Since Elementary school, I have been drawn to stories surrounding the Holocaust. I read all the fiction I could get my hands on, watched documentary films, and sought out biographies in Middle School when I had exhausted the historical fiction options. Since my years in school, authors have sensed a need in Middle School/YA historical fiction that gives an authentic, potent, view of the Holocaust from multiple perspectives. When I heard about the Librarian of Auschwitz at a literature conference, I was enthralled. Once again, someone had found a narrative that I had never heard . Someone’s story that hadn’t been told before, was available.
As soon as we got this book in the Library, I….had to give it to a student! I truly expected to be the first person to take it home. However, a student came looking for a Holocaust story and had read everything else we had. She wanted a real, raw, gritty, what actually happened, not glossed over account and I knew that this book was what she was looking for. So I waited…and waited…it is a long book and is emotionally hard to get through so she renewed it. Once I finally got it in my hands, I couldn’t wait to read it. I had all Thanksgiving break and this was going to be my free time.
It did not disappoint. The narrative of Dita’s story is inspiring and heartbreaking at the same time. The descriptions of things that are unthinkable from an outsider’s perspective (starvation, vermin infestations, the smell of death, gas chamber executions, work details collecting the dead or their personal belongings, etc. etc. etc) are harrowing and given in great detail. The grotesqueness of the camp, government, medical experiments, and humanity in general (Nazi, Gypsy, Pole, and even Jew) is not hidden. And while the depravity of the situation is in your face, hope still finds a way to break through. I could not be more appreciative of this novels authenticity in telling this story and I hope others who find stories like these have the courage to tell them before the memories and stories are forgotten or fade away.
Leave a CommentFourteen-year-old Dita is one of the many imprisoned by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Taken, along with her mother and father, from the Terezín ghetto in Prague, Dita is adjusting to the constant terror that is life in the camp. When Jewish leader Freddy Hirsch asks Dita to take charge of the eight precious volumes the prisoners have managed to sneak past the guards, she agrees. And so Dita becomes the librarian of Auschwitz.
Out of one of the darkest chapters of human history comes this extraordinary story of courage and hope.