The Book Thief

(Part I)

Again, I offer you a glimpse of the end. Perhaps it’s to soften the blow for later, or to better prepare myself for the telling. Either way, I must inform you that it was raining on Himmel Street when the world ended for Liesel Meminger.

The sky was dripping.

Like a tap that a child has tried its hardest to turn off but hasn’t quite managed. At first the drops were cool. I felt them on my hands as I walked down from Frau Diller’s, in the middle of the road.

Above me, I could hear them.

Through the overcast sky, I looked up and saw the tin-can planes. I watched their stomachs open and drop the bombs casually out. They were off target, of course. They were often off target.

A SMALL, SAD HOPE

The bombs came down and soon the clouds would bake and the cold raindrops would turn to ash. Hot snowflakes would shower to the ground.

In short, Himmel Street was flattened.

Houses were splashed from one side of the street to the other. A framed photo of a very serious-looking Führer was bashed and beaten on the shattered floor. Yet he smiled, in that serious way of his. He knew something we didn’t know. But I knew something he didn’t know. All while people slept.

Rudy Steiner slept. Mama and Papa slept. Frau Holtzapfel, Frau Diller. Tommy Muller. All sleeping. All dying.

Only one person survived.

She survived because she was sitting in a basement reading through the story of her own life, checking for mistakes. Previously, the room had been declared too shallow for a shelter, but on that night, October 7, it had been enough. The shells of wreckage cantered down, and hours later, when the strange, unkempt silence settled itself in Molching, the local LSE could hear something. An echo. Down there, somewhere, a girl was hammering a paint tin with a pencil.

They all stopped, with bent ears and bodies, and when they heard it again, they started digging.

PASSED ITEMS, HAND TO HAND

They threw all of it upwards.

When another piece of broken wall was removed, one of them saw the book thief’s hair.

The man had such a nice laugh. He was delivering a newborn child. ‘I can’t believe it, she’s alive!’

There was so much joy amongst the cluttering, calling men, but I could not fully share their enthusiasm.

Earlier, I’d held her papa in one arm and her mama in the other. Each soul was so soft.

Further away, their bodies were laid out, like the rest. Papa’s lovely silver eyes were already starting to rust, and Mama’s cardboard lips were fixed half-open, most likely the shape of an incomplete snore.

The rescuing hands pulled Liesel out and brushed the crumbs of rubble from her clothes. ‘Young girl,’ they said, ‘the sirens were too late. What were you doing in the basement? How did you know?’

What they didn’t notice was that the girl was still holding the book. She screamed her reply. A stunning scream of the living.

‘Papa!’

A second time. Her face creased as she reached a higher, more panic-stricken pitch. ‘Papa, Papa!’

They passed her up as she shouted, wailed and cried. If she was injured she did not yet know it, for she struggled free and searched and called and wailed some more.

She was still clutching the book.

She was holding desperately on to the words who had saved her life.