Fourteen-year-old Dita is one of the many imprisoned by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Taken, along with her mother and father, from the Terezín ghetto in Prague, Dita is adjusting to the constant terror that is life in the camp. When Jewish leader Freddy Hirsch asks Dita to take charge of the eight precious volumes the prisoners have managed to sneak past the guards, she agrees. And so Dita becomes the librarian of Auschwitz.
Out of one of the darkest chapters of human history comes this extraordinary story of courage and hope.
The main problem people have with this book is that it sometimes resembles a textbook instead of a fiction novel. Personally, I think that was one of the strengths of this novel. If this was a complete work of fiction, I wouldn't have learned as much as I did. If it did not give the actual numbers, people wouldn't understand how many people it affected. Sure you hear the numbers sometimes, but while reading a fictional story hearing how many people actually died makes people realize what happened more than one they just hear numbers randomly.
This story was so touching and it was one of the first stories that I read about the second world war that did not change historical facts in a way that lessened the impact of what happened.
