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The Librarian of Auschwitz cover
MAKE SOMETHING BETTER

The Librarian of Auschwitz

by Antonio Iturbe

Eight books. One library. One defiant act.

For you if

you believe that making something matters even when everything else is being destroyed

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$13 MSRP · Paperback
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In 1944, in Block 31 of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a fourteen-year-old girl named Dita Kraus secretly maintained a library of eight books — volumes hidden under floorboards and on her body during inspections. Antonio Iturbe's novel, based on Dita's true story, is about what the act of maintaining that library meant: not escape, not hope exactly, but a refusal to let the machinery of erasure be the last word. The books survived. Dita survived. What Iturbe makes from her story is a precise and devastating argument that making something — anything, even eight smuggled books in an impossible place — is itself an act of resistance that history cannot fully undo.

Where This Book Lives

Setting
Poland
Voice
An outside perspective on Poland
Themes
art as resistancebearing witnessbook banningcensorshippower of storytellingreading and literacysurvival
Topics
book banning in the united statesnazi germanythe holocaust

Based on the true story of Dita Kraus, written with her cooperation. Iturbe is a Spanish journalist and novelist; this is a work of narrative nonfiction in novelistic form.

Part of a Reading Journey

censorshipFeatured

Banned: Proof the Books Worked

They're banned because they worked. Read them anyway.

8 books • SEE THROUGH IT → MAKE SOMETHING BETTER

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