Although Sophie Scholl was sentenced to death, Marena, DeVita’s main character in "The Silenced," survives. He did this to show young adults that there is hope, that they can stand up for what they believe is right and have a positive outcome.

DeVita hopes young adults will take an active role in societal issues after reading the book.
 
“There are issues that will not be solved in my lifetime,” he said. But he hopes his book will at least motivate change in the near future, for the younger generation.

“A lot of people think I’m writing about what happened in our country and the world in the last six, seven years," he said. "What really is frightening is I wrote about something that happened 60 years ago or more. And that we’re drawing parallels to that, I think is scary.”

These are strong words coming from someone who not too long ago was apathetic about politics. Scholl’s activism deeply inspired DeVita.

“Sophie Scholl shamed me," DeVita said. "I learned from her that I can’t complain if I don’t take action."
 
And this is exactly what he preaches to his young readers.

When DeVita speaks about "The Silenced" at festivals and meetings, he says the audience usually encourages him to talk about the politics and theories behind the book. Above all, one of the points he vocalizes is that the book does not directly refer to modern issues. Nevertheless, DeVita said the book is "ripe with parallels to many modern-day political issues."

Although DeVita was not always politically in-tune, Wisconsin and Scholl helped shape this part of his life. He admits that Spring Green played a role in his political awakening.
 
“In my experience, people here [in Wisconsin] are much more politically involved than in Long Island,” DeVita said on seeing his neighbors travel all around for protests and political activism.

He readily admitted that Wisconsin residents' political activism and consciousness motivated him to become more aware. Wisconsin provided DeVita with a career in acting as well as in literature. It turned his political apathy around. And it now allows him to touch people’s lives by including his book in schools' curricula focusing on Nazi Germany.