The Devil's Arithmetic
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50 free The Devil's Arithmetic trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Jane Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic begins with a bored girl at a family Passover Seder and, within a few pages, drops her into a Polish village in 1942. Hannah Stern knows what is coming for the people who take her in, and nobody will believe her. Few novels for young readers bring the Holocaust so close, which is why it has been a classroom staple since the late 1980s. This quiz follows the story from start to finish: Hannah's family in New York, the village and its wedding, the journey, the rules and secret language of the camp, the escape attempt, Hannah's final choice and what she understands when she comes back. A few questions cover the Jewish traditions and terms the novel leans on, how the author came to write it, and the television film. Students can use it as a comprehension check after reading, and teachers get a ready-made multiple choice set with an explanation for every answer. The first questions are the gentlest, and the later ones reward close readers.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In The Devil's Arithmetic, which relative at Hannah's Seder table turns out to have been her camp friend Rivka?
Aunt Eva
Aunt Eva carries the same tattooed number as Rivka, which is how Hannah recognises her. She took a new name after reaching America.
Q 02In The Devil's Arithmetic, which fairy tale do the villagers think Hannah is muddling when she warns them of ovens?
Hansel and Gretel
Hansel and Gretel is a story Hannah had told her new friends, so they assume she has confused its witch's oven with real ones. Her true warning sounds like one more tale.
Q 03In The Devil's Arithmetic, which prophet is Hannah welcoming when she opens the apartment door at the Seder?
Elijah
Elijah is the prophet a Seder door is opened for, in the hope that he will visit. Hannah finds a field in wartime Poland where the hallway should be.
Q 04In The Devil's Arithmetic, which science-fiction film does Hannah retell to the girls walking to the wedding?
Star Wars
Star Wars is one of the plots Hannah spins for girls her own age, who hang on every word. Never popular before, she discovers that she is a born storyteller.
Q 05In The Devil's Arithmetic, what does Hannah take from Rivka and put on so that the guard leads her away instead?
Her kerchief
Her kerchief is all it takes, because the new guard has not learned the girls' faces. Hannah tells Rivka to run, then walks on in her place.
Q 06Seeing herself as Chaya in a mirror in The Devil's Arithmetic, what does Hannah find has vanished?
Her braces
Her braces are gone, and the girl in the glass reminds her of old family photographs. She is wearing a dress Gitl once wore to Shmuel's Bar Mitzvah.
Q 07What does Arbeit Macht Frei, the sign over the camp gate in The Devil's Arithmetic, mean in English?
Work sets you free
Work sets you free was the lie hung over the gates of Auschwitz, Dachau and other Nazi camps. In the novel the villagers whisper the words as they are marched in.
Q 08Which actress played Hannah in the 1999 television film of The Devil's Arithmetic?
Kirsten Dunst
Kirsten Dunst was still a high school junior when she shot the film in freezing weather. She said the scenes of being herded out of the trucks at gunpoint felt frighteningly real.
Q 09As a small girl in The Devil's Arithmetic, how does Hannah enrage Grandpa Will while trying to please him?
Inks numbers on her arm
Hannah inks numbers on her arm with a ballpoint pen to match his own, and he screams at her. She has nightmares about it for years and cannot forgive him.
Q 10In The Devil's Arithmetic, which language can Hannah suddenly understand in Gitl and Shmuel's house?
Yiddish
Yiddish comes as easily to Hannah as a translated speech she once heard on a class trip to the United Nations. Until now it was only the language her older relatives joked in.
Q 11In The Devil's Arithmetic, which disease is said to have killed Chaya's parents and left her confused?
Cholera
Cholera had struck the family months earlier, and Chaya barely came through it. Every strange thing Hannah says about the future is put down to the fever.
Q 12In The Devil's Arithmetic, what does the wedding entertainer tell Hannah that her Hebrew name, Chaya, means?
Life
Life is what Chaya means, and the name follows Hannah through the book. After the war Gitl gives it to the organisation she founds for young survivors.
Q 13In The Devil's Arithmetic, where do the camp's youngest children hide whenever the commandant comes to inspect?
The garbage dump
Q 21In The Devil's Arithmetic, what is a badchan, the figure Fayge's father pays to enliven the wedding procession?
A jester
A jester is the nearest English word for a badchan, who rhymes and clowns for the guests. Hiring one marks Fayge's father as a man with money to spare.
Q 22In The Devil's Arithmetic, what marks the right hand of the blokova, the prisoner who runs Hannah's barracks?
Missing fingers
Missing fingers are her punishment: the blokova lost two of them for losing control of the prisoners in her charge. She is a prisoner herself.
Q 23In the prisoners' slang in The Devil's Arithmetic, what does it mean to 'organize' a pair of shoes?
To steal them
The garbage dump, which the prisoners call the midden, is the one place the Nazis will not go. Children under fourteen are not supposed to be in the camp at all.
Q 14After the truck ride in The Devil's Arithmetic, what are the villagers crammed into for four days and nights?
Train boxcars
Train boxcars carry them with barely room to breathe, and the doors open only once on the way. A child and several old women are dead before the camp comes into view.
Q 15In The Devil's Arithmetic, what does Fayge do when Shmuel is lined up to be shot after the failed escape?
Runs to die beside him
Fayge runs to die beside him, throwing herself at his feet as the guns fire. The two had been stopped on the road to their own wedding.
Q 16In The Devil's Arithmetic, what does Gitl make the newly shaved Hannah promise never to do before the Nazis?
Cry
Cry is the one thing Gitl forbids, so that the guards never see her broken. Shorn of their hair, the women of the village suddenly all look alike.
Q 17On the drive to the Seder in The Devil's Arithmetic, what does Hannah complain every Jewish holiday is about?
Remembering
Remembering is exactly what she is sick of, and her mother answers that both grandparents lost family to the Nazis. The complaint frames everything the open door will teach her.
Q 18In The Devil's Arithmetic, how many Jews does Hannah tell her friends at the water pump will perish?
Six million
Six million is the figure Hannah dredges up from her history lessons, along with a promise that the Jewish people will endure. The girls take it for one more of her stories.
Q 19In The Devil's Arithmetic, where does Gitl settle after the war and found an organisation named for Chaya?
Israel
Israel is where Gitl goes after leaving the camp at a weight of just 73 pounds. Her organisation helps survivors find the relatives they lost.
Q 20As the weeks pass in the camp in The Devil's Arithmetic, what does Hannah find slipping away from her?
Her memories of home
Her memories of home fade until a word like pizza means nothing to her. She can still name things from the future but can no longer picture them.
To steal them, in plain words: the prisoners 'organize' whatever keeps them going, from water to a birthday present. The word turns theft from their captors into a small act of defiance.
Q 24In The Devil's Arithmetic, which butcher, long refused by Gitl, escapes the camp to join the partisans?
Yitzchak
Yitzchak is the only man to get away on the night of the breakout. Both of his small children had already been lost in the camp.
Q 25In The Devil's Arithmetic, what is the afikoman that the children hunt for and hide at the Stern family Seder?
A piece of matzo
A piece of matzo wrapped in an embroidered blue cloth is the prize, and Grandpa Will must buy it back from whoever hides it. Hannah now thinks herself too old for the game.
Q 26In The Devil's Arithmetic, what is a shtetl, the kind of place where Hannah wakes up among strangers?
A small Jewish town
A small Jewish town of the kind once scattered across Eastern Europe, a shtetl was a world the Holocaust all but wiped out. Hannah sees one in full swing, on the day of a wedding.
Q 27In The Devil's Arithmetic, what was Grandpa Will called in the camp, where he had to carry the dead?
Wolfe
Wolfe was his name before the family took new ones in America. As one of the Kommandos he had to carry away the bodies of prisoners who were killed.
Q 28In The Devil's Arithmetic, why does Grandpa Will pick Hannah to open the door during the Seder?
She gave up her wine
She gave up her wine, emptying her whole glass into the prophet's cup, and he praises a sacrifice nobody asked for. Hannah feels a fraud, because she simply did not want it.
Q 29In The Devil's Arithmetic, what does Rivka hand each newcomer, warning it must serve for everything?
A bowl
A bowl is the only one each prisoner will ever get, and nothing else is issued for eating or drinking. Rivka took over the job of handing them out after her mother died.
Q 30In The Devil's Arithmetic, what do the soldiers outside the synagogue announce to the wedding party?
They are being resettled
They are being resettled for the length of the war, or so the officer claims. The rabbi urges calm, and only Hannah knows where the trucks really lead.