The Librarian of Auschwitz

by Antonio Iturbe

While it lasted, Block 31 (in the Auschwitz extermination camp) was home to five hundred children, together with several prisoners who had been named “counselors.” Despite the strict surveillance they were under and against all odds, the Block housed a clandestine children’s library. It was tiny, consisting of eight books, including A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells, a Russian grammar, and another book on analytical geometry.… At the end of each day, the books, along with other treasures such as medicine and some food, were entrusted to one of the oldest girls, whose task it was to hide them in a different place every night. ALBERTO MANGUEL, The Library at Night

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

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.

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

To live is a verb that makes sense only in the present tense.

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.”

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.”

camp. 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.

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 takes out the messiest of the books—little more than a bundle of unbound sheets. It may be the least suitable, the least pedagogic, and the most irreverent of them all. There are even teachers who disapprove of it, finding it indecent and in poor taste. But those who believe that flowers grow in vases don’t understand anything about literature. 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.

The last supper Jesus shared with his disciples was a celebration of Seder, and the Christian Eucharist arose from this Jewish rite.

The two sisters had arrived in Bergen-Belsen in October 1944, after they’d been deported from Amsterdam to Auschwitz. Their crime: being Jewish. Five months have been too many to avoid death in this wet hole. Typhus has no respect for youth. Anne dies alone in her bunk the day after her sister. Her remains will stay buried forever in Bergen-Belsen’s mass graves. But Anne has done something that will end up being a small miracle: Her memory and her sister’s memory will bring them back to life many years later. In the secret place in Amsterdam where the two girls and their family hid, she spent two years writing notes about her life in the “house at the back”—some rooms attached to her father’s office, which were closed off and converted into a hiding place. For two years, with the help of family friends who supplied provisions, the family lived there, together with the van Pels family and Fritz Pfeffer. Shortly after they moved into their hideout, they celebrated Anne’s birthday, and among the presents was a small notebook. Since she couldn’t have a close friend in the hideout with whom she could share her feelings, she shared them with that notebook, which she christened Kitty. It didn’t occur to her to give a title to this outline of her life in the “house at the back,” but posterity took care of that. It has become part of history as The Diary of a Young Girl.

A person waiting for you somewhere is like a match you strike at night in the countryside. It may not be able to light up everything, but it does show you the way back home.