THE LIBRAIAN OF AUSCHWITZ IIi ANTONIO ITURBE TRANSLATED BY LILIT ŽEKULIN THWAITES HENRY HOLT AND COM PANY NEW YORK 207-68939_ch00_4P.indd 3 7/26/17 12:58 PM Henry Holt and Company, Publishers since 1866 Henry Holt® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 fiercereads .com Text copyright © 2012 by Antonio Iturbe Translation copyright © 2017 by Lilit Žekulin Thwaites Endpaper images courtesy of the National Archives All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN 978-1-62779-618-7 Our books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact your local bookseller or the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at (800) 221-7945 ext. 5442 or by e-mail at
[email protected]. First published in Spain by Editorial Planeta in 2012 First American edition, 2017 Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 207-68939_ch00_4P.indd 4 7/26/17 12:58 PM Dear reader, I want to tell you how the book you are holding came into being. Some years ago, the Spanish author Antonio Iturbe was searching for someone who could tell him some details about the books on the children’s block in the Auschwitz– Birkenau concentration camp. He received my internet address, and we started exchanging emails. His were short, apol o getic questions and mine long, detailed answers. But then we met in Prague, and for two days I showed him where I grew up and where I played in a sandbox and went to school and the house that we—my parents and I— left forever when we were sent to the Terezín ghetto by the Nazi occupants.