The Librarian of Auschwitz

Just when you have thought all the stories that could be told about life in one of the concentration camps have been told, you find an incredible story of bravery, fortitude, inner strength and endurance.

Antonio Iturbe has interviewed Dita Kraus, who now lives in Israel and when she was a fourteen year old girl was the Librarian of Auschwitz.   This book has been labeled a young adult book but I found it as intense, and both heartbreaking and inspiring as any of the adult fiction books about the Holocaust that I have read.  This book uses the fictionalized plot line to fill out the story of Dita but does not soften the horrors of life in the death camp.  There are a few very graphic scenes described in this novel.

Dita and her parents are forced to leave their lives behind in 1944 when they are sent from their home in Prague to the model camp Terezin.  There the prisoners are treated in a more human style to show the outside world that the Germans are just holding people in ghettos and work camps.

The family is then transferred to Auschwitz, where their life becomes much worse.  In the beginning because there is a chance that the Red Cross may come for an inspection, a fellow prisoner, Fredy Hirsch is allowed to run a "school" for the children.  Though at 14, Dita is too old for the school, she becomes the librarian and caretaker of the eight books that have been brought into camp clandestinely.    Books are banned in the concentration camp.  There was also the living library of teachers who would tell stories.  Dita is in charge of lending out the books and scheduling the teachers to tell stories.  "Dita caressed the books. They were broken and scratched, worn with reddish brown patches of mildew; some were mutilated.  But without them, the wisdom of centuries of civilization might be lost - geography, literature, mathematics, history, language.  They were precious. She would protect them with her life."

As Dita escapes into the book about the Count of Monte Crisco, she finds herself comparing his suffering to her own.  "She wonders if she'll manage to get away from where she is, as the protagonist of the novel did.  She doesn't think she is as brave as him, although if she had an opportunity to run toward the woods, she won't hesitate.  ...She asks herself, Can you really choose, or do the blows dealt to you by fate change you no matter what, in the same way that the blow of an ax converts a living tree into firewood?"

She feels hatred for the SS guards and officers, who are torturing her, her family and all the others.  She worries that she will become a person swallowed up with hate and seeking revenge.  She thinks about the injustices with which the Nazis have themselves in their obsession with death.
 "As she thinks about this she feels her temples throb with rage and an insatiable hunger for violence.  But then she remembers what Professor Morgenstern taught her: Our hatred is a victory for them.  And she nods in agreement.  If Professor Morgenstern was mad, then lock me up with him."


As a passionate reader, it is easy to see how books can save a soul when they need an escape from reality.  Though life was hard and those in the camps could never relax and be happy, the books I can image could give those in the "school" a chance to escape in their imaginations for just a little while.