The Book Thief

Death recounts the card games played by men on the air raid detail. They play for cigarettes. Hans is generous when he wins but earns the resentment Reinhold Zucker whenever the latter loses. Death says:

Had he not lost his cigarettes to Hans Hubermann, he wouldn’t have despised him. If he hadn’t despised him, he might not have taken his place a few weeks later on a fairly innocuous road. One seat, two men, a short argument, and me. It kills me sometimes, how people die (148).

In January of 1943, Liesel shows up to read to Frau Holtzapfel but meets her son Michael. His hand is bandaged because he lost three fingers while fighting in Stalingrad. His brother died there, and his mother is grieving. He says that Hubermann’s son was also stationed there but is alive.

Death gloomily recounts the death of Michael’s brother and the numerous others who died in the bitter cold in Russia. Liesel reads: “And the girl goes on reading, for that’s why she’s there, and it feels good to be good for something in the aftermath of the snows of Stalingrad” (150).

A few weeks before her 14th birthday in February 1943, Liesel returns the cookie plate to the Hermann residence. She thinks of her dead brother: “It was with great sadness that she realized that her brother would be six forever, but when she held that thought, she also made an effort to smile” (151).

That night, she doesn’t have any more nightmares about him but is visited by the apparitions of all the people missing from her life. The following morning, she overhears her foster mother praying for Hans’s safe return.

As the men of the air raid detail climb into their truck, Reinhold Zucker rudely takes Hans’s seat. The older man concedes. Shortly after the truck gets underway, a tire blows, and the vehicle crashes. Hans suffers a broken leg, but Zucker dies. Hans’s sergeant informs him that he will be transferred to a desk job in Munich for the duration of the war. 

Liesel and Rosa receive a letter informing them that Hans will be coming home on leave before his desk assignment begins. Rudy is glad for her but wishes that his own father could return, too. 

One night, Rudy stocks a toolbox, intent on robbing a wealthy home. He has included one of his sister’s stuffed bears in case he encounters a child during his burglary. He feels it’s time to take something back after so much has been taken away from him by life. Liesel accompanies him, but he can’t go through with the crime.

On March 9, Molching experiences another air raid. Everyone rushes to the shelter except Frau Holtzapfel. Liesel threatens that she will never read to the old woman again if she doesn’t join the others in the bomb shelter. Her wounded son Michael is distraught until she finally complies.

Liesel reads through the night until the raid is over. When everyone emerges, they notice a flaming wreck near the Amper River, where an enemy pilot has crashed his plane. Rudy takes the stuffed teddy bear from his toolbox and places it on the pilot’s shoulder until Death comes to collect him.

By the beginning of April, Hans is released from the hospital, his leg in a partial cast, and he returns to his family. Everyone rejoices to be reunited. Death says, “Yes, it was a great night to be Liesel Meminger, and the calm, the warm, and the soft would remain for approximately three more months. But her story lasts for six” (157).

Death offers a bit of foreshadowing in describing the end of Himmel Street. “Again, I offer you a glimpse of the end. Perhaps it’s to soften the blow for later, or to better prepare myself for the telling” (157). On October 7, 1943, the street is flattened by bombs. Liesel is the sole survivor because she was in the basement, writing at the time of the aerial attack.

The story now returns to the ninety-eighth day after Hans returns home in April 1943. On July 24, Michael Holtzapfel hangs himself because he can’t stand the guilt of wanting to live while everyone around him is dying. Hans breaks the news to his mother. Death says, “According to the book thief, Frau Holtzapfel hugged the body for nearly an hour. She then returned to the blinding sun of Himmel Street and sat herself down. She could no longer walk” (160).

As Michael is interred on July 27, Hitler’s war machine continues unabated. Death offers this comment: “Still, I’ll give him something, that Führer. He certainly had an iron will. There was no slackening off in terms of war-making, nor was there any scaling back on the extermination and punishment of a Jewish plague” (160). Max is among the remaining Jews still being sent to concentration camps. 

In August 1943, Max is marched through Molching with a new group of Jewish prisoners. Liesel has been watching all summer as Jews are paraded through town, hoping to catch a glimpse of her friend. When she spots him, she runs to speak with him, telling him that she’s read The Word Shaker.

They exchange a tearful greeting before the guards begin whipping both of them. After Liesel is pulled away and the march resumes, she breaks away and goes back to Max. This time, she’s almost beaten senseless until Rudy intervenes and drags her to safety; “Together, they watched the humans disappear. They watched them dissolve, like moving tablets in the humid air” (163).

A few days after the altercation in the street, Liesel seeks out Rudy to tell him the whole story about Max hiding in the basement. She shows him her copy of The Word Shaker, and Rudy finds himself depicted there: “On it was a boy with three medals hanging around his throat. ‘Hair the color of lemons,’ Rudy read. His fingers touched the words. ‘You told him about me?’” (164). Liesel realizes how much she cares for Rudy as Death mordantly observes that the boy is only a month away from his death.

In mid-August, Liesel lets herself into the Hermann library through the window. As she sits reading, she feels overcome by a sense of despair. The words in these books give her hope, yet she has seen so much suffering and death that she doesn’t want to hope anymore. She rips a book to pieces and then leaves a note to Frau Hermann apologizing for the destruction. She explains that she won’t be coming back anymore. “I think I will stop coming here. Or is it punishment at all? I love this place and hate it, because it is full of words” (165).

Three days later, Frau Hermann arrives at Liesel’s home with a present for her. It is a bound black notebook. The pages are all empty because Frau Hermann believes that Liesel should stop reading and start writing. She cautions the girl not to be like her. Liesel must stop punishing herself: “She gave her a reason to write her own words, to see that words had also brought her to life” (166). Every night after her parents go to bed, Liesel creeps down to the basement to write her life story.

Liesel continues to write through the summer and finishes her book by October 2. She persists despite additional air raids and time spent in the shelter. Her concluding lines are, “I have hated the words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right” (167-68).

Five nights after Liesel finishes writing her book, another air raid takes place without warning. No one is alerted, and the inhabitants of Himmel Street all die in their beds. Death describes gathering them each up and taking them away. Liesel is spared because she is busy editing her book in the basement, though she is buried under the rubble until an air raid detail rescues her.

The girl is shocked and disoriented to realize that everyone she knows and loves is now dead. When she finds Rudy’s corpse, she finally gives him his long-awaited kiss. Liesel begs the soldiers to salvage her father’s accordion. She has a final vision of her father playing the instrument before Death takes him as well.

As she is being dragged away from the bomb site, her book gets left behind. Death says, “The Book Thief was stepped on several times and eventually picked up without even a glance and thrown aboard a garbage truck. Just before the truck left, I climbed quickly up and took it in my hand” (171).

Contrary to expectations, Liesel lives to a ripe old age and dies in a suburb of Sydney, Australia: “In her final visions, she saw her three children, her grandchildren, her husband, and the long list of lives that merged with hers” (172). Death now intends to tell the gaps in that story.

After the bombing in 1943, Liesel is taken to the police station until they can figure out where to send her. The mayor and his wife come to claim her, and Liesel settles into the guest bedroom of the mayor’s mansion. At first, she spends hours mourning, talking to herself, and doesn’t bathe for days. She attends the funeral services for her own family and Rudy’s.

When Alex Steiner returns to find his family dead, he visits Liesel at the mansion. She tells him that she kissed Rudy after he died, “It embarrassed her, but she thought he might have liked to know. There were wooden teardrops and an oaky smile” (173).

After the war, Alex reopens his tailor shop, and Liesel spends some hours each day with him. The two walk to the nearby concentration camp at Dachau but are denied entrance by the Americans. In October 1945, a man enters the tailor shop asking for Liesel. It’s Max; “Liesel came out. They hugged and cried and fell to the floor” (173). 

When Death finally comes to claim Liesel, he shows her The Book Thief, which he has been carrying all these years. She is amazed and asks him if, after reading it, he understood it. Death is baffled for an answer. In contemplating the human race, he says, “I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant” (173). Ultimately, Death concludes that he is haunted by humans.