The Librarian of Auschwitz [antikvár]

1Auschwitz-Birkenau, January 1944 THE NAZI OFFICERS ARE DRESSED IN BLACK. THEY LOOK AT DEATHwith the indifference of a gravedigger. In Auschwitz, human life has so little value that no one is shot anymore; a bullet is more valuable than a human being. In Auschwitz, there are communal Chambers where they administer Zyklon gas. It's cost-effective, killing hun-dreds of people with just one tank. Death has become an industry that is profitable only if it's done wholesale.The officers have no idea that in the family camp in Auschwitz, on top of the dark mud into which everything sinks, Alfred Hirsch has established a school. They don't know it, and it's essential that they should not know it. Some inmates didn't believe it was possi-ble. They thought Hirsch was crazy, or naive: How could you teach children in this brutal extermination camp where everything is forbidden? But Hirsch would smile. He was always smiling enig-matically, as if he knew something that no one eise did. It doesn't matter how many schools the Nazis close, he would say to them. Each time someone stops to teil a story and children listen, a school has been established.In this life-destroying factory that is AuschwitzBirkenau, where the ovens burn corpses day and night, Block 31 is atypical, an anomaly. It's a triumph for Fredy Hirsch. He used to be a youth