The+Devil's++Synopsis



Today in my class we talked about the "The Devil's Arithmetic". It started with a character named Hannah. A 12 year old Jewish girl who is celebrating the Passover holiday. She did not like these holidays because she did not like to remember her past. One example of things that she would like to forget is grandpa Will. This old man watches Holocaust documentaries every year. While he watches the documentaries he yells and chants in anger. Our group wondered why he did this. We relized soon enough that he himself was in a concentration camp. Then another question came up, why would Will want to remember all the bad memories of his time in the concentration camp. We also wondered what the numbers on his arms meant. We also talked about Hannah during her young age. It was at a family event. Hannah saw the grandpa Will's mark of numbers and thought it would make him happy to have a set of numbers like him. When grandpa Will saw the mark that Hannah made he was furious about the mark that she had. No one in the family talked about it again. That is what we discued in our litcircles today.

Today in class my group was talking about Hannah drank too much at the dinner and maybe had passed out and dreamed about what happened in the past before the concentration camps started. She was able to see how everything was started and how her grandfather became a part of it. Then we talked about why the grandfather has so much hate towards the holocaust and we realized that he had lost so many people during that time period and is very hard to forget about anything that happened to him or anyone he knew. Posted Tuesday, 11:30 am Today in our group we spoke about how history brings the worst in people because while they were in the concentration camps they mentioned that they were in Gods hands amd that everything that is happening will turn out to be saved at the end. Even though they beleive that they can be resucued Chaya's family and the others are being sent to get killed.Something that we learned about the background was that the auschwits was a type of concentration camp that allows medical experiments. Some type things that we were confused of were if the jews beleived in religion, or mythes? Something that we wanted to talk about was the process since that mentioned it something to do with the killing.

In our group today we discussed different ideas based on our book "the Devil's Arithmetic" connecting to the Essential Question:What brings out the best and worst in people? We came up to the conclusion that religion brings out the worst of people sometimes. An example of this is when Hannah is in the Concentration camp, she was very hopeful. We realised that hope is what keeps these people alive, this was there form of resistince. Nick found a very important quote saying "Without hope, there is no life.Without life..."(Yolen,102). Hope was a very important part of life in the Concentration camps.

This was our second to last litcircles. We talked a lot about the E.Q. What brings out the best and worst of people. We relized that death brings out the worst in people. One example of this happening is when Gitl started slapping Hannah (Chaya) after Tzporah died. This was because Chaya touch the body. We also learned something very interesting. The word Barracks means living places for the jews in concentration camps. We also relized that life in this camp has changed her. She was not taking stuff for granted anymore. I know this because she was dreaming of food that she normally hated. We wanted to talk more about how they run the concentration camps and the "processing". This is what we discussed in our litcircles.

Today was our final litcircle. We were all sad. Many of the question that we had in the beginning of the book were finally answered. We now know that aunt Eva was actually Rivka. We also finally relized that the mark of numbers meant different things to different people. The Nazi's used the numbers in a way to keep track of the words. The Jews though of the mark more than just numbers. Each one of the Jews gave a different meaning to the mark. This cleared a lot of confusing for us. This was our final synopsis for our group.