Series: /
Pages: 424
Genre: Historical fiction
Based on the experience of real-life Auschwitz prisoner Dita Kraus, this is the incredible story of a girl who risked her life to keep the magic of books alive during the Holocaust.
Fourteen-year-old Dita is one of the many imprisoned by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Taken, along with her mother and father, from the Terezín ghetto in Prague, Dita is adjusting to the constant terror that is life in the camp. When Jewish leader Freddy Hirsch asks Dita to take charge of the eight precious volumes the prisoners have managed to sneak past the guards, she agrees. And so Dita becomes the librarian of Auschwitz.
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It is a horrible thought that 1.3 million innocent people were murdered simply because they were Jews. It is a horrible thought that this was going on for years before they finally put a stop to it.
This book was hard for me to rate because it's written as fiction, yet there are of course things in it that happened for real and, therefore, it's hard to give it a low rating.
The first half of the book, however, was a pure three-star read for me, it was dragging on and the story just didn't move on anywhere. There, we had mostly fiction and it was selling us a story.
The second half of the book reads almost as non-fiction because things get more realistic, it's written more about the reality of what happened and we don't only get story anymore, we get facts.
This is not only the story about Dita - the librarian, it is also a story about other people and facts; about Fredy Hirsch and his 'suicide', about the famous Siegfried Lederer's escape with the help of SS, there was also a mention of Anna Frank.
We get to see all the beauty Auschwitz tried to show on the outside and all the horrors happening inside.
Dita, a 14 year old, was based in a family camp. People in the family camp had certain privileges and their life was slightly better. There were kids with their parents and teachers and they had school. Dita was named as the librarian, even though the books were strictly forbidden, but Dita couldn't give them up because it was her escape from the ugly reality she lived in.
The family camp was mostly there for façade, something they showed the people from Red Cross when they visited to convince them that nothing wrong was going there and people lived in good conditions.
But things got worse and worse by the day, everyone knew they were going to die sooner or later. When the family camp got shut down because they didn't need it anymore, that's when the real hell started for Dita.
This is a book that's filled with brutal facts. I still think this would be better written as non-fiction, but it works this way, too. It's hard to read it, but it's necessary to do so. We must not forget the ugly parts of the history.
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