The Librarian of Auschwitz

by Antonio Iturbe

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.

This difference between the reptile world and the world of our human minds is one our sympathies seem unable to pass. We cannot conceive in ourselves the swift uncomplicated urgency of a reptile’s instinctive motives, its appetites, fears, and hates. She wonders what H. G. Wells would say about the world people now inhabit, if he would be able to distinguish the reptiles from the humans.

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

Truth is the first casualty of war.

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?

Truth is put together by destiny; it’s nothing more than a whim of fate. A lie, on the other hand, is more human; it’s created by mankind and tailor-made to purpose.