Reviews with content warning for Torture - The Librarian of Auschwitz

This book was… It’s hard to put into words how powerful this book and the characters are. Such an amazing story; full of heart ache and truth behind real people who literally survived hell.
You know a book is amazing when you become invested and feel at times as if you are with the characters. I cried, I found myself gasping when things were revealed, I had to put my cheez-its down because i couldn’t eat while some parts where explained. This is a must read for everyone. History repeats itself, and education is a powerful weapon; the Nazis’ knew this and tried to destroy knowledge and truth.

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ems_rxlibrary's review against another edition

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dark emotional informative inspiring reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

This book was beautifully written and a haunting tale of rebellion even when your life is on the line.
Dita and her mother were a couple of the prisoners in Block 31 in Auschwitz. This block in particular was set up to try and fool the world that these camps were not death camps, so the children had a barrack where they would go every day and play with the other children. Even though it was forbidden, some books were smuggled in and it became Dita’s job to protect and hide them.
I was hooked from the foreword, honestly. The author told Dita before they parted, “Everyone knows about the largest library in the world. But I am going to write about the smallest library in the world and its librarian.”
I could tell how much time and effort this author put into researching this novel.
I did feel like the novel suffered a little from the shifting POVs. Sometimes it was from one paragraph to the next with no break to let you know that we were shifting to another POV, so it was easy to get lost at times, but it was still worth it.
This book made my list of must read books about the holocaust! So good. If you are a lover of historical fiction and a lover of books, I can’t imagine that you won’t like this.

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fenouil's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional funny hopeful reflective sad

Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

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delz's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative inspiring sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

It must not be an easy task to write a respectful yet entertaining Holocaust story, but The Librarian of Auschwitz is one such novel. The framework of the story is based on a real Jewish girl, Dita Kraus who was 9 years old when the Nazis started their “final solution.” As a 15 year old, Dita became the Librarian of Auschwitz’s, very secret makeshift library that held 8 books. She was part of a secret school in the only camp that housed children, The Family Camp. It was a “front,” so that if a humanitarian group like the Red Cross were to do inspections the Nazis would show this camp where, they believed they were treating the inmates well. Many times survival was just a matter of chance, but on occasion if you were very clever you could workout a way to survive another day. While people lost faith in god and even their fellow man, someone would come along and surprise Dita in their humanity. This is a powerful story of strength and love, love of family and the power of friendship.

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enmcurrie's review against another edition

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dark emotional hopeful informative reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

This was such a powerful and beautiful book. It wasn’t without flaws, but that didn’t matter. The core of the story carried all the way through. The pace is quite slow but it definitely picks up towards the end, and the last 100 pages are definitely the most harrowing. While at times it was a little hard to completely follow along, everything threaded together by the end to create such a bittersweet storyline. It’s based on this young girl, Dita Kraus, or Dita Adler in the book, who ends up running this secret little “library” made up of 8 old books in Aushwitz, in a makeshift Jewish family camp, set up by the Nazis as a front to cover up the atrocious mass murdering they were doing from any visiting foreign representatives. Many of Dita’s peers and Dita herself do end up being transferred or moved around later on though. In the background of the plot, the book also follows a couple of young men in the SS (also real people) who manage to escape Aushwitz and its horrors.
What was so emotive about this book is how of all these poor people (from children to elderly), in the most dire and horrific of circumstances, could find happiness in the smallest of things. I also loved the message that humans simply surviving is not enough, and that we need things like literature to keep humanity alive, hence why 8 old and tattered books in a place as awful as Aushwitz-Birkenau was so important. It was incredibly sad and heart-wrenching throughout, and hard to read at times. The vivid imagery of the concentration camps and the novel’s use of free indirect speech allowing you into the other characters’ thought processes made it incredibly compelling, and knowing that so many of them don’t end up with the freedom they deserve is the worst part. I think it’s a wonderful read and all of the characters were great, but Dita will most definitely stay with me for a long time. I’m very glad she could tell her story, she’s truly remarkable. The ending was beautiful. It left you feeling incredibly sad for all the loss Dita had faced, but incredibly relieved and content that she achieved all that she did.

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