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.