Book Thief

It is a strange thing for a librarian to admit she doesn’t want to return a book, that she would like it to make a book be part of the “extremely overdue” collection. However strange the feeling, The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak, is such a book for me.

I’ve just finished reading it and am now trying to put into words how this book moved me.

It’s the story of Liesel Meminger who is the book thief. It follows her life as a foster child in Molching, Germany, a small working class town outside of Munich, from 1939 to 1943. She is a girl with a dead brother and mother, and no father. She moves in with Mama and Papa, her foster parents. She can’t read or write yet, but she can steal. She makes friends and enemies and helps her parents keep a secret that will change all their lives. She goes from a little girl to an almost women while the world around her deals with the insanity of war torn Nazi Germany.

The complex nature of this book surprised me. But the first surprise comes early in the book. Should I tell you? I will. The books narrator is Death. And he is an excellent narrator, at that. As he says often in the book, he is always surprised at how much humans can take and still survive and still want to live.

If you’d like to read a book about the power of the human spirit that is real, that doesn’t sugar coat the darkest aspects of human nature and that recognizes that ordinary people can turn the smallest glimpse of hope into “a yellow raining sun,” then you’ll like the book thief.

For now, I may have to buy a copy for myself, or possibly at least donate one to the library to replace the “extremely overdue” copy.

Review by Childrens Librarian Patricia Schroader

Brace yourself; you will need tissues for this movie!

It is through an eight-year-old boy named Bruno that the movie "Boy in the striped pajamas" unfolds. Bruno's father, Ralf, is a Nazi soldier, a highly ranked one at that. Bruno's grandfather is proud of his son's position in the German military, convinced that his son is "making history." Bruno's grandmother is a German citizen who opposes Hitler's views, much to the chagrin of her own son. And Bruno's mother is a society wife, who at the beginning of the film is concerned only with her own family and their secular German life. At the beginning, you see these four points of view and how sheltered Bruno has been -- politics isn't discussed in front of the children, so Bruno and his older sister Gretel have a cheerfully ignorant childhood. When Bruno’s dad is promoted he brings his family to the country and Bruno discovers a “farm” in the distance and wonders why the farmers wear their pajamas all day. As Bruno explores he finds a boy named Shmuel who is also 8 years old sitting on the “farm” side behind an electric barbed wire fence. Bruno and Shmuel become good friends, despite their different backgrounds and situations. The movie eventually leads up to one critical moment where Bruno makes a mistake he immediately regrets and seeks to right the wrong. Without hesitation the boys make a pact…one made in innocence and friendship. The boys who play the two eight year olds are brilliant both with expressive eyes and believable acting.

I read some reviews citing that the boy Bruno is too naïve, but I think Bruno represents not just a boy but also something bigger. Bruno seems to be a representation of Germany, perhaps even humanity, itself, and the failure to deal with the evil right before one's very eyes. So many Germans claimed the innocence that we see in Bruno, saying they had no knowledge of the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem that Hitler and his SS were carrying out across the European continent. Even today, despite all the existing evidence, there are still those that deny the Holocaust happened, not wanting to acknowledge the great evil of which humanity, perhaps even their neighbors and family members, is capable. More than anything else, this film shows the great price humanity pays for such utter naivete.

This is a Holocaust movie with sufficient realism to remind the viewer that this horror did in fact happen. I would not recommend it for younger viewers for there are no attempts to 'sanitize' this film. This is no doubt probably one of the saddest movies you’re likely ever to see, not so much for the wrenching intimate tragedy it portrays but for the historical reality it epitomizes. Toward the end I realized what was going to happen, I saw it coming practically from the beginning and when it did happen my jaw still dropped and I cried and by the time the credits rolled I was too stunned to move, still doubting what I had seen. I probably won’t watch this movie again due to the fact my heart just couldn’t take it. Watch it, it will leave a lasting impact on you.