The Auschwitz Librarian

Based on the true story of Dita Kraus.

The story of the smallest and most dangerous library in the world, told by an Auschwitz prisoner who managed to survive.

January 1944. The teenager Dita Kraus and her parents are transported from the Jewish ghetto of Terezín in Prague to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Only Dita Kraus and a handful of other prisoners survive, after a year's stay, before their liberation by the Allies in the spring of '45. She observes everything, remembers everything and recounts everything to Antonio Iturbe: The fear, the comrades she found dead in the morning from hunger and cold, the forced labor under the blows of the "Kapos", the periodic "selections" that separated the healthy from the sick who were taken to the crematoriums.

But above all, she remembers Freddy Hirsch, the leader of the children's block 31. In the black mud of Auschwitz that swallows everything, Freddy Hirsch secretly built a school. The Nazis don't know about it. Just as they don't know about the existence of the smallest, hidden and illegal public library that ever existed. It contains six "talking" books and eight printed ones. The latter, young Dita hides under her dress at the risk of her life.

The book was awarded the TROA award and translated into 22 languages.

They said about the book:

"A novel that, while not a silver bullet for the unimaginable atrocities of the death camps, is a hymn to life."
–Kirkus Reviews

"An unforgettable, heartbreaking novel."
–Publishers Weekly