Books are also useful in hell

There are situations where reality seems to surpass any possible fantasy. An example is the story of Edita Polachova , better known as Dita Kraus, born in Prague in 1929 and survived the Nazi extermination. What makes her story out of the ordinary is the fact that Dita, when she was just a little girl, became the librarian in the most infernal place that human mind has ever conceived: Auschwitz .

The drama that marked his life and that of his family began when the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939 and began to persecute the Jews. For some years Dita, her father and mother lived in a kind of limbo awaiting the inexorable fate predicted by the German authorities for members of the Jewish people. Thus, in 1942, at the age of thirteen, she and her parents were deported to the Terezin ghetto, then to Auschwitz. It could have been the end for Dita, who instead managed to cling to the passion that had accompanied her throughout her life: reading books. The written pages became the hope to cling to and its salvation. Auschwitz will be fatal to Dita's parents, who instead will be able to rebuild a life, get married, have children, continue to be a living testimony of her experience as a persecuted Jew.

That testimony was collected by the Spanish writer Antonio Iturbe in his bestseller " The librarian of Auschwitz ", which has now become - with the same title - a splendid graphic novel (Editrice Il Castoro, 2023, pp. 136), written by Salva Rubio and illustrated from Loreto Aroca.

The immediacy of the illustrations and the essentiality of the texts and dialogues (well translated by Francesco Ferrucci) fully give us back the heroism - how to call it in another way - of a girl who understood the intrinsic value of culture, the only fixed point that he could help her, her companions in the lager to preserve their dignity. Like Primo Levi who rediscovered the meaning of life in Auschwitz by reciting some verses of the Divine Comedy to another deportee, so Dita found meaning in what was happening to her when Fredy Hirsch, a charismatic young Jew, entrusted her with the custody of some stolen books . At that moment he was assigning her to a mission: not to give up. In fact, the Nazis burned the written word, making tragic reality the maxim of the 19th century German poet Heinrich Heine "Where books burn, men end up burning too".

Dita did everything to ensure that the written word survived even in hell. Dita risked her life several times - owning books meant death in Auschwitz - so that children and adults would have the opportunity to escape, even if only for a few minutes and with the imagination, the cruelty of everyday life. And it will be precisely the pages of the books of which she became the improvised librarian, texts sometimes in unknown languages, that will help Dita face the horror she was experiencing, that will give her a reason to resist, for herself and for others, even when reality took over and the only visible horizon was that of the barbed wire that surrounded the fields.