Similarities Between The Lottery And The Holocaust

“The morning of June 27th,” is how “The Lottery” starts, but another equally important date is September 1, 1939 (par. 1). This is the day that threw the world into chaos; this is the day when World War 2 starts. Many people relate “The Lottery” to World War 2, specifically the Holocaust, and many symbolic ties to the atrocity. From the opening paragraphs to the final sentence, one can see how Shirley Jackson is “poking fun” of the Nazi party. The story focuses on how one town blindly follows a tradition that makes the whole community turn cruel and savage in a heartbeat. Shirley Jackson is trying to show the reader how barbaric the Holocaust was by writing “The Lottery.”

One of the easiest horror to see would be the cruelty of the people in both the Holocaust and “The Lottery.” Everyone knows the sadistic actions the Nazis performed on the Jews. From experimental testing to gassing and burning the Nazi party was brutal. Villagers in “The Lottery” are just as brutal. For example, the villagers have an extreme shift in their mood. As seen in the beginning of the story, the villagers were happy and talkative to one another, but by the

time the lottery is over the people are stone cold killers. The elder of the village, Old Man Warner, even sees this: “‘People ain’t the way they used to be’” (par. 67). He realizes that the lottery is forcing people to change for the worse. Shirley Jackson uses the cruelty of the villagers to directly correspond to Nazi Germany.
Another, more subtle, comparison is that the villagers blindly follow authority.

After the reader finds out the Tessie has the black dot the next step is almost immediate. “‘All right, folks,’ Mr. Summers said, ‘let’s finish quickly’” (par. 73). Without question, the villagers pick up the rocks and start hurling them at Tessie. Even her kid, Davy Hutchinson throws rocks at his mother. As seen in the Holocaust, questioning Hitler was useless because if the Nazi’s did they would just get sent to the concentration camps with the Jews. The only evidence one can see of people standing up is the people who helped free the Jews by hiding them, but even then the Nazi party rejected it and would kill the person as soon as they found out. Shirley Jackson again shows the reader how the book is a retelling of a historic event by blindly

following.
Finally, possibly the most heart quenching, is the fact that both the Holocaust and “The Lottery” kill innocent people. One knows that millions of innocent people die in the Holocaust. These people did nothing wrong, they were just the scapegoat for Nazi Germany. In this same way, Tessie was the scapegoat of this year’s lottery. “‘It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,’ Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her” (par. 79). Each year in this village an innocent person dies because the village thinks they are doing the “right thing.” This is exactly how the Nazi’s ran their camps. Shirley Jackson used the term scapegoat in her story, the same term that is used in World War Two, to show the killing of the innocent.
These three points are only some of the ways Shirley Jackson relates this fiction story to the all so real Holocaust. She is trying to show the reader the idiocy of the actions of Nazi Germany. However, this is only one interpretation of the story, one can think of many different relationships to other historical events, but this is the closest to a real-life event one has. This story perfectly paints the picture of the Holocaust in a different light, so that way the world can try and see the obscenity of it.