The Librarian of Burned Books

by Brianna Labuskes

And usually once she started crying she couldn’t seem to stop. It was as if her grief was lurking, waiting for any hint of vulnerability.

Hannah knew the assault should strengthen her resolve, make her want to take up a sword. But every day that passed, she was less and less certain the world really was worth saving.

May his memory be a blessing, Brigitte had said. In Jewish tradition, that meant it was the responsibility of those who remembered the deceased to carry on his goodness.

But sometimes I think it was the moment right before the gasoline was poured on the books. The moment the most educated country in the world willingly, joyously, wholeheartedly turned away from knowledge.”

“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?”

“I started paying more attention to politics in the decade since I had my eyes viciously opened in Germany. And my opinion on the practice hasn’t changed much—it still feels like people are playing poker or baseball or football. Each side counts up their wins and losses without regard to the lives involved, and most of the time that’s fine. Things swing left and things swing right, and we get a semblance of a government coming out in the middle.”

“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.

“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.

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, you won’t recognize them when the stakes are high.