April 9-15 is National Library Week!

While you may reflect upon how important and meaningful books and libraries are for you personally this week, the role they have played in people’s lives throughout history may not be something which immediately comes to mind. The Book Thieves will serve as a powerful reminder of that role.

While the story of the Nazi efforts to loot the art and cultural artifacts of Europe during World War II is well known, less attention has been paid to the same effort regarding books and libraries. While images of public book burning events are forever linked to the rise in power of the Nazi party, there was more method in the madness to the agencies tasked with pirating the libraries of people and organizations deemed unfit for the ‘new’ Germany. These collections were mined for the efforts to re-write history in the Nazi ideology, and rather than being burned they were cataloged and hoarded.

After the war, many public libraries in Germany scavenged these already looted collections, now left behind to rot, for their own shelves. The unsavory origins of hundreds of thousands of books on their shelves have recently come to light for staff members at these some of these libraries. Their efforts to repatriate them as much as possible using bookplates, inscriptions, and old catalogs becomes a story about the relationship between people and books, in all it’s manifestations. In one, the granddaughter of a concentration camp victim receives a book her grandfather owned as a child and says that it is the only physical object belonging to him the family has ever seen.

Here’s wishing that all the lost books are found, and that future granddaughters and grandfathers always have books to read and libraries to visit together.