More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Literature has the same impact as a match lit in the middle of a field in the middle of the night. The match illuminates relatively little, but it enables us to see how much darkness surrounds it. JAVIER MARÍAS, citing William Faulkner
Nicole Crumley liked this
It doesn’t matter how many schools the Nazis close, he would say to them. Each time someone stops to tell a story and children listen, a school has been established.
Brave people are not the ones who aren’t afraid. Those are reckless people who ignore the risk; they put themselves and others in danger. That’s not the sort of person I want on my team. I need the ones who know the risk—whose legs shake, but who carry on.”
It wasn’t an extensive library. In fact, it consisted of eight books, and some of them were in poor condition. But they were books. In this incredibly dark place, they were a reminder of less somber times, when words rang out more loudly than machine guns.
You can recognize them by their better clothes, their brown “special prisoner” armbands, and the triangular badge that identifies them as non-Jews. A red triangle identifies the political prisoners, many of them Communists or social democrats; a brown one is for Gypsies; a green one for criminals and ordinary delinquents. A black triangle is for social misfits, retarded people, and lesbians, while homosexual men wear a pink triangle. Kapos with black or pink triangles are rare in Auschwitz, as these are worn by prisoners of the lowest possible category, almost as low as Jews.
Adults wear themselves out pointlessly searching for a joy they never find. But in children, it bursts out of every pore.
“The strongest athlete isn’t the one who finishes first. That athlete is the fastest. The strongest athlete is the one who gets up again every time he falls, the one who doesn’t stop when he feels a pain in his side, the one who doesn’t abandon the race, no matter how far away the finish line is. That runner is a winner whenever he reaches the finish line, even if he comes in last.
Within their pages, books contain
the wisdom of the people who wrote them. Books never lose their memory.”
Cronin’s The Citadel on
Lichtenstern.
During the night of March 8, 1944, 3,792 prisoners from the family camp BIIb were gassed and then incinerated in Crematorium III of Auschwitz–Birkenau.
The library has now become her first-aid kit, and she’s going to give the children a little of the medicine that helped her recover her smile when she thought she’d lost it forever.
Miriam looks up at her librarian. That small book with its stories has managed to bring the whole hut together. When Dita shuts her book, the children stand up and move about again, even running around the hut. Life has been reconnected.
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.
know it’s a huge effort for you, but … for the time the story lasts, the children stop being in a stable full of fleas, they stop smelling burned flesh, they stop being afraid. During those minutes, they’re happy. We can’t deny this to these children.”
pantomime. Hirsch and the rest of us have played the Nazis’
The Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk with
But she’s not going to tell that to her daughter, who’s too young to understand how tragic it is for a mother not to be able to give her daughter a happy childhood.
