Book Club: The Librarian of Auschwitz

The Librarian of Auschwitz

Based on the experience of real-life Auschwitz prisoner Dita Kraus, the award-winning The Librarian of Auschwitz by Antonio Iturbe is the incredible story of a girl who risked her life to keep the magic of books alive during the Holocaust. This edition includes a Q&A with Dita Kraus and discussion questions.

As a young girl, Dita is imprisoned by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Taken from her home in Prague in 1939, Dita does her best to adjust to the constant terror of her new reality. But even amidst horror, human strength and ingenuity persevere. When Jewish leader Fredy Hirsch entrusts Dita with eight precious volumes the prisoners have managed to sneak into the camp, She embraces the responsibility – and so becomes the librarian of Auschwitz.

From one of the darkest chapters in history comes this extraordinary story of courage and hope.

The Author

Antonio Iturbe was born in 1967 and grew up in in Barcelona, Spain. He studied Information Sciences at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and over the past fifteen years has worked as a cultural journalist. In 2005, he made his debut as a novelist with the comic novel Rectos torcidos and has written for children with the series Los Casos del Inspector Cito, a collection of the stories he used to read to his son at bedtime. He is the author of the international bestseller The Librarian of Auschwitz and The Prince of the Skies.

Our Guest

Miriam Chorley-Schulz (neé Schulz) is Assistant Professor and the Mokin Fellow in Holocaust Studies at the University of Oregon and the co-founder of the EU-funded project "We Refugees. Digital Archive on Refugeedom, Past and Present" (https://en.we-refugees-archive.org/). She holds a Ph.D. in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University and was the Ray D. Wolfe Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Jewish Studies and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto.

Miriam has received fellowships from several institutions, including the Association for Jewish Studies, the Center for Jewish History, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, the Harriman Institute, Yad Vashem’s Moshe Mirilashvili Center for Research on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, amongst others.

She is the author of "Der Beginn des Untergangs: Die Zerstörung der jüdischen Gemeinden in Polen und das Vermächtnis des Wilnaer Komitees" (Berlin: Metropol, 2016) which was awarded the “Hosenfeld/Szpilman Memorial Award.”