50 pages • 1 hour read
Jane YolenThe Devil's Arithmetic
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1988A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 13-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
Hannah wakes up to a loud noise. Her head hurts, her back aches, and she has a large scab on her shin. As she remembers the horrors of the past days, a guard comes in and tells the Jewish prisoners to hurry outside and line up if they want food.
On their way out, Hannah notices Tzipporah. She’s curled up; a fly is on her cheek. Gitl orders Hannah not to touch her. When she doesn’t listen, Gitl slaps her. Hannah cries, and Gitl weeps. Gitl doesn’t know what to tell Yitzchak. She calls the Nazis monsters.
Outside, a girl, Rivka, tells the Jewish prisoners about the importance of their bowls. Hannah eats diluted potato soup from hers. She also has dark bread. The blokova then lines up the women and abuses them. Hannah sees smoke and hears loud birds. She remembers the forest and telling stories to the girls, but she forgets the details of the stories.
Chapter 14 Summary
At night, Rivka tells Hannah not to be afraid. The Nazis don’t choose people for the gas chambers at night. She’s alive now, and that’s what matters. Esther is less reassuring. Her dad and aunts are missing. Her grandma died on the train, and Yente and Rachel aren’t around. Rivka says she’s been in the camp for a year. Everyone but her brother Wolfe has died, and Wolfe, who works for the Sonderkommando (prisoners forced to dispose of gas chamber corpses), is all but dead. Everyone has stories like hers—it’s part of the cruel math. If the living remember the dead, the dead are still alive.
Rivka explains the meaning of her number: J18202. She says the Angel of Death is here, but the prisoners can outsmart him if they stick to the rules. Rivka thinks God will reunite him with her brother. Hannah thinks God is gone—only the Devil is present. Rivka counters that God made the Devil.
Esther is fed up with Rivka’s console and walks away. Rivka calls her a “musselman”—she’s not fighting for her life. They must know when to fight, to let go, and who to avoid. Rivka can help the prisoners, and so can Sarah, a former singer Commandant Breuer likes. Rivka tells them not to go near the smokestack and that children under 14 hide in the garbage dump when Breuer comes. The Germans don’t look for the kids in the trash—it’s too gross. Rivka is 10, and Hannah is younger than 14, but they look older, so they don’t have to hide in the dump.
Rivka gives Hannah shoes. Hannah wonders why the Nazis don’t give them back their shoes. Rivka tells her not to ask why. It’s helpful to stay unaware of some things. Hannah explains the meaning of her number to Rivka and states her determination to live. Hannah has a dream, but she can’t remember it.
Chapter 15 Summary
Breuer arrives, and the kids flee to the trash dump. The guards laugh at the scurrying children. Hannah spots a baby left in the tub. She grabs it and hides it in the garbage. When it’s safe, Hannah and the baby emerge. The baby’s mom, Leye, is upset that Hannah didn’t take off her clothes. Rivka informs Leye that Hannah saved her baby. Leye goes to get water—her way of saying thank you.
Life in the camp has a routine: morning roll calls, the watery soup and hard bread for meals, and work. Rivka gives the blokova a gold ring so Hannah can work in the kitchen instead of moving wood with the men. Hannah thanks Rivka, but Rivka doesn’t want her thanks.
Breuer returns to pick out prisoners for death. Rivka tells Hannah why they don’t use words like death. Breuer reminds Hannah of another Nazi, Dr. Mengele (an infamous Nazi doctor). Looking at her shaking hands, Hannah wonders if she’s becoming a “musselman.”
Gitl tells Hannah it’s her birthday; she gives her a scarf she took from the shed where she works. Hannah isn’t sure when her birthday is, so the gift surprises her. Gitl says Shmuel and Yitzchak are fine, and the women make fun of Breuer’s small feet. Gitl then delivers tragic news: the Nazis killed Rabbi Boruch and the badchan. The Jewish prisoners say the Kaddish (a Jewish hymn extolling God) for them.
Chapter 16 Summary
Hannah considers the steps she regularly takes to avoid death. She doesn’t work too slowly, speak loudly, or stand near Greek prisoners. She survives one day at a time: One plus one—it’s the Devil’s arithmetic. The days blur together. Hannah’s camp memories replace her other memories. The girls ask her questions about her favorite food, and Hannah says pizza, but she can’t explain what pizza is.
Newcomers arrive, and Rivka explains how the blokova lost her two fingers: She failed to control the zugangi (newcomers to the camps) twice. The first time, they rioted; the second time, six zugangi hanged themselves. To punish her, the Nazis took two of her fingers.
Breuer returns, and Hannah is surprised. He was at the camp yesterday, so he shouldn’t be back for a few days—it’s unfair. The children run to the dump, but Reuven, who has a bloody knee, freezes. Breuer asks Reuven if he’s ok and inquires about his mom. Hannah tells him Reuven’s mom is dead. Breuer asks Hannah if Reuven is her brother, and she shakes her head. Breuer takes Reuven away.
Hannah thinks it’s her fault Reuven is chosen, and Rivka tells her not to use that word. Hannah says they’re monsters for not fighting back, and Rivka says the Nazis are the monsters, and that the Jewish prisoners are the victims. The prisoners don’t have knives or guns.
Fayge tells a story about the soul’s incorruptibility and the omnipresence of enemies. She also tells a story about young Israel. He enters a werewolf’s body and frees its satanic heart. The earth then swallows the heart. Hannah thinks the concentration camp is like a werewolf.
Chapters 13-16 Analysis
In the concentration camp, Hannah experiences a different level of suffering. Now, she’s in a life-or-death situation. Yolen uses physical imagery to portray her emotional pain:
[H]er head hurt where she’d banged it and her back ached from lying on the hard shelf. Even her leg hurt. She drew her knee up to look. There was caked blood and a big scab along her shin (102).
It’s as if the horrors of the camp are overwriting her good memories: Hannah recalls the cattle cars, the dead people in trains, the tattoo, and the cut hair, but she can’t remember other things, like pizza or the details of the stories she told the girls in the forest. Thus, memories link to identity. What a person remembers makes them who they are. Now, Hannah is a prisoner in a concentration camp, so her memories are frightful.
The horrors of the camp continue when Hannah realizes Tzipporah is dead. The word “dead” isn’t uttered aloud by the characters or in the text. Yolen alludes to death through the image of the fly and the picture of Hannah and Gitl in tears. The omission of the word indicates that the Jewish prisoners are trying to distance themselves from their deadly surroundings. To foster hope, they avoid terms that reflect their overwhelmingly hopeless situation.
Instead of mentioning death, Rivka tells Hannah that most of her family has “gone there” (108). The ambiguous diction appears to help Rivka. She has survived the camp for almost a year. She’s wise and provides Hannah with helpful tips. The emphasis on the bowls links to the theme of Privilege, Suffering, and Life or Death. Hannah goes from Barbie dolls and jellybeans to having only a single bowl.
Rivka evokes The Link Between Memory, Hope, and Personal Experience. She tells Hannah and the girls: “As long as we can remember, all those gone before are alive inside us” (109). She tells them that the camp can obliterate a person’s identity and turn them into a zombie, a member of the living dead, or, to use the camp term, a “musselman” (110). Rivka preserves her identity by infusing her tattoo, J18202, with meaning. The J stands for Jews, the 1 for being alone, the 8 since she lived with 8 family members, the 2 because only she and her brother remain alive, 0 since her brother thinks he’s a zero, and 2 because she and her brother will survive and reunite. Rivka engages with the Devil’s arithmetic, the title of the book. She studies “brutal arithmetic” to stay alive.
Hannah, too, engages with devilish calculations. She creates a human identity from her inhumane number. The J stands for Jews; the 1 for being alone; the 9 sounds like the German for “no,” and Hannah says “no” to death in the camp; the 7 for each day of the week she’ll live; the 2 for Gitl and Shmuel; and the 4 for her family of four in New Rochelle.
The Preservation of Identity continues with the children hiding behind the garbage dump. To stay alive, they have to conceal themselves in the trash. The Nazis mock the hiding children. They think of them as garbage. As the Nazis don’t think of themselves as trash, they don’t follow them into the garbage.
Hannah showcases her sense of community and how she has transformed from the beginning of the novel when taking Leye’s baby to the dump. Leye illustrates the emphasis on actions over words. Instead of saying thank you, she gets Hannah and the baby water. Hannah tries to thank Rivka for saving her from working with wood, but Rivka, emphasizing community, says: “Keep your thanks. And hand it on” (120).
Hannah’s memories trip her up again when she mistakes Breuer for the infamous Nazi doctor, Dr. Josef Mengele. She questions her identity and wonders if she’s becoming a “musselman.” Breuer’s sudden return to select another murder victim reflects the unpredictability of camp life. Hannah tries to save Reuven from Breuer. She models courage and continues to feel a sense of obligation toward the other Jewish prisoners.
The prisoners preserve their Jewish identity by saying Kaddish for Rabbi Boruch. Leye and Rivka lecture Hannah more about not using words like “death” or “corpse” (123). The scene complicates why Jewish prisoners avoid these terms. It could be to give them hope, and it might be to avoid upsetting the Nazis, who prefer technical jargon like “chosen” and “processed” (123). Fayge’s stark story about Israel and the werewolf reinforces the prisoners’ Jewish identity and the idea that they’re in a devilish, but not a godless, place.
One day, Hannah sees “a single strand of smoke rising against the bright spring sky, curling endlessly out of a tall chimney stack” (106). The image could represent smoke from the gas chamber or harmless smoke. The elusive diction makes it possible to construct different narratives.
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