The Book Thief: The Book of Despair by Charlotte

The Book Thief: The Book of Despair by Charlotte - May 2017 Scholarship Essay

The Book Thief: The Book of Despair
Books open up a reader’s mind and allows the readers to have a movie inside of their head. To me, one of the most powerful books that help create imagery is The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. When I first read this novel, my knowledge of the Holocaust was decent, but this book made me want to learn more about the background. As the narrator Death gives a depressing outlook, Zusak utilizes death with no religious input, allowing all readers to fall in love and in despair. Zusak places death as the one telling the story to signify how everyone is going to end up there one day, but some sooner than others due the tragedies of the Holocaust.
As many novels explore the topic of the internment camps during the Holocaust, Zusak discusses the lives of what the children living in Germany knew and were unaware of. The children don’t understand all of the complexities lying underneath the Holocaust, but they do know they must “Heil Hitler”. As Liesel is taken to another household due to the death of her brother and the wanting of her mother for Liesel to be safe, Liesel comes to understand what’s going on in Germany. As she learns about the horrors, so does her best friend Rudy, who painted himself in mud to look like Usain Bolt and was punished because he tried to look like a black man. As Rudy doesn’t understand why this is so bad, he will come to learn that he would be killed because of how Hitler strictly only wants a blonde hair and blue eyed population. This influenced me with how horrible discrimination was during the Holocaust and you could’ve died being born the way you were. Liesel and Rudy come to hate Hitler, even though this is strictly forbidden. Zusak shows how being a child during the Holocaust is difficult on the child and the family. The parents have to illustrate how much they love Hitler just so they don’t die and they have to teach their kids the same thing. Parents have to do anything to keep their children safe, and obeying a dictator is one of those things. Yet kids grow up to learn the complexities of everything and how they must learn they have to obey the rules. Liesel’s foster father teaches Liesel how to read and write in the basement, and every word Liesel learns, she gets to write on the chalkboard. Her passion with reading and writing grows as the plot continues forward. She steals books in order to enhance her reading, even though books are banned if they aren’t about Hitler. In the basement as well, Liesel’s foster family hides a Jew and Liesel learns how hard it is to keep this a secret, but also how important this is. Liesel’s family risked their lives in order to keep someone from being sent to the concentration camps. Most people don’t want to take this risk, which opened my eyes to how complicated doing the right thing vs doing the civil thing is. Soldiers come into the house and search to see if they are hiding someone, and luckily, the Jew wasn’t found. Being alive during the Holocaust meant having the fear that you will die, or that you eventually die without being aware of what’s going on.
At the end of the novel, Liesel fell asleep in the basement at the night bombs struck their town. Everyone, but her, died. Her parents, Rudy, Rudy’s family, everyone. All of those people, who were even favorable to Hitler because of the blonde hair and blue eyes, still died. With this tragic ending, this made me realize how important it is to stand for human rights and dictatorship. All of the lives lost in the Holocaust, there lives weren’t ever given back. Death picked up all of their souls, just like how he’s picking up all of the souls in Syria today.