get rid of all that fur? It’s everywhere!”
Helena Schmidt was a rich widow. “That old cripple—sitting there
just wasting away. She’s never had to do a day’s work in all her life.”
Rosa’s greatest disdain, however, was reserved for 8 Grande
Strasse. A large house, high on a hill, in the upper part of Molching.
“This one,” she’d pointed out to Liesel the first time they went
there, “is the mayor’s house. That crook. His wife sits at home all day,
too mean to light a fire—it’s always freezing in there. She’s crazy.”
She punctuated the words. “Absolutely. Crazy.” At the gate, she
motioned to the girl. “You go.”
Liesel was horrified. A giant brown door with a brass knocker stood
atop a small flight of steps. “What?”
Mama shoved her. “Don’t you ‘what’ me, Saumensch. Move it.”
Liesel moved it. She walked the path, climbed the steps, hesitated,
and knocked.
A bathrobe answered the door.
Inside it, a woman with startled eyes, hair like fluff, and the
posture of defeat stood in front of her. She saw Mama at the gate and
handed the girl a bag of washing. “Thank you,” Liesel said, but there
was no reply. Only the door. It closed.
“You see?” said Mama when she returned to the gate. “This is what
I have to put up with. These rich bastards, these lazy swine …”
Holding the washing as they walked away, Liesel looked back. The
brass knocker eyed her from the door.
When she finished berating the people she worked for, Rosa
Hubermann would usually move on to her other favorite theme of
abuse. Her husband. Looking at the bag of washing and the hunched
houses, she would talk, and talk, and talk. “If your papa was any
good,” she informed Liesel every time they walked through Molching,
“I wouldn’t have to do this.” She sniffed with derision. “A painter!
Why marry that Arschloch? That’s what they told me—my family, that is.” Their footsteps crunched along the path. “And here I am, walking
the streets and slaving in my kitchen because that Saukerl never has
any work. No real work, anyway. Just that pathetic accordion in
those dirt holes every night.”
“Yes, Mama.”
“Is that all you’ve got to say?” Mama’s eyes were like pale blue
cutouts, pasted to her face.
They’d walk on.
With Liesel carrying the sack.
At home, it was washed in a boiler next to the stove, hung up by
the fireplace in the living room, and then ironed in the kitchen. The
kitchen was where the action was.
“Did you hear that?” Mama asked her nearly every night. The iron
was in her fist, heated from the stove. Light was dull all through the
house, and Liesel, sitting at the kitchen table, would be staring at the
gaps of fire in front of her.
“What?” she’d reply. “What is it?”
“That was that Holtzapfel.” Mama was already out of her seat.
“That Saumensch just spat on our door again.”
It was a tradition for Frau Holtzapfel, one of their neighbors, to spit
on the Hubermanns’ door every time she walked past. The front door
was only meters from the gate, and let’s just say that Frau Holtzapfel
had the distance—and the accuracy.
The spitting was due to the fact that she and Rosa Hubermann were
engaged in some kind of decade-long verbal war. No one knew the
origin of this hostility. They’d probably forgotten it themselves.
Frau Holtzapfel was a wiry woman and quite obviously spiteful.
She’d never married but had two sons, a few years older than the
Hubermann offspring. Both were in the army and both will make
cameo appearances by the time we’re finished here, I assure you.
In the spiteful stakes, I should also say that Frau Holtzapfel was door of number thirty-three and say, “Schweine!” each time she
walked past. One thing I’ve noticed about the Germans:
They seem very fond of pigs.
A SMALL QUESTION AND
ITS ANSWER
And who do you think was made to clean the spit off the door
each night?
Yes—you got it.
When a woman with an iron fist tells you to get out there and clean
spit off the door, you do it. Especially when the iron’s hot.
It was all just part of the routine, really.
Each night, Liesel would step outside, wipe the door, and watch the
sky. Usually it was like spillage—cold and heavy, slippery and gray—
but once in a while some stars had the nerve to rise and float, if only
for a few minutes. On those nights, she would stay a little longer and
wait.
“Hello, stars.”
Waiting.
For the voice from the kitchen.
Or till the stars were dragged down again, into the waters of the
German sky.As with most small towns, Molching was filled with characters. A
handful of them lived on Himmel Street. Frau Holtzapfel was only
one cast member.
The others included the likes of these:
* Rudy Steiner—the boy next door who was obsessed with the
black American athlete Jesse Owens.
* Frau Diller—the staunch Aryan corner-shop owner.
* Tommy Müller—a kid whose chronic ear infections had resulted
in several operations, a pink river of skin painted across his face, and
a tendency to twitch.
* A man known primarily as “Pfiffikus”—whose vulgarity made
Rosa Hubermann look like a wordsmith and a saint.
On the whole, it was a street filled with relatively poor people,
despite the apparent rise of Germany’s economy under Hitler. Poor
sides of town still existed.
As mentioned already, the house next door to the Hubermanns was
rented by a family called Steiner. The Steiners had six children. One
of them, the infamous Rudy, would soon become Liesel’s best friend,
and later, her partner and sometime catalyst in crime. She met him on
the street.
A few days after Liesel’s first bath, Mama allowed her out, to play
with the other kids. On Himmel Street, friendships were made
outside, no matter the weather. The children rarely visited each other’s homes, for they were small and there was usually very little in
them. Also, they conducted their favorite pastime, like professionals,
on the street. Soccer. Teams were well set. Garbage cans were used to
mark out the goals.
Being the new kid in town, Liesel was immediately shoved between
one pair of those cans. (Tommy Müller was finally set free, despite
being the most useless soccer player Himmel Street had ever seen.)
It all went nicely for a while, until the fateful moment when Rudy
Steiner was upended in the snow by a Tommy Müller foul of
frustration.
“What?!” Tommy shouted. His face twitched in desperation. “What
did I do?!”
A penalty was awarded by everyone on Rudy’s team, and now it
was Rudy Steiner against the new kid, Liesel Meminger.
He placed the ball on a grubby mound of snow, confident of the
usual outcome. After all, Rudy hadn’t missed a penalty in eighteen
shots, even when the opposition made a point of booting Tommy
Müller out of goal. No matter whom they replaced him with, Rudy
would score.
On this occasion, they tried to force Liesel out. As you might
imagine, she protested, and Rudy agreed.
“No, no.” He smiled. “Let her stay.” He was rubbing his hands
together.
Snow had stopped falling on the filthy street now, and the muddy
footprints were gathered between them. Rudy shuffled in, fired the
shot, and Liesel dived and somehow deflected it with her elbow. She
stood up grinning, but the first thing she saw was a snowball
smashing into her face. Half of it was mud. It stung like crazy.
“How do you like that?” The boy grinned, and he ran off in pursuit
of the ball.
“Saukerl,” Liesel whispered. The vocabulary of her new home was
catching on fast.

Those first few months were definitely the hardest.
Every night, Liesel would nightmare.
Her brother’s face.
Staring at the floor.
She would wake up swimming in her bed, screaming, and drowning
in the flood of sheets. On the other side of the room, the bed that was
meant for her brother floated boatlike in the darkness. Slowly, with
the arrival of consciousness, it sank, seemingly into the floor. This
vision didn’t help matters, and it would usually be quite a while
before the screaming stopped.
Possibly the only good to come out of these nightmares was that it
brought Hans Hubermann, her new papa, into the room, to soothe
her, to love her.
He came in every night and sat with her. The first couple of times,
he simply stayed—a stranger to kill the aloneness. A few nights after
that, he whispered, “Shhh, I’m here, it’s all right.” After three weeks,
he held her. Trust was accumulated quickly, due primarily to the
brute strength of the man’s gentleness, his thereness. The girl knew
from the outset that Hans Hubermann would always appear
midscream, and he would not leave.
A DEFINITION NOT FOUND
IN THE DICTIONARY
Not leaving: an act of trust and love, often deciphered by
children
Hans Hubermann sat sleepy-eyed on the bed and Liesel would cry into his sleeves and breathe him in. Every morning, just after two
o’clock, she fell asleep again to the smell of him. It was a mixture of
dead cigarettes, decades of paint, and human skin. At first, she sucked
it all in, then breathed it, until she drifted back down. Each morning,
he was a few feet away from her, crumpled, almost halved, in the
chair. He never used the other bed. Liesel would climb out and
cautiously kiss his cheek and he would wake up and smile.
Some days Papa told her to get back into bed and wait a minute, and
he would return with his accordion and play for her. Liesel would sit
up and hum, her cold toes clenched with excitement. No one had ever
given her music before. She would grin herself stupid, watching the
lines drawing themselves down his face and the soft metal of his eyes
—until the swearing arrived from the kitchen.
“STOP THAT NOISE, SAUKERL!”
Papa would play a little longer.
He would wink at the girl, and clumsily, she’d wink back.
A few times, purely to incense Mama a little further, he also brought
the instrument to the kitchen and played through breakfast.
Papa’s bread and jam would be half eaten on his plate, curled into
the shape of bite marks, and the music would look Liesel in the face. I
know it sounds strange, but that’s how it felt to her. Papa’s right hand
strolled the tooth-colored keys. His left hit the buttons. (She
especially loved to see him hit the silver, sparkled button—the C
major.) The accordion’s scratched yet shiny black exterior came back
and forth as his arms squeezed the dusty bellows, making it suck in
the air and throw it back out. In the kitchen on those mornings, Papa
made the accordion live. I guess it makes sense, when you really
think about it.
How do you tell if something’s alive?
You check for breathing.The sound of the accordion was, in fact, also the announcement of
safety. Daylight. During the day, it was impossible to dream of her
brother. She would miss him and frequently cry in the tiny washroom
as quietly as possible, but she was still glad to be awake. On her first
night with the Hubermanns, she had hidden her last link to him—The
Grave Digger’s Handbook—under her mattress, and occasionally she
would pull it out and hold it. Staring at the letters on the cover and
touching the print inside, she had no idea what any of it was saying.
The point is, it didn’t really matter what that book was about. It was
what it meant that was more important.
THE BOOK’S MEANING
1. The last time she saw her brother.
2. The last time she saw her mother.
Sometimes she would whisper the word Mama and see her mother’s
face a hundred times in a single afternoon. But those were small
miseries compared to the terror of her dreams. At those times, in the
enormous mileage of sleep, she had never felt so completely alone.
As I’m sure you’ve already noticed, there were no other children in
the house.
The Hubermanns had two of their own, but they were older and
had moved out. Hans Junior worked in the center of Munich, and
Trudy held a job as a housemaid and child minder. Soon, they would
both be in the war. One would be making bullets. The other would be
shooting them.
School, as you might imagine, was a terrific failure.
Although it was state-run, there was a heavy Catholic influence,
and Liesel was Lutheran. Not the most auspicious start. Then they
discovered she couldn’t read or write.
Humiliatingly, she was cast down with the younger kids, who were only just learning the alphabet. Even though she was thin-boned and
pale, she felt gigantic among the midget children, and she often
wished she was pale enough to disappear altogether.
Even at home, there wasn’t much room for guidance.
“Don’t ask him for help,” Mama pointed out. “That Saukerl.” Papa
was staring out the window, as was often his habit. “He left school in
fourth grade.”
Without turning around, Papa answered calmly, but with venom,
“Well, don’t ask her, either.” He dropped some ash outside. “She left
school in third grade.”
There were no books in the house (apart from the one she had
secreted under her mattress), and the best Liesel could do was speak
the alphabet under her breath before she was told in no uncertain
terms to keep quiet. All that mumbling. It wasn’t until later, when
there was a bed-wetting incident midnightmare, that an extra reading
education began. Unofficially, it was called the midnight class, even
though it usually commenced at around two in the morning. More of
that soon.
• • •
In mid-February, when she turned ten, Liesel was given a used doll
that had a missing leg and yellow hair.
“It was the best we could do,” Papa apologized.
“What are you talking about? She’s lucky to have that much,”
Mama corrected him.
Hans continued his examination of the remaining leg while Liesel
tried on her new uniform. Ten years old meant Hitler Youth. Hitler
Youth meant a small brown uniform. Being female, Liesel was
enrolled into what was called the BDM. The first thing they did there was make sure your “heil Hitler” was
working properly. Then you were taught to march straight, roll
bandages, and sew up clothes. You were also taken hiking and on
other such activities. Wednesday and Saturday were the designated
meeting days, from three in the afternoon until five.
Each Wednesday and Saturday, Papa would walk Liesel there and
pick her up two hours later. They never spoke about it much. They
just held hands and listened to their feet, and Papa had a cigarette or
two.
The only anxiety Papa brought her was the fact that he was
constantly leaving. Many evenings, he would walk into the living
room (which doubled as the Hubermanns’ bedroom), pull the
accordion from the old cupboard, and squeeze past in the kitchen to
the front door.
As he walked up Himmel Street, Mama would open the window
and cry out, “Don’t be home too late!”
“Not so loud,” he would turn and call back.
“Saukerl! Lick my ass! I’ll speak as loud as I want!”
The echo of her swearing followed him up the street. He never
looked back, or at least, not until he was sure his wife was gone. On
those evenings, at the end of the street, accordion case in hand, he
would turn around, just before Frau Diller’s corner shop, and see the
figure who had replaced his wife in the window. Briefly, his long,
ghostly hand would rise before he turned again and walked slowly
on. The next time Liesel saw him would be at two in the morning,
when he dragged her gently from her nightmare.

She’d heard it several times in the past few years.
“Communist.”
There were boardinghouses crammed with people, rooms filled
with questions. And that word. That strange word was always there
somewhere, standing in the corner, watching from the dark. It wore
suits, uniforms. No matter where they went, there it was, each time
her father was mentioned. She could smell it and taste it. She just
couldn’t spell or understand it. When she asked her mother what it
meant, she was told that it wasn’t important, that she shouldn’t worry
about such things. At one boardinghouse, there was a healthier
woman who tried to teach the children to write, using charcoal on the
wall. Liesel was tempted to ask her the meaning, but it never
eventuated. One day, that woman was taken away for questioning.
She didn’t come back.
When Liesel arrived in Molching, she had at least some inkling that
she was being saved, but that was not a comfort. If her mother loved
her, why leave her on someone else’s doorstep? Why? Why?
Why?
The fact that she knew the answer—if only at the most basic level
—seemed beside the point. Her mother was constantly sick and there
was never any money to fix her. Liesel knew that. But that didn’t
mean she had to accept it. No matter how many times she was told
that she was loved, there was no recognition that the proof was in the
abandonment. Nothing changed the fact that she was a lost, skinny
child in another foreign place, with more foreign people. Alone.The Hubermanns lived in one of the small, boxlike houses on Himmel
Street. A few rooms, a kitchen, and a shared outhouse with neighbors.
The roof was flat and there was a shallow basement for storage. It
was supposedly not a basement of adequate depth. In 1939, this wasn’t
a problem. Later, in ’42 and ’43, it was. When air raids started, they
always needed to rush down the street to a better shelter.
In the beginning, it was the profanity that made an immediate
impact. It was so vehement and prolific. Every second word was either
Saumensch or Saukerl or Arschloch. For people who aren’t familiar
with these words, I should explain. Sau, of course, refers to pigs. In
the case of Saumensch, it serves to castigate, berate, or plain humiliate
a female. Saukerl (pronounced “saukairl”) is for a male. Arschloch can
be translated directly into “asshole.” That word, however, does not
differentiate between the sexes. It simply is.
“Saumensch, du dreckiges!” Liesel’s foster mother shouted that first
evening when she refused to have a bath. “You filthy pig! Why won’t
you get undressed?” She was good at being furious. In fact, you could
say that Rosa Hubermann had a face decorated with constant fury.
That was how the creases were made in the cardboard texture of her
complexion.
Liesel, naturally, was bathed in anxiety. There was no way she was
getting into any bath, or into bed for that matter. She was twisted
into one corner of the closetlike washroom, clutching for the
nonexistent arms of the wall for some level of support. There was
nothing but dry paint, difficult breath, and the deluge of abuse from
Rosa.
“Leave her alone.” Hans Hubermann entered the fray. His gentle
voice made its way in, as if slipping through a crowd. “Leave her to
me.”
He moved closer and sat on the floor, against the wall. The tiles
were cold and unkind.
“You know how to roll a cigarette?” he asked her, and for the next
hour or so, they sat in the rising pool of darkness, playing with the
tobacco and the cigarette papers and Hans Hubermann smoking them.
When the hour was up, Liesel could roll a cigarette moderately
well. She still didn’t have a bath.
SOME FACTS ABOUT
HANS HUBERMANN
He loved to smoke.
The main thing he enjoyed about smoking was the rolling.
He was a painter by trade and played the piano accordion. This
came in handy, especially in winter, when he could make a little
money playing in the pubs of Molching, like the Knoller.
He had already cheated me in one world war but would later be
put into another (as a perverse kind of reward), where he would
somehow manage to avoid me again.
To most people, Hans Hubermann was barely visible. An un-special
person. Certainly, his painting skills were excellent. His musical
ability was better than average. Somehow, though, and I’m sure
you’ve met people like this, he was able to appear as merely part of
the background, even if he was standing at the front of a line. He was
always just there. Not noticeable. Not important or particularly
valuable.
The frustration of that appearance, as you can imagine, was its
complete misleadence, let’s say. There most definitely was value in
him, and it did not go unnoticed by Liesel Meminger. (The human
child—so much cannier at times than the stupefyingly ponderous
adult.) She saw it immediately.
His manner.
The quiet air around him.
When he turned the light on in the small, callous washroom that
night, Liesel observed the strangeness of her foster father’s eyes. They were made of kindness, and silver. Like soft silver, melting. Liesel,
upon seeing those eyes, understood that Hans Hubermann was worth
a lot.
SOME FACTS ABOUT
ROSA HUBERMANN
She was five feet, one inch tall and wore her browny gray
strands of elastic hair in a bun.
To supplement the Hubermann income, she did the washing and
ironing for five of the wealthier households in Molching.
Her cooking was atrocious.
She possessed the unique ability to aggravate almost anyone she
ever met.
But she did love Liesel Meminger.
Her way of showing it just happened to be strange.
It involved bashing her with wooden spoon and words at
various intervals.
When Liesel finally had a bath, after two weeks of living on Himmel
Street, Rosa gave her an enormous, injury-inducing hug. Nearly
choking her, she said, “Saumensch, du dreckiges—it’s about time!”
After a few months, they were no longer Mr. and Mrs. Hubermann.
With a typical fistful of words, Rosa said, “Now listen, Liesel—from
now on you call me Mama.” She thought a moment. “What did you
call your real mother?”
Liesel answered quietly. “Auch Mama—also Mama.”
“Well, I’m Mama Number Two, then.” She looked over at her
husband. “And him over there.” She seemed to collect the words in
her hand, pat them together, and hurl them across the table. “That Saukerl, that filthy pig—you call him Papa, verstehst? Understand?”
“Yes,” Liesel promptly agreed. Quick answers were appreciated in
this household.
“Yes, Mama,” Mama corrected her. “Saumensch. Call me Mama
when you talk to me.”
At that moment, Hans Hubermann had just completed rolling a
cigarette, having licked the paper and joined it all up. He looked over
at Liesel and winked. She would have no trouble calling him Papa.

How could she move?
That’s the sort of thing I’ll never know, or comprehend—what
humans are capable of.
She picked him up and continued walking, the girl clinging now to
her side.
Authorities were met and questions of lateness and the boy raised
their vulnerable heads. Liesel remained in the corner of the small,
dusty office as her mother sat with clenched thoughts on a very hard
chair.
There was the chaos of goodbye.
It was a goodbye that was wet, with the girl’s head buried into the
woolly, worn shallows of her mother’s coat. There had been some
more dragging.
Quite a way beyond the outskirts of Munich, there was a town called
Molching, said best by the likes of you and me as “Molking.” That’s
where they were taking her, to a street by the name of Himmel.
A TRANSLATION
Himmel = Heaven
Whoever named Himmel Street certainly had a healthy sense of irony.
Not that it was a living hell. It wasn’t. But it sure as hell wasn’t
heaven, either.
Regardless, Liesel’s foster parents were waiting.
The Hubermanns.
They’d been expecting a girl and a boy and would be paid a small
allowance for having them. Nobody wanted to be the one to tell Rosa
Hubermann that the boy didn’t survive the trip. In fact, no one ever
really wanted to tell her anything. As far as dispositions go, hers wasn’t really enviable, although she had a good record with foster
kids in the past. Apparently, she’d straightened a few out.
For Liesel, it was a ride in a car.
She’d never been in one before.
There was the constant rise and fall of her stomach, and the futile
hopes that they’d lose their way or change their minds. Among it all,
her thoughts couldn’t help turning toward her mother, back at the
Bahnhof, waiting to leave again. Shivering. Bundled up in that useless
coat. She’d be eating her nails, waiting for the train. The platform
would be long and uncomfortable—a slice of cold cement. Would she
keep an eye out for the approximate burial site of her son on the
return trip? Or would sleep be too heavy?
The car moved on, with Liesel dreading the last, lethal turn.
The day was gray, the color of Europe.
Curtains of rain were drawn around the car.
“Nearly there.” The foster care lady, Frau Heinrich, turned around
and smiled. “Dein neues Heim. Your new home.”
Liesel made a clear circle on the dribbled glass and looked out.
A PHOTO OF HIMMEL STREET
The buildings appear to be glued together, mostly small houses
and apartment blocks that look nervous.
There is murky snow spread out like carpet.
There is concrete, empty hat-stand trees, and gray air.
A man was also in the car. He remained with the girl while Frau
Heinrich disappeared inside. He never spoke. Liesel assumed he was
there to make sure she wouldn’t run away or to force her inside if she
gave them any trouble. Later, however, when the trouble did start, he
simply sat there and watched. Perhaps he was only the last resort, the final solution.
After a few minutes, a very tall man came out. Hans Hubermann,
Liesel’s foster father. On one side of him was the medium-height Frau
Heinrich. On the other was the squat shape of Rosa Hubermann, who
looked like a small wardrobe with a coat thrown over it. There was a
distinct waddle to her walk. Almost cute, if it wasn’t for her face,
which was like creased-up cardboard and annoyed, as if she was
merely tolerating all of it. Her husband walked straight, with a
cigarette smoldering between his fingers. He rolled his own.
• • •
The fact was this:
Liesel would not get out of the car.
“Was ist los mit dem Kind?” Rosa Hubermann inquired. She said it
again. “What’s wrong with this child?” She stuck her face inside the
car and said, “Na, komm. Komm.”
The seat in front was flung forward. A corridor of cold light invited
her out. She would not move.
Outside, through the circle she’d made, Liesel could see the tall
man’s fingers, still holding the cigarette. Ash stumbled from its edge
and lunged and lifted several times until it hit the ground. It took
nearly fifteen minutes to coax her from the car. It was the tall man
who did it.
Quietly.
There was the gate next, which she clung to.
A gang of tears trudged from her eyes as she held on and refused to
go inside. People started to gather on the street until Rosa
Hubermann swore at them, after which they reversed back, whence
they came.Eventually, Liesel Meminger walked gingerly inside. Hans Hubermann
had her by one hand. Her small suitcase had her by the other. Buried
beneath the folded layer of clothes in that suitcase was a small black
book, which, for all we know, a fourteen-year-old grave digger in a
nameless town had probably spent the last few hours looking for. “I
promise you,” I imagine him saying to his boss, “I have no idea what
happened to it. I’ve looked everywhere. Everywhere!” I’m sure he
would never have suspected the girl, and yet, there it was—a black
book with silver words written against the ceiling of her clothes:
THE GRAVE DIGGER’S HANDBOOK
A Twelve-Step Guide to
Grave-Digging Success
Published by the Bayern Cemetery Association
The book thief had struck for the first time—the beginning of an
illustrious career.Yes, an illustrious career.
I should hasten to admit, however, that there was a considerable
hiatus between the first stolen book and the second. Another
noteworthy point is that the first was stolen from snow and the
second from fire. Not to omit that others were also given to her. All
told, she owned fourteen books, but she saw her story as being made
up predominantly of ten of them. Of those ten, six were stolen, one
showed up at the kitchen table, two were made for her by a hidden
Jew, and one was delivered by a soft, yellow-dressed afternoon.
When she came to write her story, she would wonder exactly when
the books and the words started to mean not just something, but
everything. Was it when she first set eyes on the room with shelves
and shelves of them? Or when Max Vandenburg arrived on Himmel
Street carrying handfuls of suffering and Hitler’s Mein Kampf? Was it
reading in the shelters? The last parade to Dachau? Was it The Word
Shaker? Perhaps there would never be a precise answer as to when
and where it occurred. In any case, that’s getting ahead of myself.
Before we make it to any of that, we first need to tour Liesel
Meminger’s beginnings on Himmel Street and the art of saumensching:
Upon her arrival, you could still see the bite marks of snow on her
hands and the frosty blood on her fingers. Everything about her was
undernourished. Wirelike shins. Coat hanger arms. She did not
produce it easily, but when it came, she had a starving smile.
Her hair was a close enough brand of German blond, but she had
dangerous eyes. Dark brown. You didn’t really want brown eyes in
Germany around that time. Perhaps she received them from her
father, but she had no way of knowing, as she couldn’t remember
him. There was really only one thing she knew about her father.

I entered the train.
My feet stepped through the cluttered aisle and my palm was over
his mouth in an instant. No one noticed. The train galloped on.
Except the girl.
With one eye open, one still in a dream, the book thief—also known
as Liesel Meminger—could see without question that her younger
brother, Werner, was now sideways and dead.
His blue eyes stared at the floor.
Seeing nothing.
Prior to waking up, the book thief was dreaming about the Führer,
Adolf Hitler. In the dream, she was attending a rally at which he
spoke, looking at the skull-colored part in his hair and the perfect
square of his mustache. She was listening contentedly to the torrent
of words spilling from his mouth. His sentences glowed in the light. In
a quieter moment, he actually crouched down and smiled at her. She
returned the smile and said, “Guten Tag, Herr Führer. Wie geht’s dir
heut?” She hadn’t learned to speak too well, or even to read, as she
had rarely frequented school. The reason for that she would find out
in due course.
Just as the Führer was about to reply, she woke up.
It was January 1939. She was nine years old, soon to be ten.
Her brother was dead.
One eye open.
One still in a dream.
It would be better for a complete dream, I think, but I really have
no control over that.
The second eye jumped awake and she caught me out, no doubt
about it. It was exactly when I knelt down and extracted his soul,holding it limply in my swollen arms. He warmed up soon after, but
when I picked him up originally, the boy’s spirit was soft and cold,
like ice cream. He started melting in my arms. Then warming up
completely. Healing.
For Liesel Meminger, there was the imprisoned stiffness of
movement and the staggered onslaught of thoughts. Es stimmt nicht.
This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening.
And the shaking.
Why do they always shake them?
Yes, I know, I know, I assume it has something to do with instinct.
To stem the flow of truth. Her heart at that point was slippery and
hot, and loud, so loud so loud.
Stupidly, I stayed. I watched.
Next, her mother.
She woke her up with the same distraught shake.
If you can’t imagine it, think clumsy silence. Think bits and pieces
of floating despair. And drowning in a train.
• • •
Snow had been falling consistently, and the service to Munich was
forced to stop due to faulty track work. There was a woman wailing.
A girl stood numbly next to her.
In panic, the mother opened the door.
She climbed down into the snow, holding the small body.
What could the girl do but follow?
As you’ve been informed, two guards also exited the train. They
discussed and argued over what to do. The situation was unsavory to
say the least. It was eventually decided that all three of them should be taken to the next township and left there to sort things out.
This time, the train limped through the snowed-in country.
It hobbled in and stopped.
They stepped onto the platform, the body in her mother’s arms.
They stood.
The boy was getting heavy.
Liesel had no idea where she was. All was white, and as they
remained at the station, she could only stare at the faded lettering of
the sign in front of her. For Liesel, the town was nameless, and it was
there that her brother, Werner, was buried two days later. Witnesses
included a priest and two shivering grave diggers.
AN OBSERVATION
A pair of train guards.
A pair of grave diggers.
When it came down to it, one of them called the shots.
The other did what he was told.
The question is, what if the other is a lot more than one?
Mistakes, mistakes, it’s all I seem capable of at times.
For two days, I went about my business. I traveled the globe as
always, handing souls to the conveyor belt of eternity. I watched
them trundle passively on. Several times, I warned myself that I
should keep a good distance from the burial of Liesel Meminger’s
brother. I did not heed my advice.
From miles away, as I approached, I could already see the small
group of humans standing frigidly among the wasteland of snow. The
cemetery welcomed me like a friend, and soon, I was with them. I
bowed my head.Standing to Liesel’s left, the grave diggers were rubbing their hands
together and whining about the snow and the current digging
conditions. “So hard getting through all the ice,” and so forth. One of
them couldn’t have been more than fourteen. An apprentice. When he
walked away, after a few dozen paces, a black book fell innocuously
from his coat pocket without his knowledge.
A few minutes later, Liesel’s mother started leaving with the priest.
She was thanking him for his performance of the ceremony.
The girl, however, stayed.
Her knees entered the ground. Her moment had arrived.
Still in disbelief, she started to dig. He couldn’t be dead. He
couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t—
Within seconds, snow was carved into her skin.
Frozen blood was cracked across her hands.
Somewhere in all the snow, she could see her broken heart, in two
pieces. Each half was glowing, and beating under all that white. She
realized her mother had come back for her only when she felt the
boniness of a hand on her shoulder. She was being dragged away. A
warm scream filled her throat.
A SMALL IMAGE, PERHAPS
TWENTY METERS AWAY
When the dragging was done, the mother and the girl stood and
breathed.
There was something black and rectangular lodged in the snow.
Only the girl saw it.
She bent down and picked it up and held it firmly in her fingers.
The book had silver writing on it.They held hands.
A final, soaking farewell was let go of, and they turned and left the
cemetery, looking back several times.
As for me, I remained a few moments longer.
I waved.
No one waved back.
Mother and daughter vacated the cemetery and made their way
toward the next train to Munich.
Both were skinny and pale.
Both had sores on their lips.
Liesel noticed it in the dirty, fogged-up window of the train when
they boarded just before midday. In the written words of the book
thief herself, the journey continued like everything had happened.
When the train pulled into the Bahnhof in Munich, the passengers slid
out as if from a torn package. There were people of every stature, but
among them, the poor were the most easily recognized. The
impoverished always try to keep moving, as if relocating might help.
They ignore the reality that a new version of the same old problem
will be waiting at the end of the trip—the relative you cringe to kiss.
I think her mother knew this quite well. She wasn’t delivering her
children to the higher echelons of Munich, but a foster home had
apparently been found, and if nothing else, the new family could at
least feed the girl and the boy a little better, and educate them
properly.
The boy.
Liesel was sure her mother carried the memory of him, slung over
her shoulder. She dropped him. She saw his feet and legs and body
slap the platform.
How could that woman walk?

As with most small towns, Molching was filled with characters. A handful of them lived on Himmel Street.
Frau Holtzapfel was only one cast member.
The others included the likes of these:
• Rudy Steiner—the boy next door who was obsessed with the black American athlete Jesse Owens.
• Frau Diller—the staunch Aryan corner-shop owner.
• Tommy Müller—a kid whose chronic ear infections had resulted in several operations, a pink river of skin
painted across his face, and a tendency to twitch.
• A man known primarily as “Pfiffikus”—whose vulgarity made Rosa Hubermann look like a wordsmith and a
saint.
On the whole, it was a street filled with relatively poor people, despite the apparent rise of Germany’s economy
under Hitler. Poor sides of town still existed.
As mentioned already, the house next door to the Hubermanns was rented by a family called Steiner. The
Steiners had six children. One of them, the infamous Rudy, would soon become Liesel’s best friend, and later,
her partner and sometime catalyst in crime. She met him on the street.
A few days after Liesel’s first bath, Mama allowed her out, to play with the other kids. On Himmel Street,
friendships were made outside, no matter the weather. The children rarely visited each other’s homes, for they
were small and there was usually very little in them. Also, they conducted their favorite pastime, like
professionals, on the street. Soccer. Teams were well set. Garbage cans were used to mark out the goals.
Being the new kid in town, Liesel was immediately shoved between one pair of those cans. (Tommy Müller was
finally set free, despite being the most useless soccer player Himmel Street had ever seen.)
It all went nicely for a while, until the fateful moment when Rudy Steiner was upended in the snow by a
Tommy Müller foul of frustration.
“What?!” Tommy shouted. His face twitched in desperation. “What did I do?!”
A penalty was awarded by everyone on Rudy’s team, and now it was Rudy Steiner against the new kid, Liesel
Meminger.
He placed the ball on a grubby mound of snow, confident of the usual outcome. After all, Rudy hadn’t missed a
penalty in eighteen shots, even when the opposition made a point of booting Tommy Müller out of goal. No
matter whom they replaced him with, Rudy would score.
On this occasion, they tried to force Liesel out. As you might imagine, she protested, and Rudy agreed.
“No, no.” He smiled. “Let her stay.” He was rubbing his hands together.Snow had stopped falling on the filthy street now, and the muddy footprints were gathered between them. Rudy
shuffled in, fired the shot, and Liesel dived and somehow deflected it with her elbow. She stood up grinning,
but the first thing she saw was a snowball smashing into her face. Half of it was mud. It stung like crazy.
“How do you like that?” The boy grinned, and he ran off in pursuit of the ball.
“Saukerl,” Liesel whispered. The vocabulary of her new home was catching on fast.
SOME FACTS ABOUT RUDY STEINER
He was eight months older than Liesel and had
bony legs, sharp teeth, gangly blue eyes,
and hair the color of a lemon.
One of six Steiner children, he was
permanently hungry.
On Himmel Street, he was considered a little crazy. This was on account of an event that was rarely
spoken about but widely regarded as “The Jesse Owens Incident,” in which he painted himself charcoal
black and ran the 100 meters at the local playing field one night.
Insane or not, Rudy was always destined to be Liesel’s best friend. A snowball in the face is surely the perfect
beginning to a lasting friendship.
A few days after Liesel started school, she went along with the Steiners. Rudy’s mother, Barbara, made him
promise to walk with the new girl, mainly because she’d heard about the snowball. To Rudy’s credit, he was
happy enough to comply. He was not the junior misogynistic type of boy at all. He liked girls a lot, and he liked
Liesel (hence, the snowball). In fact, Rudy Steiner was one of those audacious little bastards who actually
fancied himself with the ladies. Every childhood seems to have exactly such a juvenile in its midst and mists.
He’s the boy who refuses to fear the opposite sex, purely because everyone else embraces that particular fear,
and he’s the type who is unafraid to make a decision. In this case, Rudy had already made up his mind about
Liesel Meminger.
On the way to school, he tried to point out certain landmarks in the town, or at least, he managed to slip it all in,
somewhere between telling his younger siblings to shut their faces and the older ones telling him to shut his. His
first point of interest was a small window on the second floor of an apartment block.
“That’s where Tommy Müller lives.” He realized that Liesel didn’t remember him. “The twitcher? When he
was five years old, he got lost at the markets on the coldest day of the year. Three hours later, when they found
him, he was frozen solid and had an awful earache from the cold. After a while, his ears were all infected inside
and he had three or four operations and the doctors wrecked his nerves. So now he twitches.”
Liesel chimed in, “And he’s bad at soccer.”
“The worst.”
Next was the corner shop at the end of Himmel Street. Frau Diller’s.
AN IMPORTANT NOTE
ABOUT FRAU DILLER
She had one golden rule.Frau Diller was a sharp-edged woman with fat glasses and a nefarious glare. She developed this evil look to
discourage the very idea of stealing from her shop, which she occupied with soldierlike posture, a refrigerated
voice, and even breath that smelled like “heil Hitler.” The shop itself was white and cold, and completely
bloodless. The small house compressed beside it shivered with a little more severity than the other buildings on
Himmel Street. Frau Diller administered this feeling, dishing it out as the only free item from her premises. She
lived for her shop and her shop lived for the Third Reich. Even when rationing started later in the year, she was
known to sell certain hard-to-get items under the counter and donate the money to the Nazi Party. On the wall
behind her usual sitting position was a framed photo of the Führer. If you walked into her shop and didn’t say
“heil Hitler,” you wouldn’t be served. As they walked by, Rudy drew Liesel’s attention to the bulletproof eyes
leering from the shop window.
“Say ‘heil’ when you go in there,” he warned her stiffly. “Unless you want to walk a little farther.” Even when
they were well past the shop, Liesel looked back and the magnified eyes were still there, fastened to the
window.
Around the corner, Munich Street (the main road in and out of Molching) was strewn with slosh.
As was often the case, a few rows of troops in training came marching past. Their uniforms walked upright and
their black boots further polluted the snow. Their faces were fixed ahead in concentration.
Once they’d watched the soldiers disappear, the group of Steiners and Liesel walked past some shop windows
and the imposing town hall, which in later years would be chopped off at the knees and buried. A few of the
shops were abandoned and still labeled with yellow stars and anti-Jewish slurs. Farther down, the church aimed
itself at the sky, its rooftop a study of collaborated tiles. The street, overall, was a lengthy tube of gray—a
corridor of dampness, people stooped in the cold, and the splashed sound of watery footsteps.
At one stage, Rudy rushed ahead, dragging Liesel with him.
He knocked on the window of a tailor’s shop.
Had she been able to read the sign, she would have noticed that it belonged to Rudy’s father. The shop was not
yet open, but inside, a man was preparing articles of clothing behind the counter. He looked up and waved.
“My papa,” Rudy informed her, and they were soon among a crowd of various-sized Steiners, each waving or
blowing kisses at their father or simply standing and nodding hello (in the case of the oldest ones), then moving
on, toward the final landmark before school.
THE LAST STOP
The road of yellow stars
It was a place nobody wanted to stay and look at, but almost everyone did. Shaped like a long, broken arm, the
road contained several houses with lacerated windows and bruised walls. The Star of David was painted on their
doors. Those houses were almost like lepers. At the very least, they were infected sores on the injured German
terrain.
“Schiller Strasse,” Rudy said. “The road of yellow stars.”
At the bottom, some people were moving around. The drizzle made them look like ghosts. Not humans, but
shapes, moving about beneath the lead-colored clouds.“Come on, you two,” Kurt (the oldest of the Steiner children) called back, and Rudy and Liesel walked quickly
toward him.
At school, Rudy made a special point of seeking Liesel out during the breaks. He didn’t care that others made
noises about the new girl’s stupidity. He was there for her at the beginning, and he would be there later on,
when Liesel’s frustration boiled over. But he wouldn’t do it for free.
THE ONLY THING WORSE THAN
A BOY WHO HATES YOU
A boy who loves you.
In late April, when they’d returned from school for the day, Rudy and Liesel waited on Himmel Street for the
usual game of soccer. They were slightly early, and no other kids had turned up yet. The one person they saw
was the gutter-mouthed Pfiffikus.
“Look there.” Rudy pointed.
A PORTRAIT OF PFIFFIKUS
He was a delicate frame.
He was white hair.
He was a black raincoat, brown pants, decomposing shoes, and
a mouth—and what a mouth it was.
“Hey, Pfiffikus!”
As the distant figure turned, Rudy started whistling.
The old man simultaneously straightened and proceeded to swear with a ferocity that can only be described as a
talent. No one seemed to know the real name that belonged to him, or at least if they did, they never used it. He
was only called Pfiffikus because you give that name to someone who likes to whistle, which Pfiffikus most
definitely did. He was constantly whistling a tune called the Radetzky March, and all the kids in town would
call out to him and duplicate that tune. At that precise moment, Pfiffikus would abandon his usual walking style
(bent forward, taking large, lanky steps, arms behind his raincoated back) and erect himself to deliver abuse. It
was then that any impression of serenity was violently interrupted, for his voice was brimming with rage.
On this occasion, Liesel followed Rudy’s taunt almost as a reflex action.
“Pfiffikus!” she echoed, quickly adopting the appropriate cruelty that childhood seems to require. Her whistling
was awful, but there was no time to perfect it.
He chased them, calling out. It started with “Geh’ scheissen!” and deteriorated rapidly from there. At first, he
leveled his abuse only at the boy, but soon enough, it was Liesel’s turn.
“You little slut!” he roared at her. The words clobbered her in the back. “I’ve never seen you before!” Fancy
calling a ten-year-old girl a slut. That was Pfiffikus. It was widely agreed that he and Frau Holtzapfel would
have made a lovely couple. “Get back here!” were the last words Liesel and Rudy heard as they continued
running. They ran until they were on Munich Street.
“Come on,” Rudy said, once they’d recovered their breath. “Just down here a little.”He took her to Hubert Oval, the scene of the Jesse Owens incident, where they stood, hands in pockets. The
track was stretched out in front of them. Only one thing could happen. Rudy started it. “Hundred meters,” he
goaded her. “I bet you can’t beat me.”
Liesel wasn’t taking any of that. “I bet you I can.”
“What do you bet, you little Saumensch? Have you got any money?”
“Of course not. Do you?”
“No.” But Rudy had an idea. It was the lover boy coming out of him. “If I beat you, I get to kiss you.” He
crouched down and began rolling up his trousers.
Liesel was alarmed, to put it mildly. “What do you want to kiss me for? I’m filthy.”
“So am I.” Rudy clearly saw no reason why a bit of filth should get in the way of things. It had been a while
between baths for both of them.
She thought about it while examining the weedy legs of her opposition. They were about equal with her own.
There’s no way he can beat me, she thought. She nodded seriously. This was business. “You can kiss me if you
win. But if I win, I get out of being goalie at soccer.”
Rudy considered it. “Fair enough,” and they shook on it.
All was dark-skied and hazy, and small chips of rain were starting to fall.
The track was muddier than it looked.
Both competitors were set.
Rudy threw a rock in the air as the starting pistol. When it hit the ground, they could start running.
“I can’t even see the finish line,” Liesel complained.
“And I can?”
The rock wedged itself into the earth.
They ran next to each other, elbowing and trying to get in front. The slippery ground slurped at their feet and
brought them down perhaps twenty meters from the end.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” yelped Rudy. “I’m covered in shit!”
“It’s not shit,” Liesel corrected him, “it’s mud,” although she had her doubts. They’d slid another five meters
toward the finish. “Do we call it a draw, then?”
Rudy looked over, all sharp teeth and gangly blue eyes. Half his face was painted with mud. “If it’s a draw, do I
still get my kiss?”
“Not in a million years.” Liesel stood up and flicked some mud off her jacket.

Papa’s bread and jam would be half eaten on his plate, curled into the shape of bite marks, and the music would
look Liesel in the face. I know it sounds strange, but that’s how it felt to her. Papa’s right hand strolled the
tooth-colored keys. His left hit the buttons. (She especially loved to see him hit the silver, sparkled button—the
C major.) The accordion’s scratched yet shiny black exterior came back and forth as his arms squeezed the
dusty bellows, making it suck in the air and throw it back out. In the kitchen on those mornings, Papa made the
accordion live. I guess it makes sense, when you really think about it.
How do you tell if something’s alive?
You check for breathing. The sound of the accordion was, in fact, also the announcement of safety. Daylight.
During the day, it was impossible to dream of her brother. She would miss him and frequently cry in the tiny
washroom as quietly as possible, but she was still glad to be awake. On her first night with the Hubermanns, she
had hidden her last link to him— The Grave Digger’s Handbook—under her mattress, and occasionally she
would pull it out and hold it. Staring at the letters on the cover and touching the print inside, she had no idea
what any of it was saying. The point is, it didn’t really matter what that book was about. It was what it meant
that was more important.
THE BOOK’S MEANING
1. The last time she saw her brother.
2. The last time she saw her mother.
Sometimes she would whisper the word Mama and see her mother’s face a hundred times in a single afternoon.
But those were small miseries compared to the terror of her dreams. At those times, in the enormous mileage of
sleep, she had never felt so completely alone.
As I’m sure you’ve already noticed, there were no other children in the house.
The Hubermanns had two of their own, but they were older and had moved out. Hans Junior worked in the
center of Munich, and Trudy held a job as a housemaid and child minder. Soon, they would both be in the war.
One would be making bullets. The other would be shooting them.
School, as you might imagine, was a terrific failure.
Although it was state-run, there was a heavy Catholic influence, and Liesel was Lutheran. Not the most
auspicious start. Then they discovered she couldn’t read or write.
Humiliatingly, she was cast down with the younger kids, who were only just learning the alphabet. Even though
she was thin-boned and pale, she felt gigantic among the midget children, and she often wished she was pale
enough to disappear altogether.
Even at home, there wasn’t much room for guidance.
“Don’t ask him for help,” Mama pointed out. “That Saukerl.” Papa was staring out the window, as was often his
habit. “He left school in fourth grade.”
Without turning around, Papa answered calmly, but with venom, “Well, don’t ask her, either.” He dropped
some ash outside. “She left school in third grade.”
There were no books in the house (apart from the one she had secreted under her mattress), and the best Liesel
could do was speak the alphabet under her breath before she was told in no uncertain terms to keep quiet. All that mumbling. It wasn’t until later, when there was a bed-wetting incident midnightmare, that an extra reading
education began. Unofficially, it was called the midnight class, even though it usually commenced at around
two in the morning. More of that soon. In mid-February, when she turned ten, Liesel was given a used doll that
had a missing leg and yellow hair.
“It was the best we could do,” Papa apologized.
“What are you talking about? She’s lucky to have that much,” Mama corrected him.
Hans continued his examination of the remaining leg while Liesel tried on her new uniform. Ten years old
meant Hitler Youth. Hitler Youth meant a small brown uniform. Being female, Liesel was enrolled into what
was called the BDM.
EXPLANATION OF THE
ABBREVIATION
It stood for Bund Deutscher Mädchen—
Band of German Girls.
The first thing they did there was make sure your “heil Hitler” was working properly. Then you were taught to
march straight, roll bandages, and sew up clothes. You were also taken hiking and on other such activities.
Wednesday and Saturday were the designated meeting days, from three in the afternoon until five.
Each Wednesday and Saturday, Papa would walk Liesel there and pick her up two hours later. They never
spoke about it much. They just held hands and listened to their feet, and Papa had a cigarette or two.
The only anxiety Papa brought her was the fact that he was constantly leaving. Many evenings, he would walk
into the living room (which doubled as the Hubermanns’ bedroom), pull the accordion from the old cupboard,
and squeeze past in the kitchen to the front door.
As he walked up Himmel Street, Mama would open the window and cry out, “Don’t be home too late!”
“Not so loud,” he would turn and call back.
“Saukerl! Lick my ass! I’ll speak as loud as I want!”
The echo of her swearing followed him up the street. He never looked back, or at least, not until he was sure his
wife was gone. On those evenings, at the end of the street, accordion case in hand, he would turn around, just
before Frau Diller’s corner shop, and see the figure who had replaced his wife in the window. Briefly, his long,
ghostly hand would rise before he turned again and walked slowly on. The next time Liesel saw him would be
at two in the morning, when he dragged her gently from her nightmare.
Evenings in the small kitchen were raucous, without fail. Rosa Hubermann was always talking, and when she
was talking, it took the form of schimpfen. She was constantly arguing and complaining. There was no one to
really argue with, but Mama managed it expertly every chance she had. She could argue with the entire world in
that kitchen, and almost every evening, she did. Once they had eaten and Papa was gone, Liesel and Rosa would
usually remain there, and Rosa would do the ironing.
A few times a week, Liesel would come home from school and walk the streets of Molching with her mama,
picking up and delivering washing and ironing from the wealthier parts of town. Knaupt Strasse, Heide Strasse.
A few others. Mama would deliver the ironing or pick up the washing with a dutiful smile, but as soon as the
door was shut and she walked away, she would curse these rich people, with all their money and laziness.“Too g’schtinkerdt to wash their own clothes,” she would say, despite her dependence on them.
“Him,” she accused Herr Vogel from Heide Strasse. “Made all his money from his father. He throws it away on
women and drink. And washing and ironing, of course.”
It was like a roll call of scorn.
Herr Vogel, Herr and Frau Pfaffelhürver, Helena Schmidt, the Weingartners. They were all guilty of something.
Apart from his drunkenness and expensive lechery, Ernst Vogel, according to Rosa, was constantly scratching
his louse-ridden hair, licking his fingers, and then handing over the money. “I should wash it before I come
home,” was her summation.
The Pfaffelhürvers scrutinized the results. “ ‘Not one crease in these shirts, please,’ ” Rosa imitated them. “
‘Not one wrinkle in this suit.’ And then they stand there and inspect it all, right in front of me. Right under my
nose! What a G’sindel—what trash.”
The Weingartners were apparently stupid people with a constantly molting Saumensch of a cat. “Do you know
how long it takes me to get rid of all that fur? It’s everywhere!”
Helena Schmidt was a rich widow. “That old cripple—sitting there just wasting away. She’s never had to do a
day’s work in all her life.”
Rosa’s greatest disdain, however, was reserved for 8 Grande Strasse. A large house, high on a hill, in the upper
part of Molching.
“This one,” she’d pointed out to Liesel the first time they went there, “is the mayor’s house. That crook. His
wife sits at home all day, too mean to light a fire—it’s always freezing in there. She’s crazy.” She punctuated
the words. “Absolutely. Crazy.” At the gate, she motioned to the girl. “You go.”
Liesel was horrified. A giant brown door with a brass knocker stood atop a small flight of steps. “What?”
Mama shoved her. “Don’t you ‘what’ me, Saumensch. Move it.”
Liesel moved it. She walked the path, climbed the steps, hesitated, and knocked.
A bathrobe answered the door.
Inside it, a woman with startled eyes, hair like fluff, and the posture of defeat stood in front of her. She saw
Mama at the gate and handed the girl a bag of washing. “Thank you,” Liesel said, but there was no reply. Only
the door. It closed.
“You see?” said Mama when she returned to the gate. “This is what I have to put up with. These rich bastards,
these lazy swine . . .”
Holding the washing as they walked away, Liesel looked back. The brass knocker eyed her from the door.
When she finished berating the people she worked for, Rosa Hubermann would usually move on to her other
favorite theme of abuse. Her husband. Looking at the bag of washing and the hunched houses, she would talk,
and talk, and talk. “If your papa was any good,” she informed Liesel every time they walked through Molching,
“I wouldn’t have to do this.” She sniffed with derision. “A painter! Why marry that Arschloch ? That’s what they told me—my family, that is.” Their footsteps crunched along the path. “And here I am, walking the streets
and slaving in my kitchen because that Saukerl never has any work. No real work, anyway. Just that pathetic
accordion in those dirt holes every night.”
“Yes, Mama.”
“Is that all you’ve got to say?” Mama’s eyes were like pale blue cutouts, pasted to her face.
They’d walk on.
With Liesel carrying the sack.
At home, it was washed in a boiler next to the stove, hung up by the fireplace in the living room, and then
ironed in the kitchen. The kitchen was where the action was.
“Did you hear that?” Mama asked her nearly every night. The iron was in her fist, heated from the stove. Light
was dull all through the house, and Liesel, sitting at the kitchen table, would be staring at the gaps of fire in
front of her.
“What?” she’d reply. “What is it?”
“That was that Holtzapfel.” Mama was already out of her seat. “That Saumensch just spat on our door again.”
It was a tradition for Frau Holtzapfel, one of their neighbors, to spit on the Hubermanns’ door every time she
walked past. The front door was only meters from the gate, and let’s just say that Frau Holtzapfel had the
distance—and the accuracy.
The spitting was due to the fact that she and Rosa Hubermann were engaged in some kind of decade-long verbal
war. No one knew the origin of this hostility. They’d probably forgotten it themselves.
Frau Holtzapfel was a wiry woman and quite obviously spiteful. She’d never married but had two sons, a few
years older than the Hubermann offspring. Both were in the army and both will make cameo appearances by the
time we’re finished here, I assure you.
In the spiteful stakes, I should also say that Frau Holtzapfel was thorough with her spitting, too. She never
neglected to spuck on the door of number thirty-three and say, “Schweine!” each time she walked past. One
thing I’ve noticed about the Germans:
They seem very fond of pigs.
A SMALL QUESTION AND
ITS ANSWER
And who do you think was made to
clean the spit off the door each night?
Yes—you got it.
When a woman with an iron fist tells you to get out there and clean spit off the door, you do it. Especially when
the iron’s hot.
It was all just part of the routine, really Each night, Liesel would step outside, wipe the door, and watch the sky. Usually it was like spillage—cold and
heavy, slippery and gray—but once in a while some stars had the nerve to rise and float, if only for a few
minutes. On those nights, she would stay a little longer and wait.
“Hello, stars.”
Waiting.
For the voice from the kitchen.
Or till the stars were dragged down again, into the waters of the German sky.

Yes, an illustrious career.
I should hasten to admit, however, that there was a considerable hiatus between the first stolen book and the
second. Another noteworthy point is that the first was stolen from snow and the second from fire. Not to omit
that others were also given to her. All told, she owned fourteen books, but she saw her story as being made up
predominantly of ten of them. Of those ten, six were stolen, one showed up at the kitchen table, two were made
for her by a hidden Jew, and one was delivered by a soft, yellow-dressed afternoon.
When she came to write her story, she would wonder exactly when the books and the words started to mean not
just something, but everything. Was it when she first set eyes on the room with shelves and shelves of them? Or
when Max Vandenburg arrived on Himmel Street carrying handfuls of suffering and Hitler’s Mein Kampf ?
Was it reading in the shelters? The last parade to Dachau? Was it The Word Shaker? Perhaps there would never
be a precise answer as to when and where it occurred. In any case, that’s getting ahead of myself. Before we
make it to any of that, we first need to tour Liesel Meminger’s beginnings on Himmel Street and the art of
saumensching:
Upon her arrival, you could still see the bite marks of snow on her hands and the frosty blood on her fingers.
Everything about her was undernourished. Wirelike shins. Coat hanger arms. She did not produce it easily, but
when it came, she had a starving smile.
Her hair was a close enough brand of German blond, but she had dangerous eyes. Dark brown. You didn’t
really want brown eyes in Germany around that time. Perhaps she received them from her father, but she had no
way of knowing, as she couldn’t remember him. There was really only one thing she knew about her father. It
was a label she did not understand.
A STRANGE WORD
Kommunist
She’d heard it several times in the past few years.
“Communist.”
There were boardinghouses crammed with people, rooms filled with questions. And that word. That strange
word was always there somewhere, standing in the corner, watching from the dark. It wore suits, uniforms. No
matter where they went, there it was, each time her father was mentioned. She could smell it and taste it. She
just couldn’t spell or understand it. When she asked her mother what it meant, she was told that it wasn’t
important, that she shouldn’t worry about such things. At one boardinghouse, there was a healthier woman who
tried to teach the children to write, using charcoal on the wall. Liesel was tempted to ask her the meaning, but it
never eventuated. One day, that woman was taken away for questioning. She didn’t come back.
When Liesel arrived in Molching, she had at least some inkling that she was being saved, but that was not a
comfort. If her mother loved her, why leave her on someone else’s doorstep? Why? Why?The fact that she knew the answer—if only at the most basic level—seemed beside the point. Her mother was
constantly sick and there was never any money to fix her. Liesel knew that. But that didn’t mean she had to
accept it. No matter how many times she was told that she was loved, there was no recognition that the proof
was in the abandonment. Nothing changed the fact that she was a lost, skinny child in another foreign place,
with more foreign people. Alone.
The Hubermanns lived in one of the small, boxlike houses on Himmel Street. A few rooms, a kitchen, and a
shared outhouse with neighbors. The roof was flat and there was a shallow basement for storage. It was
supposedly not a basement of adequate depth. In 1939, this wasn’t a problem. Later, in ’42 and ’43, it was.
When air raids started, they always needed to rush down the street to a better shelter.
In the beginning, it was the profanity that made an immediate impact. It was so vehement and prolific. Every
second word was either Saumensch or Saukerl or Arschloch. For people who aren’t familiar with these words, I
should explain. Sau, of course, refers to pigs. In the case of Saumensch, it serves to castigate, berate, or plain
humiliate a female. Saukerl (pronounced “saukairl”) is for a male. Arschloch can be translated directly into
“asshole.” That word, however, does not differentiate between the sexes. It simply is.
“Saumensch, du dreckiges!” Liesel’s foster mother shouted that first evening when she refused to have a bath.
“You filthy pig! Why won’t you get undressed?” She was good at being furious. In fact, you could say that
Rosa Hubermann had a face decorated with constant fury. That was how the creases were made in the
cardboard texture of her complexion.
Liesel, naturally, was bathed in anxiety. There was no way she was getting into any bath, or into bed for that
matter. She was twisted into one corner of the closetlike washroom, clutching for the nonexistent arms of the
wall for some level of support. There was nothing but dry paint, difficult breath, and the deluge of abuse from
Rosa.
“Leave her alone.” Hans Hubermann entered the fray. His gentle voice made its way in, as if slipping through a
crowd. “Leave her to me.”
He moved closer and sat on the floor, against the wall. The tiles were cold and unkind.
“You know how to roll a cigarette?” he asked her, and for the next hour or so, they sat in the rising pool of
darkness, playing with the tobacco and the cigarette papers and Hans Hubermann smoking them.
When the hour was up, Liesel could roll a cigarette moderately well. She still didn’t have a bath.
SOME FACTS ABOUT
HANS HUBERMANN
He loved to smoke.
The main thing he enjoyed about smoking
was the rolling.
He was a painter by trade and played the piano
accordion. This came in handy, especially in winter,
when he could make a little money playing in the pubs
of Molching, like the Knoller.
He had already cheated me in one world war but
would later be put into another (as a perverse
kind of reward), where he would somehow
manage to avoid me again.To most people, Hans Hubermann was barely visible. An un-special person. Certainly, his painting skills were
excellent. His musical ability was better than average. Somehow, though, and I’m sure you’ve met people like
this, he was able to appear as merely part of the background, even if he was standing at the front of a line. He
was always just there. Not noticeable. Not important or particularly valuable.
The frustration of that appearance, as you can imagine, was its complete misleadence, let’s say. There most
definitely was value in him, and it did not go unnoticed by Liesel Meminger. (The human child—so much
cannier at times than the stupefyingly ponderous adult.) She saw it immediately.
His manner.
The quiet air around him.
When he turned the light on in the small, callous washroom that night, Liesel observed the strangeness of her
foster father’s eyes. They were made of kindness, and silver. Like soft silver, melting. Liesel, upon seeing those
eyes, understood that Hans Hubermann was worth a lot.
SOME FACTS ABOUT
ROSA HUBERMANN
She was five feet, one inch tall and wore her
browny gray strands of elastic hair in a bun.
To supplement the Hubermann income, she did
the washing and ironing for five of the wealthier
households in Molching.
Her cooking was atrocious.
She possessed the unique ability to aggravate
almost anyone she ever met.
But she did love Liesel Meminger.
Her way of showing it just happened to be strange.
It involved bashing her with wooden spoon and words
at various intervals.
When Liesel finally had a bath, after two weeks of living on Himmel Street, Rosa gave her an enormous, injuryinducing hug. Nearly choking her, she said, “ Saumensch, du dreckiges—it’s about time!”
After a few months, they were no longer Mr. and Mrs. Hubermann. With a typical fistful of words, Rosa said,
“Now listen, Liesel—from now on you call me Mama.” She thought a moment. “What did you call your real
mother?”
Liesel answered quietly. “Auch Mama—also Mama.”
“Well, I’m Mama Number Two, then.” She looked over at her husband. “And him over there.” She seemed to
collect the words in her hand, pat them together, and hurl them across the table. “That Saukerl, that filthy pig—
you call him Papa, verstehst? Understand?”
“Yes,” Liesel promptly agreed. Quick answers were appreciated in this household.
“Yes, Mama,” Mama corrected her. “Saumensch. Call me Mama when you talk to me.”At that moment, Hans Hubermann had just completed rolling a cigarette, having licked the paper and joined it
all up. He looked over at Liesel and winked. She would have no trouble calling him Papa Those first few months were definitely the hardest.
Every night, Liesel would nightmare.
Her brother’s face.
Staring at the floor.
She would wake up swimming in her bed, screaming, and drowning in the flood of sheets. On the other side of
the room, the bed that was meant for her brother floated boatlike in the darkness. Slowly, with the arrival of
consciousness, it sank, seemingly into the floor. This vision didn’t help matters, and it would usually be quite a
while before the screaming stopped.
Possibly the only good to come out of these nightmares was that it brought Hans Hubermann, her new papa,
into the room, to soothe her, to love her.
He came in every night and sat with her. The first couple of times, he simply stayed—a stranger to kill the
aloneness. A few nights after that, he whispered, “Shhh, I’m here, it’s all right.” After three weeks, he held her.
Trust was accumulated quickly, due primarily to the brute strength of the man’s gentleness, his thereness. The
girl knew from the outset that Hans Hubermann would always appear midscream, and he would not leave.
A DEFINITION NOT FOUND
IN THE DICTIONARY
Not leaving: an act of trust and love,
often deciphered by children
Hans Hubermann sat sleepy-eyed on the bed and Liesel would cry into his sleeves and breathe him in. Every
morning, just after two o’clock, she fell asleep again to the smell of him. It was a mixture of dead cigarettes,
decades of paint, and human skin. At first, she sucked it all in, then breathed it, until she drifted back down.
Each morning, he was a few feet away from her, crumpled, almost halved, in the chair. He never used the other
bed. Liesel would climb out and cautiously kiss his cheek and he would wake up and smile.
Some days Papa told her to get back into bed and wait a minute, and he would return with his accordion and
play for her. Liesel would sit up and hum, her cold toes clenched with excitement. No one had ever given her
music before. She would grin herself stupid, watching the lines drawing themselves down his face and the soft
metal of his eyes—until the swearing arrived from the kitchen.
“STOPTHATNOISE, SAUKERL!”
Papa would play a little longer.
He would wink at the girl, and clumsily, she’d wink back.
A few times, purely to incense Mama a little further, he also brought the instrument to the kitchen and played
through breakfast.

The Book Thief: A Summary of the “Spectacularly Tragic Moment”
‎That last time. That **apocalyptic red sky**…
‎How does a **historical fiction protagonist** like the **Book Thief** end up kneeling and howling, flanked by a man-made heap of ridiculous, greasy, cooked-up rubble? Years earlier, the **inciting incident** began with snow. The time had come for one.**A SPECTACULARLY TRAGIC MOMENT**
‎A train was moving quickly, packed with humans. A six-year-old boy died in the third carriage. The **Book Thief (Liesel Meminger)** and her brother, Werner, were traveling toward **Munich, Germany**, to be placed with **foster parents (Hans and Rosa Hubermann)**. We now know, of course, that the boy didn’t survive the journey.**HOW IT HAPPENED**There was an intense spurt of coughing—almost an “inspired” spurt—and soon after, nothing. When the coughing stopped, there was only the nothingness of life moving on with a shuffle. A suddenness found its way onto his lips, which were a corroded brown color, peeling like old paint in desperate need of redoing.Their mother was asleep. **Death, the narrator**, entered the train. My feet stepped through the cluttered aisle, and my palm was over his mouth in an instant. No one noticed as the train galloped on.Except the girl.With one eye open, the other still in a dream, the girl—known to readers as **Liesel Meminger**—could see without question that her younger brother, Werner, was now sideways and dead. His blue eyes stared at the floor, seeing nothing.
The Book Thief: Chapter Summary and Analysis (January 1939)
‎Prior to waking up, the **Book Thief** was dreaming about the Führer, **Adolf Hitler**. In this haunting piece of **WWII historical fiction**, she imagined attending a Nazi rally, staring at the skull-colored part in his hair and the perfect square of his mustache. She listened contentedly to the torrent of words spilling from his mouth; in her dream, his sentences glowed. In a rare, quiet moment, he crouched to smile at her. She replied in German, “*Guten Tag, Herr Führer. Wie geht’s dir heut?*” At this stage in the **character arc**, she hadn’t learned to read or speak well—a central theme in **The Book Thief’s literacy journey**.Just as the Führer was about to reply, she woke up. It was **January 1939**. She was nine years old, soon to be ten, and her brother was dead.
The Narrator’s Perspective: Death’s Arrival
‎One eye open. One still in a dream. As **Death (the narrator)**, I find it’s better for a complete dream, but I have no control over that. The second eye jumped awake and she caught me—exactly when I knelt to extract his soul.In a striking **literary metaphor**, the boy’s spirit felt soft and cold, like ice cream, melting in my arms before warming up and healing. For **Liesel Meminger**, the reality was an “imprisoned stiffness.” Her internal monologue screamed, “*Es stimmt nicht*”—This isn’t happening.
Symbolism of the Train and the Snow
‎Then came the shaking. Why do humans always shake the dead? Perhaps to stem the flow of truth. Her heart was slippery, hot, and loud. Stupidly, I stayed and watched. Next, she woke her mother with that same distraught shake.If you seek to understand the **emotional depth of Markus Zusak’s writing**, think of “clumsy silence” and “floating despair.” Because of faulty track work on the way to **Munich**, the train stopped. In the heavy, a mother climbed down holding a small, lifeless body.What could the girl do but follow?
The Grave Digger’s Handbook
‎As previously noted, two guards exited the train to argue over the unsavory situation. It was eventually decided that the three passengers should be taken to the next township to resolve the matter. The train, now a **symbol of displacement**, limped through the snowed-in German countryside until it hobbled to a stop.
The Burial of Werner Meminger
‎They stepped onto the platform, the small body still in her mother’s arms. The boy was getting heavy. For **Liesel Meminger**, the town remained nameless—a white, frozen void. It was there, two days later, that her brother, Werner, was buried. The **witnesses to this tragedy** included a priest and two shivering grave diggers.
‎> **AN OBSERVATION ON AUTHORITY**
‎> A pair of train guards. A pair of grave diggers. In both cases, one called the shots while the other obeyed. This raises a recurring **theme in Holocaust literature**: What happens when the “other” is more than just one person?
Death’s Perspective on the Funeral
‎Even **Death, the narrator**, admits to making mistakes. For two days, I traveled the globe, handing souls to the **conveyor belt of eternity**. Despite warning myself to keep a distance from the burial, I did not heed my own advice.
‎From miles away, I saw the small group standing frigidly in the **wasteland of snow**. The cemetery welcomed me like a friend. Standing to Liesel’s left, the grave diggers complained about the ice. One was a mere fourteen-year-old apprentice. As he walked away, a **black book**—the first of many **stolen books**—fell innocuously from his coat pocket.
The First Act of the Book Thief
‎A few minutes later, Liesel’s mother began to leave with the priest, thanking him for the ceremony. But the girl stayed. Her knees hit the frozen earth. This was her **pivotal character moment**. Still in disbelief, she started to dig with her bare hands, her mind screaming that he couldn’t be dead.Within seconds, the harsh **winter setting** took its toll. Snow carved into her skin, and frozen blood cracked across her hands—marking the brutal beginning of her journey as the **Book Thief**.
The First Theft: Symbolism of the Black Book
‎Somewhere in the vast **German winter landscape**, she could see her broken heart in two pieces, glowing and beating under the white frost. It was only when she felt the boniness of her mother’s hand on her shoulder that she realized she was being dragged away. A warm scream filled her throat, a raw expression of **childhood grief**.
‎**A SMALL IMAGE: TWENTY METERS AWAY**
‎When the dragging was done, the mother and daughter stood and breathed. Lodged in the snow was something black and rectangular—the **Grave Digger’s Handbook**. Only the girl saw it. She bent down, picked it up, and held it firmly. The book featured silver writing, a stark contrast to the **bleak setting**.They held hands in a final, soaking farewell to the cemetery, looking back as they left. As for **Death, the narrator**, I remained a few moments longer. I waved. No one waved back.
The Journey to Munich: A Study in Poverty
‎Mother and daughter vacated the cemetery and boarded the next train to **Munich**. Both were skinny and pale, with sores on their lips—vivid markers of the **poverty and malnutrition** of the era. Liesel caught her reflection in the dirty, fogged-up window of the train. In the words of the **Book Thief** herself, the journey continued as if everything had happened.When the train pulled into the **Munich Bahnhof**, the passengers spilled out like contents from a torn package. Among the crowd, the impoverished were the most recognizable. This reflects a major **theme in The Book Thief**: the desperate hope that relocation might solve the problems of the poor, even when a “new version of the same old problem” waits at the destination.
The Foster Care Reality
‎Liesel’s mother understood this well. She wasn’t delivering her children to the upper echelons of society. A **foster home (the Hubermanns)** had been found in the hope that they could provide better food and a proper **education**.
‎The memory of the boy, Werner, hung heavy. Liesel was certain her mother carried him slung over her shoulder, but in her mind, she saw him drop—his body slapping the platform.**How could that woman walk? How could she move?** This haunting question sets the stage for Liesel’s arrival at **33 Himmel Street**, where her new life begins.
Arrival at 33 Himmel Street
‎That is the sort of thing I will never know or comprehend—what humans are capable of. She picked him up and continued walking, the girl clinging now to her side.
The Bureaucracy of Loss
‎Authorities were met, and questions of lateness and the boy raised their vulnerable heads. Liesel remained in the corner of the small, dusty office as her mother sat with clenched thoughts on a hard chair. Then came the **chaos of goodbye**—a wet, heart-wrenching farewell with the girl’s head buried in the woolly, worn shallows of her mother’s coat.There had been more dragging. Quite a way beyond the outskirts of **Munich**, there was a town called **Molching** (pronounced “Molking”). That is where they were taking her, to a street by the name of **Himmel**.
‎> **Himmel = Heaven**
‎> Whoever named Himmel Street had a healthy sense of irony. It wasn’t a living hell, but it certainly wasn’t heaven, either. This **ironic setting** is a central theme in **Markus Zusak’s historical fiction**.
Meeting the Hubermanns: Foster Care in Nazi Germany
‎Regardless, Liesel’s **foster parents** were waiting: **The Hubermanns**. They had been expecting both a girl and a boy and would be paid a small allowance for their care.Nobody wanted to be the one to tell **Rosa Hubermann** that the boy didn’t survive the trip. Her disposition wasn’t enviable, though she had a successful record with **foster kids** in the past. Apparently, she had “straightened a few out.”
The Journey to a New Home
‎For Liesel, it was her first ride in a car. There was the constant rise and fall of her stomach and the futile hopes they would lose their way. Her thoughts turned toward her mother, back at the **Munich Bahnhof**, shivering in a useless coat and eating her nails on a cold cement platform. Would she look for Werner’s burial site on the return trip? Or would sleep be too heavy?The car moved on, with Liesel dreading the last, lethal turn. The day was gray—the **color of Europe** in 1939. Curtains of rain were drawn around the vehicle.“Nearly there,” the social worker, **Frau Heinrich**, turned and smiled. “*Dein neues Heim.* Your new home.”Liesel made a clear circle on the dribbled glass and looked out, marking the start of her **coming-of-age journey** in one of the most acclaimed **Holocaust novels** of the 21st century.
Arrival at Molching: The Introduction of Hans and Rosa Hubermann
‎**A PHOTO OF HIMMEL STREET**
‎The buildings of **Molching** appear glued together—small houses and nervous-looking apartment blocks. Murky snow is spread out like a carpet across concrete, punctuated by empty “hat-stand” trees and gray air. A silent man remained in the car with **Liesel Meminger** while **Frau Heinrich** went inside. Liesel assumed he was there to prevent her from running away—a “final solution” to ensure her delivery to her **foster parents**.
The Character Dynamics of the Hubermanns
‎After a few minutes, the **protagonists** of Liesel’s new life emerged. **Hans Hubermann**, her foster father, was a very tall man. Beside him stood the squat, wardrobe-shaped **Rosa Hubermann**. Rosa walked with a distinct waddle and wore a face like “creased-up cardboard”—perpetually annoyed, as if merely tolerating the world. Hans, by contrast, walked straight, a hand-rolled cigarette smoldering between his fingers.
The Conflict: “Was ist los mit dem Kind?”
‎The central **internal conflict** of this scene is Liesel’s paralyzing fear. She would not get out of the car.
‎“*Was ist los mit dem Kind?*” Rosa Hubermann snapped. “What’s wrong with this child?”Through a small circle she had cleared in the window steam, Liesel watched Hans Hubermann’s cigarette ash lunge and lift before hitting the ground. It took fifteen minutes of quiet coaxing from the tall man to get her out. Even then, she clung to the iron gate, a “gang of tears” trudging from her eyes. When a crowd gathered, **Rosa Hubermann’s character traits** were fully displayed through a sharp, colorful “announcement” to the neighbors.
‎> A TRANSLATION OF ROSA’S ANNOUNCEMENT
‎> “What are you assholes looking at?”
The Symbolism of the Suitcase
‎Eventually, **Liesel Meminger** walked gingerly inside, flanked by her new father and her small suitcase. Buried beneath her clothes lay the **Grave Digger’s Handbook**—the black book with silver words. While a young apprentice in a nameless town searched frantically for his lost manual, the **Book Thief** carried it into her new life, marking the first of many **literary thefts** that would define her story.
‎
‎

Roy’s Letter: Navigating Forgiveness and Relationship Closure
‎Dear Celestial,People around here think that I found spiritual salvation in prison. But prison is a haunted house of mirrors; it was impossible for me to find the **absolute truth** there. When I try to explain this, they ask about my **religious identity**, but they know I consider myself a man of God. I can’t break it down to them because I can’t break it down to myself. Who would believe that my **emotional breakthrough** happened in the holy dark of our bedroom?I’m ashamed of the **domestic conflict** with Andre. I swear I never hurt another human like that. Even while **incarcerated**, I never brutalized anyone. I get a sharp pain thinking how close I came to a **fatal mistake**. Dre didn’t fight back hard, which made me feel like I wasn’t worth the effort. Maybe I wanted you to see his **pain and suffering** because it didn’t seem like you cared about mine. I felt **forsaken**—that’s the only word for it. When you reached for the phone to call the police, I hoped you’d “fire” it. I was ready to die.I used these same hands to sign the **divorce settlement papers** your uncle Banks drew up. Davina is a **notary public**, so you will see her name as well. I know this **legal separation** is the right thing, but I hated seeing my signature on that line. We tried. I guess that is all the **closure** we get.Sincerely,
‎Roy
‎**PS:** The tree? Did it survive the storm?
Celestial’s Response: Healing After Heartbreak
‎Dear Roy,Seeing your **handwritten letter** feels like a brief encounter with a friend I may never see again. When you were away, **long-distance communication** made me feel close to you, but now these letters remind me of our **emotional distance**. I hope that one day we can find **reconciliation** and get to know each other again.
‎## **Georgia’s Letter: Choosing Communion Over Traditional Marriage**
‎Now that I have the **legal documents**, you probably think that Andre and I will be on the next bus to the **justice of the peace**, but we don’t feel the need for a **marriage license**. My mother, his mother, even strangers—they all want to see me in a **designer wedding dress**, but Dre and I like the **relationship satisfaction** we have, just the way we have it.At the end of the day, I don’t want to be anyone’s wife. Not even Dre’s. For his part, Dre says he doesn’t want a **life partner** who doesn’t want the title. We’re living our lives together—a **spiritual communion**.Thank you for asking about Old Hickey. We had a **certified arborist** out last week who told us that you can calculate the **age of a tree** using just a measuring tape and a **growth rate calculator**. According to the **tree care expert**, Old Hickey is about 128 years old. They say he has another century in him, assuming no one comes after him with an axe.And this is the news: I am having a baby. I hope you will be happy for our **growing family**. I know it is painful, and I haven’t forgotten our past **fertility journey** and what we went through. It may be unreasonable, but will you offer a **prayer for a healthy pregnancy**? Will you pray every day until she is born?
‎Always,
‎Georgia
Roy’s Letter: Embracing a Blended Family and New Beginnings**
‎Dear Celestial,Don’t laugh, but I’m the one heading to the **civil ceremony**. Davina and I aren’t planning for a **newborn baby**, but I would like to try my hand at **remarriage**. You say you aren’t cut out for **married life**, but I disagree. You were a supportive spouse when conditions were favorable and for a long time when they were not. You deserve more **self-respect** than I ever gave you.As for me, I’d like to be a father, but Davina already has a son, and that **blended family dynamic** is currently unhappy. She doesn’t want to start over with **infant care**, and truthfully, as much as I used to fantasize about my own “Trey,” I don’t want to jeopardize my **current relationship** over a dream that may not fit me anymore. I wish I could be like Big Roy and provide **step-parent adoption** support, but he is an adult. If you need a child to stay together, then how “together” are you? That’s her **relationship advice**, and she is probably right.Of course I will pray for you, but you make it seem like I’m a preacher! I’m only focused on **mindfulness and spiritual healing**. I have found a small plot of **sacred ground** by the stream. Do you remember that spot? I go out there early in the morning…
Roy’s New Chapter: Entrepreneurship and Inner Peace
‎…and listen to the wind play that bridge music while I think or pray. Everyone knows that this is my **morning routine and meditation** practice. Occasionally, I invite one or two to come along. Big Roy has joined me, and sometimes Davina. But mostly, it’s me alone with my own **mental health** and my own memories.And speaking of heads, Big Roy and I have officially launched a **small business**. We have a **top-rated barbershop** called *Locs and Lineups*. You know I always had that **entrepreneurial spirit**. Picture a **traditional barbershop** complete with a vintage pole, but upgraded with **modern grooming amenities** and **premium hair services**. We’re making decent **passive income**—not quite *Poupées* luxury brand levels yet—but I’m content with our **business growth**.My prayer for you is for **inner peace**, which is something you have to actively create. You can’t just find it (those are **words of wisdom** from my biological father, whom I visit most Sundays—he’s dealing with **elderly care** issues in there, and it is hard to watch).But mostly, my **quality of life** is good, only it’s a different type of fulfillment than I originally planned. Some days I get antsy and start talking to Davina about **relocating**—pulling up stakes and searching for **real estate in Houston**, **New Orleans**, or even **Portland**. She humors me, but when I’m done, she smiles because we both know I’m not going anywhere. This is **home sweet home**. This is where I am.Sincerely,Roy.
‎
‎