The Devil’s Arithmetic follows Hannah, a contemporary Jewish girl, as she’s magically transported back to Poland in 1942. At the beginning of the story, Hannah sees remembering the past as nothing more than a burden. She dislikes how all Jewish holidays seem to be about remembering the past, wishing that instead she could just focus on the celebratory parts of holidays, like eating Easter candy. But when Hannah gets transported back in time to 1942 Poland, she gets a firsthand lesson about why adults like Grandpa Will and Aunt Eva believe that remembering the past is so important.
At first, Hannah believes that her memories of the Holocaust might help her protect the people of the Polish shtetl, like Gitl and Shmuel, from the Nazis by alerting her new friends to the dangers the Nazis pose. But as Hannah talks, she learns that remembering history alone is not enough to prevent it from happening. Gitl and Shmuel themselves have no memory of the Holocaust (because it hasn’t happened yet), and so partly because they can’t imagine a tragedy on the scale of the Holocaust, they trust the Nazis when they command them to board a truck to be “resettled.” Hannah learns that remembering history can’t be a solitary activity—everyone has to remember it to prevent it from happening again. Furthermore, as Hannah experiences an important episode in Jewish history firsthand, she learns that not everyone has the luxury of choosing whether or not to remember the past. For people like Grandpa Will and Aunt Eva, who have a reminder of the concentration camps literally on their skin in the form of tattoos, it is impossible for them to forget the horrors they witnessed. And so, when Hannah complains at the beginning of the novel that remembering things is a burden, she isn’t necessarily wrong, but she doesn’t realize at the beginning that she lives a privileged life compared to family members and other Jewish people who survived the Holocaust. Hannah learns that being able to remember is a privilege, and that remembering is a way to honor the people who suffered in the past to make her present life possible. Additionally, remembering is a way to potentially prevent the atrocities of the past from happening again.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Memory ThemeTracker
Memory Quotes in The Devil’s Arithmetic
“I’m tired of remembering,” said Hannah to her mother as she climbed into the car.
There was a lipstick stain where Aunt Eva had kissed her on the forehead. She ran some water and tried to scrub it off, feeling guilty because Aunt Eva was her favorite aunt, the only one who preferred her over Aaron. Hannah was even named after some friend of Aunt Eva’s. Some dead friend.
“Give them this!” Grandpa Will shouted at the TV, holding up his left arm to the set. The sleeve of his shirt was rolled up above the elbow.
Rosemary gets to eat jellybeans, and I get to eat horseradish.
“Never mind, little Chaya, never mind,” Gitl said. “Shmuel and I—we are your family now.”
“But if there is no Old Rochelle, how can there be a New?” Shmuel mused out loud. “Perhaps there is a Rochelle all alone, though the child does not know it.”
Photographs of Grandma’s family but none of Grandpa Will’s, because, Aunt Eva had once explained, no photographs had been saved in the death camps. “We are our own photos. Those pictures are engraved only in our memories. When we are gone, they are gone.”
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.
“The men down there,” she cried out desperately, “they’re not wedding guests. They’re Nazis. Nazis! Do you understand? They kill people. They killed—kill—will kill Jews. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. Six million of them! I know. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do. We have to turn the wagons around. We have to run!”
Was knowing—or not knowing—more frightening? She couldn’t decide. A strange awful taste rose in her mouth, more bitter even than the Seder’s bitter herbs. And they were for remembering.
“You are zugangi, newcomers, the lowest of the low,” the tall, dark-haired woman said to them as they huddled in the stark barracks room. She was in a blue dress with green piping and the short sleeves displayed a long number tattooed on her arm.
“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.”
Something forced Hannah to bend down and stare into the shelf. Little Tzipporah lay curled in a ball, her finger in her mouth like a stopper in a bottle. There was a fly on her cheek. Hannah reached out to brush it off.
“Do not touch her,” Gitl said.
“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.
