The Librarian of Auschwitz

by Antonio Iturbe

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

The Nazi officers are dressed in black. They look at death with the indifference of a gravedigger. In Auschwitz, human life has so little value that no one is shot anymore; a bullet is more valuable than a human being.

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.

Throughout history, all dictators, tyrants, and oppressors, whatever their ideology—whether Aryan, African, Asian, Arab, Slav, or any other racial background; whether defenders of popular revolutions, or the privileges of the upper classes, or God’s mandate, or martial law—have had one thing in common: the vicious persecution of the written word. Books are extremely dangerous; they make people think.

Night had fallen by the time they reached Auschwitz–Birkenau. It was impossible to forget the screeching sound of the metal door as it opened. Impossible to forget that first breath of icy air that smelled of burnt flesh. Impossible to forget the intense glare of the lights in the night: The platform was lit up like an operating room. Then came the orders, the thud of rifle butts against the side of the metal carriage, the shots, the whistles, the screams. And in the middle of all the confusion, that Beethoven symphony being flawlessly whistled by a captain at whom even the SS guards looked with terror.

No one would treat them as Uncle Josef did in his macabre genetic experiments to find out how to make German women give birth to twins and multiply the number of Aryan births.

She is so young that she barely remembers anymore what the world was like when there was no war. In the same way that she hides the books from the Nazis, she keeps secret the memories in her head. She closes her eyes and tries to recall what the world was like when there was no fear.

From the little she remembers of her childhood, Dita recalls that peace smelled of chicken soup left cooking on the stove all night every Friday. It tasted of well-roasted lamb, and pastry made with nuts and eggs. It was long school days, and afternoons spent playing hopscotch and hide-and-seek with Margit and other classmates, now fading in her memory …

That was the day she stopped being afraid of skeletons and old stories about phantom hands, and started being afraid of men.

The first lesson any veteran inmate teaches a recent arrival is that you must always be clear about your goal: survival.

To survive a few more hours and, in this way, gain another day that, added to other days, might become one more week. You must continue like this, never making big plans, never having big goals, only surviving each moment.

To live is a verb that makes sense only in th...

Against all odds, life stubbornly carried on.

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.”

“Dr. Mengele? He’s a madman. He experimented with injections of blue ink into the pupils of thirty-six children in an attempt to produce blue-eyed people.

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.

Adults wear themselves out pointlessly searching for a joy they never find. But in children, it bursts out of every pore.

His mind was a blank while he was concentrating on his challenges; he was almost happy.

Within their pages, books contain the wisdom of the people who wrote them. Books never lose their memory.”

Starting a book is like boarding a train to go on holiday.

But men always expect to be told everything.

Drawing was a way of having a conversation with herself when she was overcome by the idea that her youth, which had barely begun, already seemed to be over.

H. G. Wells is right. There really is a time machine—books.

It must be close to freezing point outside, but they aren’t cold; or if they are, they’re sharing it, so it’s more bearable. Maybe that’s what love is—sharing the cold.

Love was like walking on a carpet of shattered glass.

she tells him the things you never stop to say because you think there’ll always be time in future to say them.

Her father’s absence weighs unbearably on her. How can something that no longer exists be so heavy? How can emptiness have weight?

A book is like a trapdoor that leads to a secret attic: You can open it and go inside. And your world is different.

She even briefly questions whether it’s legitimate to laugh after everything that’s happened, and with everything that’s still going on.

He told her that falling in love was to see someone and suddenly recognize them for who they were, knowing that this was the person you’d always been waiting for.

Renée would like to hate him; she knows it’s her duty to hate him. But hate is too much like love: Neither of them is a matter of choice.

That the greatest weakness of all is precisely that of the strong: They end up believing they are invincible.

Death is something terrible but foreign to her, as though it could happen to others but not to her.

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.

There’s no doubt that love and madness have some common features.

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?

Dita suddenly sees fear as a type of rust that undermines even the strongest convictions. It corrodes everything; it destroys all.

“Life, any life, is very short. But if you’ve managed to be happy for at least an instant, it will have been worth living.”

There’s constant talk of typhus and tuberculosis and pneumonia, but not so much is said about the depression sweeping through the Lager like a plague. It happened to Dita’s father, too: People suddenly begin to switch off. They are the ones who have given up.

But war not only destroys bodies with machine guns and explosions; it also wipes out sanity and kills souls.

War is like an overflowing river: It’s hard to control and, if you put up a small barrier, it only gets swept along in its path.

Their friendship has reached a point where moments of silence don’t bother them.

Dita’s not interested in romance, especially not with some Pole she can’t understand, whose ears look like bowls. She doesn’t want anyone to tell her what to do.

“Don’t talk like that. God will punish you!” “More?” “You’ll go to hell.” “Don’t be naïve, Margit. We’re already in hell.”

since the death of her husband, she feels a wound inside her that is continually bleeding.

They’ve spent years being shoved from one place to another and threatened with death, sleeping poorly and eating badly, without knowing if there’s a purpose to it all, if they really are going to see the end of this war. The worst thing is that Dita is beginning not to care. Apathy is the worst possible symptom.

She pinches her arm until it hurts. Then she pinches herself even harder until she almost draws blood. She needs life to hurt. When something pains you, it’s because that something is important to you.

The name of the supervisor in charge of the guards at Bergen-Belsen is Elisabeth Volkenrath. After training as a warden at Ravensbrück, she moved on to Auschwitz, where she forged a solid reputation for the ease with which she ordered executions by hanging for the slightest misdemeanor.

That’s all we are? Bits of decomposing matter? A few atoms, like those of a willow tree or a shoe?

assistants. It occurs to Dita that if Hitler hadn’t come to power and war hadn’t broken out, this unscrupulous woman now standing in front of them with a killer’s glint in her eye would be yet another of those slightly plump, pleasant hairdressers who give the girls ringlets and cheerfully comment about the neighborhood gossip.