The Book Thief

THE SNOWS OF STALINGRAD

In the middle of January 1943, the corridor of Himmel Street was its dark, miserable self. Liesel shut the gate and made her way to Frau Holtzapfel’s door and knocked. She was surprised by the answerer.

Her first thought was that the man must have been one of her sons, but he did not look like either of the brothers in the framed photos by the door. He seemed far too old, although it was difficult to tell. His face was dotted with whiskers and his eyes looked painful and loud. A bandaged hand fell out of his coat sleeve and cherries of blood were seeping through the wrapping.

‘Perhaps you should come back later.’

Liesel tried to look past him. She was close to calling out to Frau Holtzapfel, but the man blocked her.

‘Child,’ he said. ‘Come back later. I’ll get you. Where are you from?’

After more than three hours, a knock arrived at 33 Himmel Street and the man stood before her. The cherries of blood had grown into plums.

‘She’s ready for you now.’

Outside, in the fuzzy grey light, Liesel couldn’t help asking the man what had happened to his hand. He blew some air from his nostrils – a single syllable – before his reply. ‘Stalingrad.’

‘Sorry?’ He had looked into the wind when he spoke. ‘I couldn’t hear you.’

He answered again, only louder, and this time he answered the question fully. ‘Stalingrad happened to my hand. I was shot in the ribs and I had three of my fingers blown off. Does that answer your question?’ He placed his uninjured hand in his pocket and shivered with contempt for the German wind. ‘You think it’s cold here?’

Liesel touched the wall at her side. She couldn’t lie. ‘Yes, of course.’

The man laughed. ‘This isn’t cold.’ He pulled out a cigarette and placed it in his mouth. One-handed, he tried to light a match. In the dismal weather, it would have been difficult with both hands, but with just the one, it was impossible. He dropped the matchbook and swore.

Liesel picked it up.

She took his cigarette and put it in her mouth. She, too, could not light it.

‘You have to suck on it,’ the man explained. ‘In this weather, it only lights when you suck. Verstehst?’

She gave it another go, trying to remember how Papa did it. This time, her mouth filled with smoke. It climbed her teeth and scratched her throat, but she restrained herself from coughing.

‘Well done.’ When he took the cigarette and breathed it in, he reached out his uninjured hand, his left. ‘Michael Holtzapfel.’

‘Liesel Meminger.’

‘You’re coming to read to my mother?’

Rosa arrived behind her at that point, and Liesel could feel the shock at her back. ‘Michael?’ she asked. ‘Is that you?’

Michael Holtzapfel nodded. ‘Guten Tag, Frau Hubermann, it’s been a long time.’

‘You look so …’

‘Old?’

Rosa was still in shock, but she composed herself. ‘Would you like to come in? I see you met my foster daughter …’ Her voice trailed off as she noticed the bloodied hand.

‘My brother’s dead,’ said Michael Holtzapfel, and he could not have delivered the punch any better with his one usable fist. For Rosa staggered. Certainly, war meant dying, but it always shifted the ground beneath a person’s feet when it was someone who had once lived and breathed in close proximity. Rosa had watched both of the Holtzapfel boys grow up.

The oldened young man somehow found a way to list what happened without losing his nerve. ‘I was in one of the buildings we used for a hospital when they brought him in. It was a week before I was coming home. I spent three days of that week sitting with him before he died …’

‘I’m sorry.’ The words didn’t seem to come from Rosa’s mouth. It was someone else standing behind Liesel Meminger that evening, but she did not dare to look.

‘Please.’ Michael stopped her. ‘Don’t say anything else. Can I take the girl to read? I doubt my mother will hear it, but she said for her to come.’

‘Yes, take her.’

They were halfway down the path when Michael Holtzapfel remembered himself and returned. ‘Rosa?’ There was a moment of waiting while Mama re-widened the door. ‘I heard your son was there. In Russia. I ran into someone else from Molching and they told me. But I’m sure you knew that already.’

Rosa tried to prevent his exit. She rushed out and held his sleeve. ‘No. He left here one day and never came back. We tried to find him, but then, so much happened, there was …’

Michael Holtzapfel was determined to escape. The last thing he wanted to hear was yet another sob story. Pulling himself away, he said, ‘As far as I know, he’s alive.’ He joined Liesel at the gate, but the girl did not walk next door. She watched Rosa’s face. It lifted and dropped in the same moment.

‘Mama?’

Rosa raised her hand. ‘Go.’

Liesel waited.

‘I said go.’

When she caught up to him, the returned soldier tried to make conversation. He must have been regretting his verbal mistake with Rosa, and he tried to bury it beneath some other words. Holding up the bandaged hand, he said, ‘I still can’t get it to stop bleeding.’ Liesel was actually glad to be entering the Holtzapfels’ kitchen. The sooner she started reading the better.

Frau Holtzapfel sat with wet streams of wire on her face.

Her son was dead.

But that was only the half of it.

She would never really know how it occurred, but I can tell you without question that one of us here knows. I always seem to know what happened when there was snow and guns and the various confusions of human language.

When I imagine Frau Holtzapfel’s kitchen from the book thief’s words, I don’t see the stove or the wooden spoons or the water pump, or anything of the sort. Not to begin with, anyway. What I see is the Russian winter and the snow falling from the ceiling, and the fate of Frau Holtzapfel’s second son.

His name was Robert, and what happened to him was this.

A SMALL WAR STORY

It was Russia, January 5 1943, and just another icy day. Out amongst the city and snow, there were dead Russians and Germans everywhere. Those who remained were firing into the blank pages in front of them. Three languages interwove. The Russian, the bullets, the German.

As I made my way through the fallen souls, one of the men was saying, ‘My stomach is itchy.’ He said it many times over. Despite his shock, he crawled up ahead, to a dark, disfigured figure who sat streaming on the ground. When the soldier with the wounded stomach arrived, he could see that it was Robert Holtzapfel. His hands were caked in blood and he was heaping snow onto the area just above his shins, where his legs had been chopped off by the last explosion. There were hot hands and a red scream.

Steam rose from the ground. The sight and smell of rotting snow.

‘It’s me,’ the soldier said to him. ‘It’s Pieter.’ He dragged himself a few centimetres closer.

‘Pieter?’ Robert asked, a vanishing voice. He must have felt me nearby.

A second time. ‘Pieter?’

For some reason, dying men always ask questions they know the answer to. Perhaps it’s so they can die being right.

The voices suddenly all sounded the same.

Robert Holtzapfel collapsed to his right, onto the cold and steamy ground.

I’m sure he expected to meet me there and then.

He didn’t.

Unfortunately for the young German, I did not take him that afternoon. I stepped over him with the other poor souls in my arms and made my way back to the Russians.

Back and forth, I travelled.

Disassembled men.

It was no ski-trip, I can tell you.

As Michael told his mother, it was three very long days later that I finally came for the soldier who left his feet behind in Stalingrad. I showed up very much invited at the temporary hospital and flinched at the smell.

A man with a bandaged hand was telling the mute, shock-faced soldier that he would survive. ‘You’ll soon be going home,’ he assured him.

Yes, home, I thought. For good.

‘I’ll wait for you,’ he continued. ‘I was going back at the end of the week, but I’ll wait.’

In the middle of his brother’s next sentence, I gathered up the soul of Robert Holtzapfel.

Usually, I need to exert myself, to look through the ceiling when I’m inside, but I was lucky in that particular building. A small section of the roof had been destroyed and I could see straight up. A metre away, Michael Holtzapfel was still talking. I tried to ignore him by watching the hole above me. The sky was white but deteriorating fast. As always, it was becoming an enormous dust sheet. Blood was bleeding through, and in patches, the clouds were dirty, like footprints in melting snow.

Footprints? you ask.

Well, I wonder whose those could be.

In Frau Holtzapfel’s kitchen, Liesel read. The pages waded by unheard, and for me, when the Russian scenery fades in my eyes, the snow refuses to stop falling from the ceiling. The kettle is covered, as is the table. The humans, too, are wearing patches of snow, on their heads and shoulders.

The brother shivers.

The woman weeps.

And the girl goes on reading, for that’s why she’s there, and it feels good to be good for something in the aftermath of the snows of Stalingrad.