Translation of ‘La bibliotecaria de Auschwitz’ highlights impact of small actions

    Any other readers out there wish they would have prioritized reading more books in 2018? Regardless of how many I’ve read, I always wish I’d made time for more. That’s why, throughout the month of January, you’ll find reviews for teens (or adults) looking for books to read this year. They’re all available at the Heginbotham Library, so if a book sounds interesting, check it out.
    To get my 2019 Resolution Reads started, I grabbed “The Librarian of Auschwitz,” written by Antonio Iturbe and translated by Lilit Thwaites. Found in the juvenile fiction section, it’s by an author I’d never heard of and is based on true events in history, so it seemed worth a read. The other thing that grabbed my attention was the fact that the book was originally written in Spanish. I don’t speak the language, and off the top of my head I can think of just one Spanish author whose work I’m familiar with. He’s been dead for 400 years, so the chance to read a translation of a modern Spanish author’s book seemed too good to pass up.
    Preceding the novel is a letter from Dita Kraus, the woman whose life the story is based on. In it, she writes that Iturbe said, “Everyone knows about the largest library in the world. But I am going to write a book about the smallest library in the world and its librarian.”
    Dita was that librarian, and at the age of 14 in the Aschwitz concentration camp during World War II, she took on the responsibility of preserving books when most would expect people to be too preoccupied with simply preserving their own lives to do much else.
    Despite the historical correctness of the novel, Kraus reminds readers that it was born of both her own experiences and “the rich imagination of the author.” Iturbe uses fiction not just to entertain, but to keep people thinking about the tragedies of the holocaust. In the book, Dita’s character looks at the atrocities around her and hopes that she never gets used to it. In the same way, I hope that people today take in the history lessons, museums and stories — this novel included — without ever becoming desensitized to the very real horrors that millions of people faced.

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