The Librarian of Burned Books

by Brianna Labuskes

“So much of this is because of fear, isn’t it? All Hitler had to do was make people afraid: There is a monster out there who will attack you if you don’t let me protect you.”

We are just different from the others, who curiously wander at first through a thousand wonders, and yet only see the banal in the end.

“Maybe it will all be pointless. Even if Althea says yes, Taft might not change his mind.” “But?” she prompted. “But the only way you’ll sleep at night is if you throw everything you have at this,” Hale said, looking up once more, his eyes dark. “The good fight isn’t always about winning. Sometimes it’s a reminder to the world that there are people out there who are willing to try.”

But it hadn’t felt completely real at the time. Hitler had been installed as chancellor because the moderates had thought they could control him. Most people who paid attention to politics in those days expected him to fade into obscurity, his madness burning bright but then snuffing out quickly.

We . . . we humans, we love telling each other stories, don’t we? We’ve done just that in caves and in amphitheaters and in the Globe and in kitchens and around campfires and in the trenches. Every culture, every country, every type of person in the world tells stories. They’ve been whispered and sung and written down on scraps of paper and they have always, always been an indelible part of our very humanity.”

All Hannah could think now was that it was people like that who had let Hitler rise to power. The terrible men Hitler had surrounded himself with were absolutely complicit in what was happening, but so were the otherwise decent people who thought that Hitler’s success could ultimately benefit them if they simply held their noses over the parts of him they didn’t like.

“I don’t think an author’s job is always to change the world,” Viv said. “I think sometimes it’s to make it more enjoyable. Even for a brief amount of time.”

“I can tell you that banning books, burning books, blocking books is often used as a way to erase a people, a belief system, a culture,” Hannah said. “To say these voices don’t belong here, even when those writers represent the very best of a country.

“In 1928, my father, along with the rest of my country, was mocking Hitler. They saw him as a joke, someone who could be easily controlled, someone who would burn out after everyone heard his deranged spiels. Only a handful of years later, we had to flee Germany after my brother was dragged to a concentration camp, where he would be murdered for his beliefs. “History is built on moments that feel insignificant,” Hannah said again, and Althea marveled at how she could land each word as a punch. “And so in every moment you must ask yourself: Do you want to be the ones handing out the gasoline cans? Or the ones trying to put out the fire?”

“Most of the time, it’s fine,” Althea repeated. “But it can also blind you to the occasions when politics isn’t just politics. World leaders spent most of the years before Hitler invaded Poland pacifying the man. They treated him like he was any other politician who would play by the rules of the game, the unspoken ones that keep millions of citizens from being disappeared in the middle of broad daylight. The unspoken ones that keep the party’s street fighters from murdering their opponents in the town’s square. The unspoken ones that keep countries from brutalizing their neighbors and slaughtering their own people.

“Even if it’s the elephant in the room today, I know why this amendment exists, I know the politics behind it. Roosevelt’s fourth term is your boogeyman, Senator Taft.”

“And you want the numbers on your side of the scoreboard to be higher than your opponents’,” Althea said, clear and decisive. “But if you walk away from today, from every testimonial about how much joy and relief the Armed Services Editions bring to our boys overseas, then all you are is stuck on a court playing games while the rest of us live in the real world.

“There are bigger things in this world than politics,” Althea continued. “There are bigger things in this world than scoring a win for your side just to score a win for your side. This might seem like a melodramatic overreaction for some of you, maybe you scoff at the notion that there should be so much brouhaha over books. There were plenty of people who felt that way in May 1933, as well. And I promise you, if I’ve learned anything from my time in Berlin, it’s this: an attack on books, on rationality, on knowledge isn’t a tempest in a teacup, but rather a canary dead in a coal mine.

“There are moments in life when you have to put what is right over what party you vote for. And if you can’t recognize those moments when the stakes are low—let me assure you, y...