The Book Thief

I just finished reading the English version of "The Book Thief". A truly remarkable book that touched and stirred the core of my heart with its wit, sorrow, love and strange cases of luck. As the pages ran out, the tears were rolling down my cheeks uncontrollably: it was the simple story of the book thief; told immaculately by death; that wrung out sacks of salty water in my eyes. Her juggled words lulled me inside the farthest corner of my bed sheet and at the same time slammed me down on to the coldest hardest cement floor of her basement, where her foster parents stole and kept a Jew away from the Fuehrer.

I've known that words can bruise, hurt and even kill you. I've seen people bled; cut to pieces by words. But words can also fly you high up to heavens and make you forget your pains and let smile conquer your face again. Like the words from a loving mother to her crying child. One thing that I didn't know; what the stolen Jew called Max Vandenburg told me; was that one can also plant words and later harvest them on people. The Fueher and every other great leaders had known this and with the power of words they tried to conquer the world of humans, who actually invented and intended to use the very words for their own sake. The book thief tried once to kill the words just to find out that she was going to gather them again into her own.

Those wriggling dreaded harvesting years in Nazi Germany were her line of colors. She'd seen her brother coughed for the last time with one eye dreaming. She'd imagined her mother waiting for the train out of Munich to oblivion. She'd come to a new family with a mother whose face was made of lined cardboard but whose kind heart was huge and had millions of towering shelves; enough place for everyone; and a father who was actually an accordion with silver eyes and warm hands. She'd stolen foods and books from a woman who always left her windows open for her private thief; a woman whose soul was eerie and broken down because it had lost a huge lump somewhere in Stalingrad. She'd made a beautiful friendship with a feathery Jew in front of the fireplace. One thing she'd missed was to give someone a kiss while his lips were still warm and soft with life; something she would never be able to do anymore because she couldn't had bargained with time for another chance at the freezing water as the candle lit haired boy saved her newly stolen book.

She outlived everything. She was a survivor. And she was one of the many, who made it harder for death to cope with his reality of life. "I am haunted by humans", said Death at the very end of the page.

That was the book thief's simple story, that touched and stirred my heart with its each single word.

-For the love of books she stole them-