The connection between showering and gas chambers makes Hannah think the Nazis are gassing them when she first arrives at the camp. To further distance themselves from the murders, the Nazis made prisoners, like Rivka’s brother Wolfe, collect the corpses and burn them in ovens. A Nazi soldier points to a smoking chimney and tells Gitl: “That’s Jew smoke!” (100). To degrade prisoners not immediately selected for death, the Nazis shaved their heads, took away their clothes, and gave them numerical tattoos. Hannah perceives the challenge to her identity and tries to preserve it. 

As Hilberg, German American historian Hannah Arendt, and other credible scholars point out, Jewish individuals have an extensive history of persecution. In Europe during the 1800s, they faced pogroms or organized massacres. Centuries earlier, in 1492, Spain tried to expel all Jewish people. Jewish individuals’ familiarity with oppression led the rabbi to tell Hannah: “There will always be Nazis among us” (65).

Before Hannah goes back in time, she celebrates Passover. The Jewish holiday marks the Israelites’ freedom from another historical oppressive incident—slavery in Egypt. According to the Old Testament, God punished the Egyptians by taking away their firstborn, but passed over the firstborn of Jewish families. God liberated Jewish people from Egypt but not from hardship. They wandered the wilderness for 40 years until they reached the Promised Land—modern-day Israel, where Gitl and Yitzchak live after the Holocaust.