The Librarian of Auschwitz: Chapters 1–5

It’s cost-effective, killing hundreds of people with just one tank. Death has become an industry that is profitable only if it’s done wholesale.

They thought Hirsch was crazy, or naïve: How could you teach children in this brutal extermination camp where everything is forbidden?

He was always smiling enigmatically, as if he knew something that no one else did.

In this life-destroying factory that is Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the ovens burn corpses day and night, Block 31 is atypical, an anomaly.

“Six! Six! Six!”
It’s code for the imminent arrival of SS guards at Block 31.

These items, so dangerous that their mere possession is a death sentence, cannot be fired, nor do they have a sharp point, a blade, or a heavy end. These items, which the relentless guards of the Reich fear so much, are nothing more than books: old, unbound, with missing pages, and in tatters.

No one would treat them as Uncle Josef did in his macabre genetic experiments to find out how to make German women give birth to twins and multiply the number of Aryan births.

The sergeant—the one everyone calls the Priest—scrutinizes the hut with his almost transparent eyes, his hands still tucked inside the sleeves of his greatcoat and hovering over his middle, never far from the holster of his gun.

They’d told them at school that the clock was a piece of mechanical ingenuity, invented by Maestro Hanuš more than five hundred years ago.

They found it difficult to deal with the mayhem of dead bodies mixed in with those who were still dying; with the arduous task of having to kill again, one by one, those who had already been shot; with the quagmire of blood as they stepped over the fallen bodies; with the hands of the dying coiling around their boots like creeping vines.

They found it difficult to deal with the mayhem of dead bodies mixed in with those who were still dying; with the arduous task of having to kill again, one by one, those who had already been shot; with the quagmire of blood as they stepped over the fallen bodies; with the hands of the dying coiling around their boots like creeping vines.

Mengele gives the papers a cursory look and disdainfully hands them to the sergeant, almost allowing them to fall.

Mengele gives the papers a cursory look and disdainfully hands them to the sergeant, almost allowing them to fall.

The sergeant looks to Mengele, who despises nothing more than incompetence, before he angrily thrusts his men aside and resumes the inspection.

“That won’t be necessary,” says a man’s voice, speaking Czech with a strong German accent, slow and deliberate, and yet emphatic.

Close up, Hirsch’s eyes were an odd mix of gentleness and insolence.

“You could have spent the afternoon lying on your pallet, going for walks with your girlfriends, or just doing your own thing. But instead, you pushed the cart so that people could have their books."

He told her about the books that had reached the camp clandestinely.

The political maps were a mosaic of vermilion, brilliant greens, orange, navy blue, in sharp contrast to the dullness that surrounded Dita: the dark brown of the mud, the faded ocher of the huts, and an ashy clouded sky.

The Basic Treatise on Geometry was somewhat better preserved.

He explained to her that the book in question was called The Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk and was written by a blasphemous alcoholic called Jaroslav Hašek, that it contained scandalous opinions about politics and religion, and more than dubious moral situations.

“It was painful to watch him bowing down in front of the Priest in such a servile manner.”

The addition of five thousand new prisoners to the camp meant they’d have to share the water that dribbled from the taps; the roll calls would become interminable; and the huts would be absolutely jam-packed.

“I cheekily stood right in front of her and said, ‘Hey, you!’”

The two Kapos chatting to each other—a man and a woman—wear a pink and a black triangle respectively; chances are no one else wants to talk to them.

If Death were to speak, it would do so with precisely this icy cadence.

The Priest didn’t focus on her in the end, thanks to the altercation with the crazy teacher, and she thought she’d escaped.

And they’ll say it with that condescending tone that makes her blood boil, pretending to be understanding.

The three of them and her grandparents had to move into a tiny dilapidated apartment on Elišky Krásnohorské Street.

Dita repeated what her father had told her: The rabbi had succeeded in deciphering the sacred word used by Yahweh to instill the gift of life.

The first kiss, no matter how fleeting it might be, is never forgotten.

When the kids race off, the school goes back to being a crude wooden shed.

The registrar keeps the books on prisoner numbers in a place where the ebb and flow of people is tragically constant.

He displays the affable smile of a model prisoner for any guards he comes across.

“It has to be. If you learn anything when you’re working near the Germans, it’s that everything has its rationale, whatever it might be. It might be terrible or cruel...but there’s always a reason.”

When the poison hits, the body must react horribly: suffocation, convulsions.

That morning, after roll call, her attention had been caught by an older woman wandering close to the barbed wire fence, despite the fact that it was forbidden. Mrs. Turnovská, whom Dita refers to as Radio Birkenau, had told her mother that the guards gave this woman some leeway because she’s the seamstress.

“No. You’re doing a job, and it deserves fair recompense.”

He’s performed skin grafts, and the patients have died of gangrene.

The teacher takes the book by the cover and opens it, reverent.