Page 65 of Library of Forbidden Books

Helene caught wind of rumors that all the Jews in Berlin would soon be deported and sent off from the Grunewald train station. Helene’s ID papers were not marked “Jew,” but her mother’s were, and Maria could be rounded up at any moment. The Nazis had lists of all the homes where Jews lived.

One day Helene went to her parents’ house to try once again to convince them to come live with her at the house in the middle of the forest. Gustav and Maria hardly ever ventured outdoors anymore, and Amalia was deathly pale.

“We can’t leave, Helene. Amalia is still in school . . .”

“Dad, the Nazis are going to take Mom. Don’t you see that?” She could not understand how blind the man was.

“Honey, I don’t want to leave your father,” Maria said. “We’ve been together for a lifetime, and I just don’t think it’s a good idea to hide away. People say they send Jews to camps in Poland to work, or to the ghettos up there.”

“Mom, I’ve been in one of those camps. It’s, it’s . . . I can’t even tell you how terrible it is, and I was in one of the better ones. Believe me, at your age, you won’t survive a week.”

Her mother shook her head. “We’re not leaving. But take your sister—she can still be saved. We’ve already lived long enough. This war isn’t going to end anytime soon, and we won’t recognize the world that exists once it’s over. I really appreciate what you’re trying to do, but we’re going to stay here.”

Helene clung to them, weeping and begging them to change their minds, but to no avail. Amalia sobbed the entire time she packed her suitcase, saying, “No, no, I don’t want to go. I don’t want to leave you!”

“You’ve got to,” Maria said, wiping away the young woman’s tears as she did when Amalia was a child. “We will live forever through you and Helene. God will preserve us in your memory, and one day he will make all things new, and we’ll be together with him forever. This separation is only temporary. Your grandparents are already there waiting for us. We’ll be together again soon enough.”

It was unbelievably hard to give the very last hug and then walk away. They dragged Amalia’s heavy suitcase to the car and loaded it into the trunk beside the cans of spare gasoline. Once Helene had found access to gas again, she had started keeping several gallons in the car and at the house so she would never run out.

As she and Amalia drove away from their childhood neighborhood, Helene felt like her heart was being ripped apart. The buildings and the streets were the same, but Berlin was an empty husk, its soul having been ripped out by the Nazis.

That very night the SS came for Helene’s parents. Neighbors later told Helene that the sergeant had told Gustav that they were there only for Maria. He answered that he was going with his wife anywhere they were taking her. They set out for the last journey of their life hand in hand, going down the stairs as calmly as if for a stroll to the park. The long walks they had taken to coax Helene out of Maria’s womb, the back-and-forth journeys on foot to take their daughters to school and music lessons, sitting peacefully on the porch in fall, the aroma of spring flowers—it all came flooding back as Gustav and Maria mounted the back of the truck and joined a group of strangers under a green canvas roof and drove into the forever silence.

After the watershed conversation about the living library, Lena had taken charge of contacting the potential candidates. It was a delicate matter that took time to complete. The initial conversations were all about determining who had become Nazi sympathizers. Most candidates, though, were political dissidents or religious people who could not tolerate the evil actions of the heartless regime. Then she and Helene would hand deliver the books to be memorized. Before returning a volume, the participants would recite its contents to them. They divided longer texts into two or three parts.

That afternoon, two participants came to Lena’s house for a recitation. A young man stood, cleared his throat, and launched into A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair . . .”

Beside him, an elderly woman nodded along, waiting for her turn.

The young man took a break an hour later, and she continued where she had left off earlier that day with War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, when Princess Marya and Natásha tend to Prince Andrei on his deathbed:

“It was the last spiritual struggle between life and death, in which death gained the victory. It was the unexpected realization of the fact that he still valued life as presented to him in the form of his love for Natásha, and a last, though ultimately vanquished, attack of terror before the unknown.”

Over weeks and months, the participants committed hundreds of texts to memory, constructing a human library built of nerves, muscles, and bones. In the brains of those brave resisters, one of the most important treasures of humanity was being painstakingly safeguarded while humankind raced headlong into near-complete destruction.

Chapter 38

Kummer and the Clue

Berlin

March 29, 1944

Despite the more frequent bombings, the human library had survived to the end of another winter and continued to grow. Lena, Gabor, and Mark had gone to live with Helene and Amalia in the house in Grunewald, which was outside of Berlin just far enough to offer a degree of safety. The capital’s inhabitants were fully tasting the gall of war by then. Large sections of the city, built up and beautified by Prussian kings, now lay devastated by fire and bombs. People lived in air-raid shelters, and food was scarce. The Russians were advancing in the east and the Americans through Italy. The fervor after Goebbels’s “Total War” speech from the year before had fallen flat, and the Nazi regime seemed at the brink of collapse, no longer even believing their own propaganda. Yet, still none of the leadership was willing to reverse course.

Helene was relieved that her country was losing the war. It was the only way to save the nation. But she did not know what it would mean for Derek and the kids, still in Königsberg.

Living alone with Helene had been hard on Amalia for several months. Helene tried to make a nice home for her sister, even while she struggled to breathe under the weight of her own grief. There was no way to know what had happened to their parents after their detention, but the stories that drifted back about the extermination camps left little doubt.

The winter of 1943 had been brutal, and spring was dragging its feet into 1944. At least most of the snow had melted, and their firewood had not run out. They had it a bit easier than the Berliners who still lived downtown. Helene and Amalia kept chickens, and Lena had started raising rabbits, so there were plenty of eggs and meat. But other food was hard to come by, even on the exorbitantly priced black market.

On the other side of Berlin, Rudolf Kummer was licking his wounds. Derek had been removed from his custody, and then Klaus had died at Dachau before Kummer could get much information out of him. However, one of the few things Klaus confessed under torture was that the library was right under their noses, but he never gave up the exact location.

With Klaus’s arrest came a portion of the banned books that the astute Jewish librarian had been concealing, but Kummer felt defeated. He could not stand that Helene Nathan was getting away with her plan.

Kummer no longer believed in Nazi victory but, like many Germans, did believe that a Germany without Hitler should not exist. If destiny had led them to this point, annihilation was better than being subject to Russia or the US, two of the most decadent countries in the world.