The Book Thieves Quotes

“Dispersal was a conscious strategy of the plunderers. Only by destroying these collections could they build up new ones. Many of these libraries were the results of decades, sometimes centuries, of careful collecting. There had been generations of learned collectors and readers. The books also said something about the people who owned and treasured them: what they read and what they thought and what they dreamed. Sometimes they left traces in the form of underlined passages, notations, notes in the margins, or short comments. The beautiful and personally designed ex librises that many readers had made for their books demonstrate the care and pride they took in their libraries. Each collection in its own right took form in a unique culture, a depiction of its creator's world, which was lost when the library was broken up. The books are fragments of a library, of a world that once existed.”
― Anders Rydell, The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance

“I realized that these memories are central, they were the very reason for the book plundering. Robbing people of words and narrative is a way of imprisoning them.”
― Anders Rydell, The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance

“What is more frightening, a totalitarian regime’s destruction of knowledge or its hankering for it?”
― Anders Rydell, The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance

“Thousands of Jews in the ghetto came to their library to borrow books. Reading gave both hope and consolation to the inhabitants, as a fifteen-year-old boy, Yitzhak Rudashevski, wrote in his diary on the same day that the library celebrated its hundred thousandth book loan: 'Hundreds of people read in the ghetto. Reading has become the ghetto's greatest pleasure. Books give one a feeling of freedom; books connect us to the world. The loan of the hundred thousandth copy is something the ghetto can be proud of.”
― Anders Rydell, The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance

“The extermination of Poland's literary heritage was frighteningly efficient. Researchers have estimated that 70 percent of all books in Poland were destroyed or lost through plunder. Over 90 percent of collections belonging to public libraries or schools were lost or destroyed.”
― Anders Rydell, The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance

“What immediately strikes me is just how tattered the books are. Some of the spines have split. The binding has loosened and the threads stick out. Some of the books are in such bad condition that they seem to be held together only by their place on the shelf. They are neither old nor valuable, but they have had hard lives - emigres, some having arrived with refugees from Russia before the war, only to go back east at a later stage. More than sixty years later they have come home to Paris.”
― Anders Rydell, The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance

“Works of art were trophies that glorified leaders and the nation. Art would also reflect and legitimize the National Socialist ideals and the new human being. But the actual ideology would be underpinned by books and archives. The future would be built by a control of memory and history, on the basis of the written word. The”
― Anders Rydell, The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance

“The book was an instrument of both repression and liberation”
― Anders Rydell, The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance

“Nazis realized that if there was something that gave more power than merely destroying the word, it was owning and controlling it. There was a power in books. Words could act as weapons, resounding long after the rumbling of artillery had stopped. They are weapons not only as propaganda, but also in the form of memories. Whoever owns the word has the power to not only interpret it, but also to write history.”
― Anders Rydell, The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance

“Нацистам було відомо, якими важливими були книжки для євреїв. Читання робить людину людиною. Той, хто забирає його в нас, разом із книжками забирає й наші думки.”
― Anders Rydell, The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance

“Адольф Гітлер створив дарвіністську культуру лідерства, яка в такій тоталітарній системі, як Третій райх, дійсно працювала на диво добре. То була система, де вершина належала сукупності хитрості, підступності, жаху, лестощів, нетерпимості, бюрократичної майстерності та безжалісності як альтернатива м’язовій силі чи чистоті крові. Заблудлі у власній арійській утопії створення нової людини, вони були нездатні побачити, що у шляху до влади в нацистській Німеччині не було нічого героїчного.”
― Anders Rydell, The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance

“Коли ж усе було сказано й зроблено, нацистська еліта являла собою доволі нездорове кубло. Ґерінг був огрядним, до того ж полюбляв морфін. Ґеббельс мав клишоногість, а Гітлер страждав на хронічну хворобу шлунка і ймовірно, що скінчив би життя із хворобою Паркінсона.”
― Андерс Риделл, The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance

“Спалювання книжок найдужче вказує на культурний занепад суспільства. Хоча його й ототожнюють здебільшого зі спалюванням книжок нацистами 1933 року, символічний занепад літератури існує стільки ж, скільки сама книжка.”
― Anders Rydell, The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance

“[...] if there was something that gave more power than merely destroying the word, it was owning and controlling it. There was a power in books. Words could act as weapons, resounding long after the rumbling of artillery had stopped. They are weapons not only as propaganda, but also in the form of memories. Whoever owns the word has the power not only to interpret it, but also to write history.”
― Anders Rydell, The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance

“The strong relationship between humans and books relates to the role of the written word in the dissemination of knowledge, feeling, and experience over thousands of years [...] Our simultaneously emotional and spiritual relationship to the book is about how the book "speaks to us." It is a medium connecting us to other people both living and dead.”
― Anders Rydell, The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance

“Reading makes you into a human being. When someone takes it away from you they also steal your thoughts.”
― Anders Rydell, The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance

“There was a power in books. Words could act as weapons, resounding long after the rumbling of artillery had stopped. They are weapons not only as propaganda, but also in the form of memories. Whoever owns the word has the power to not only interpret it, but also to write history.”
― Anders Rydell, The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance

“Robbing people of words and narrative is a way of imprisoning them.”
― Anders Rydell, The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance

“These people were well aware that the theft of their literary culture was a way of robbing them of their history, their humanity, and, in the final analysis, any possibility of remembrance.”
― Anders Rydell, The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance