The Librarian of Auschwitz
By: Antonio Iturbe / Translator: Lilit Thwaites / Prologue: Dita Kraus / Narrated by: Marisa Calin
Length: 13 hrs and 39 mins
Is it EVER possible to say one Likes a piece of Holocaust fiction/literature…?
P’raps what engaged me from the get-go was that there’s a bit of a blurb at the beginning of The Librarian of Auschwitz from the “actual” Dita, young librarian at Auschwitz’s block for families and children. She sounds ancient, wise, and resilient. The woman sounds STRONG. So right away I was feeling for the main character, and however uneven the opening (Dita originally runs around like a bit of a spaz before settling down and behaving like the teenager she is), I was firmly behind her.
Now see, lemme say right here that my mom was the person who taught me about the Holocaust when I was a wee one when she’d gather us children around her to read The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom. So I’ve been dabbling in Holocaust historicals and memoirs and fiction and what have you for many many years now.
It’s horrific; it’s an outrage; it’s sobering.
Can one say that one Likes such stuff?
I s’pose we’ll just have to go with: Does it make me feel?
On that front, by that measure, I did like this audiobook. Dita is a youngster when the war begins, and as she’s barely a teenager when the story opens, all she’s known, basically, is war and privation. Still, Auschwitz is a horror show that boggles her mind. Also mind boggling is the fact that she, highly literate and a lover of books, is put in charge of the eight precious books there are in the family block at Auschwitz. Each day she reads from them and passes them out, and each day she gathers them back up and hides them in leader Freddy Hirsch’s cubby.
And that’s about it as far as being a Librarian goes.
Mostly, this book follows many individuals as they live in the ghettos, run afoul of leaders/the Reich, move onto concentration camps. Generally, this is about the abominable conditions in the camps, the hours-long roll calls in freezing temperatures wearing nothing by rags and standing in icy puddles. It’s about surviving in the barracks whilst being eaten by fleas and with lice crawling all over the place. Naturally, it’s about selections also, where Dr. Mengele isn’t evil so much as he simply doesn’t view others as anything but specimens to be sent either to Life, or to the other side of Death in the showers.
This is also about keeping love alive, whether it’s through love of one’s family as survivors get fewer, or it’s love of one’s friends as they find each other after moves from concentration camp to concentration camp. Young Dita, who has to sneak in to the men’s barracks to see her father before disease and hunger take him, who knows crippling sorrow and anger, also discovers that there’s joy to be found in these times: A friend who lives, a friend who has comes to be like a sister to her. There is anguish, but there is hope and courage and endurance.
I thought Marisa Calin did a fine job with the narration, tho’ her German accents were a bit harsh. Then again, pretty much every German in here is pretty danged harsh, soooo….? She handled the young as well as the old in a suitable manner. And the see-sawing emotions were deftly handled as well. Horror and rage, yes. But three girls giggling and trying to make light of lice? Yes. Goading each other about who might be a dashing young man? Yes here too.
That’s probably what I liked most about this book: The stories of young people just trying to be young, just trying to be people. A 15-year old girl will trade a bit of food away for a ribbon, all because she wants her ragged and starved self to be seen like any other young girl in love, a girl with a ribbon in her hair, meeting at the fence with the boy of her dreams. There is a future to be clung to in these moments, love that is so precious. Love that is clutched to and held tightly… until it has to be let go, time is up, it’s onto the showers.
Sometimes I didn’t appreciate the stories or timelines hopping around so much, and sometimes (Tho’ for the most part the translation managed to get through some shining prose) the language felt stilted. And sometimes it felt as tho’ there was more history being jammed into the story as brief asides that took me out of the rhythm.
Wish there was more of an Epilogue…
But oh how few survived the camps long enough to live through Epilogues…
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