The Librarian of Auschwitz is based on the true story of Dita Kraus, a 14-year-old girl imprisoned, together with her mother and father, in the family camp at Auschwitz. The family camp was an experimental initiative of the Nazis, to create a false representation of life in the camp to the outside world in order to hide genocide. At its peak, 17,500 prisoners were assigned to the family camp at Auschwitz. Tragically, only 1294 survived. In this section of the camp, family members were allowed to mix and there was even a purpose-built children’s block where children received basic lessons and could play games. But these prisoners did not benefit from any special conditions; they suffered from hunger, cold, exhaustion, illness and poor sanitation like any other prisoner at Auschwitz.

Antonio Iturb has drawn on research and personal interviews with actual survivors of the family camp for his fictionalised retelling of this disturbing record of human suffering. In this way, we meet the heroine of this story, Dita, who’s given the challenging task of librarian and caretaker of contraband books, of which there are eight paperbound and six living (ie. those shared orally through storytelling). To be discovered with banned material would mean certain death for Dita, so being custodian of these precious few books places her at great personal risk. But this is a risk Dita feels emboldened to take as the exchange of ideas, knowledge and education is a form of rebellion and gives hope in a hopeless situation.

Hope carries the characters of this story forward with resistance against their persecutors. Survival is the ultimate defiance. But hope takes real courage as like ‘a razor-thin edge…each time you put your hand on it, it cuts you’.

Natalie Platten is the assistant manager and children’s book buyer at Readings Doncaster.