Although The Devil’s Arithmetic explores one of the darkest parts of human history, the Holocaust, it is nevertheless a hopeful novel. When Hannah gets transported back in time to the Holocaust, she is often surprised by how hopeful the Jewish people she meets are. Partly, this is because they don’t know the future and the full extent of the Nazi atrocities—as Hannah does—but even after experiencing the worst of the concentration camps, people like Gitl and Shmuel hold on to hope that the future will be better, even though everything about their current situation seems to suggest otherwise. Hope, the novel shows, can buoy people in times of hardship, though on a grander scale, it’s not capable of actually changing the outcome of something as senseless and terrible as the Holocaust.
One of the greatest sources of hope during the story is an escape attempt from the camp that several characters organize. The attempt gets thwarted, and as a result, several characters like Shmuel and Fayge end up being executed by Nazis. Still, Yitzchak’s body never turns up among the dead, and so the hope that he really escaped and is free somewhere helps sustain Gitl as she struggles to survive until the camp is finally liberated. The escape attempt shows how hope often arises from dark circumstances or even failure, but it nevertheless helps people to endure difficult conditions. Similarly, just at the moment when Hannah, Esther, and Shifre are being led to their deaths in the dark room near the chimneys, Hannah consoles the other girls by telling them hopeful stories of her life in the future in New Rochelle and of all the things that Jewish people will go on to achieve even after the Holocaust. While The Devil’s Arithmetic shows the limits of hope, depicting how hope was not enough to stop many Jewish people from dying in concentration camps, it also portrays the power hope has to provide comfort in impossibly difficult situations.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Hope ThemeTracker
Hope Quotes in The Devil’s Arithmetic
Pretty girl, with faraway eyes,
Why do you look with such surprise?
How did you get to be so wise,
Old girl in young-girl disguise.
“When the man finished the number, he reached out and touched the collar of her dress, smoothing it down gently. “Live,” he whispered. “For my Chaya. For all our Chayas. Live. And remember.”
“God made the Devil, so God is here, too,” Rivka said.
Part of her revolted against the insanity of the rules. Part of her was grateful. In a world of chaos, any guidelines helped. And she knew that each day she remained alive, she remained alive. One plus one plus one. The Devil’s arithmetic, Gitl called it.
“If something happens to us, you must remember. Promise me, Chaya, you will remember.”
Hannah’s lips moved but no sound came out.
“Promise.”
“I will remember.” The words forced themselves out through her stiffened lips.
When it was silent at last, the commandant threw the shoes on top of Fayge’s body. “Let them all go up the stack,” he said. “Call the Kommandos. Schnell!”
The memories of Lublin and the shtetl and the camp itself suddenly seemed like the dreams. She lived, had lived, would live in the future—she, or someone with whom she shared memories. But Rivka had only now.
Then all three of them took deep, ragged breaths and walked in through the door into endless night.
“In my village, in the camp . . . in the past,” Eva said, “I was called Rivka.”
Hannah nodded and took her aunt’s fingers from her lips. She said, in a voice much louder than she had intended, so loud that the entire table hushed at its sound, “I remember. Oh, I remember.”
It later became an adoption agency, the finest in the Mideast. She called it after her young niece, who had died a hero in the camps: CHAYA.
Life.
