The Librarian of Auschwitz

The overriding theme of this story is the message that books are life-changing, empowering, and a way to grant solace to the Jewish prisoners who are at the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp. Books are a way to understand history, as well, and to determine how history changes and affects not just life as it is lived in the present, but the past and the future. Professor Morgenstern, who readers learn at the end of his life, is erudite, intelligent, and compassionate, perhaps says it best when he has a conversation one day with Dita: “Within their pages, books contain the wisdom of the people who wrote them. Books never lost their memory” (69).

Readers see this theme most powerfully through the collection of books that have landed with the prisoners of Block 31. It is perhaps Dita’s favorite book that lends power to the notion that books can explain the unexplainable while, at the same time, provide comedic relief and comfort. The irony with the book, The Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk, is that initially, the book is nearly banned by the prisoners for being scandalous, but Dita recognizes that it is really a powerful book that parodies war, thus showing how fruitless war is.