At this point I’m still reading the Book Thief, and things just keep getting tougher. The war is constantly escalating, and Death is starting to complain about the amount of souls that he has to carry into the afterlife. Life at Liesel’s house also changed drastically. An old favor that her father, Hans, owed from WWI when he was a soldier, came into play. What it basically came down to, was that during WWI Hans was saved by his friend, Erik Vanderburg, and because of this, the favor came into play. His friend didn’t survive, but he was survived by his son, Max. I guess that an important thing to add would be that the Vandenburgs are a Jewish family. In order to pay back his friend who is now long gone, the Hubermanns took in Max. The rest of Max’s family was long gone, either dead or disappeared into parts unknown.  

From the book, we learn early on that Hans Hubermann is a man with a big heart, and always willing to help others instead of himself. But what sure prized me the most was his wife’s reaction to basically rising their lives to hide a Jew. In case I haven’t described Rosa Hubermann, here it is. She’s an extremely harsh woman, and berates Liesel and her husband whenever she can, or feels like it. She’s also a very practical woman, and she’s always unfazed and prepared for the worst.

As soon as Max comes into their lives, most of that changes. Rosa doesn’t continue with her constant anger that’s usually aimed at her husband and foster daughter. She makes sure that Max is as comfortable as he can be living in the freezing basement of the Hubermann’s house. He has to stay in the basement during the day so that no passerby would be able to see him through the windows of the house, and at night he would come up the stairs, and try to warm his frozen bones by the fire.

I find this sudden change in Rosa amazing. At the start she’s a woman that loves, but doesn’t show it. As Max comes into their lives, a tenderness emerges that we never even knew was there. To be honest, for the first few chapters in which kind Rosa resided I was a bit confused as to where the real Rosa Hubermann went. But then it hit me how kind of awesome, but at the same time sad the transformation was. It was amazing because once this stranger entered their lives, Rosa became a new person, yet at the same time it was sad, because it was this stranger that made this change that neither Liesel or Hans could've made in Rosa. She completely changed who she was for a boy who she had never met before. But perhaps part of that care that she gave him came from the fact that he needed her to live. Liesel and Hans were capable of going off on their own, and her not needing to worry about them too much. Maybe part of the reason that she berates Hans and Liesel is that deep down she really cares for them, but doesn’t know how to show it. She’s definitely a more complex character than she seems.

Blog Entry #2

At this point, I’m still reading The Book Thief, and the plot keeps getting thicker. Right now, Liesel is still in school, and her reading is continually getting better and stronger. A chapter or two before where I am, the Nazi party had a book burning ceremony to destroy all of the books that could be harmful to party ideals. On this list were books any written by Jewish authors or that featured a Jewish protagonist, or anything that portrayed Jews in a positive light. They were all piled, one on top of the other, forming a funeral pile of potential classics. And of course, Death is present there, at this pseudo-funeral, overseeing the goings-on.

All of the children are required to attend, on account of them being Hitler Youth, and these book burnings were the party’s way of “educating” both the young and the old on what should be kept as far as possible from your intellect. The entire town of Molching is there. Liesel is among them, and to her, seeing a pile of books the size of a small building that are destined for burning, is incomprehensible (it is to me too). So she stands there, watching the books go up in flames while listening to some big shot party leader ramble on about how this burning is for the good of all, and it’s all because the Fuhrer “cares about his people”.

After the burning when nearly all is reduced to ashes, Liesel finds her (adopted) father, Hans, but he’s distracted talking to someone. She ambles over the pile of still hot ashes that some workmen began to clean up. The gray cobblestone of the square where the burning occurred was visible, and on top of that lay three books, nearly unharmed. Feeling brave, Liesel runs to the piles and snags one of the books. After that, she runs back to her father, feeling terrified and exhilarated at the same time, and while walking home, the narrator says that she tucked the book into her jacket, hidden from her father’s eyes. But the entire time while she walked, she felt the book “burning” her, and with each passing second, it got hotter until it hurt her skin.

At first I thought that okay, the book is still hot from the fire – that’s normal. But as it started getting hotter, and I got a little confused. The book should be cooling down, right? I guess not. But think that I was looking at it from too much a common-sensical perspective. Now I think that the book burning Liesel’s skin was her own reaction to stealing it. She felt guilty, both about stealing the book and hiding it from her father, who was her greatest comfort and friend. She also must obviously feel terrified, since she just stole a banned book that was meant to have another fate. On top of that, she knew that someone had seen her take the book. The person who saw her take it was a quiet woman, who was always lost in her mind – she was never fully in reality. All of these emotions were boiling inside Liesel, and that heat transferred to her book, making her feel like she was about to burn to death.