The librarian of Auschwitz

In November 1942, Dita Kraus was sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto. From there she was transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she became the librarian of the smallest library in the world.

By NADINE WOJAKOVSKI
Updated: DECEMBER 25, 2017 10:32
DITA KRAUS, 88, at her Netanya home. (photo credit: Courtesy)
DITA KRAUS, 88, at her Netanya home.
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Among the famous library collections written about in Alberto Manguel’s book The Library at Night is the one that existed at Block 31 – the Children’s Block – in Auschwitz-Birkenau. This minuscule library, consisting of about 12 books, was run from 1943 to 1944 by a 14-year-old Czechoslovakian girl named Dita Polachova. It was a job that preserved her sanity amid the inferno of Auschwitz.
Today, Dita, 88, lives alone in Netanya. Conscious of the dwindling number of survivors, I brought my sister, children and two nephews to hear her story.
Born in Prague on July 12, 1929, Dita was raised as an only child in a loving home. She was unaware that she was Jewish until the age of eight, when the discovery came in a most unexpected way.
“When I was in second grade, I found a piece of paper on my desk with the words ‘You are a Jew.’ I went home and asked: ‘Mom, what is a Jew?’”
Her idyllic childhood ended abruptly in March 1939, when the Nazis invaded Prague.
“The moment they occupied Czechoslovakia, they started issuing restrictions on Jews and soon all the Nuremberg Laws became enforced. Within a month, we were evicted. My father was dismissed from his job as a lawyer for the state Pension Fund Institute. It was almost impossible to disappear. All Jews were registered and the Germans knew about every Jew in Czechoslovakia.”
By the age of 12 she had already been evicted from two homes. She and her parents were now squashed into a room of an apartment, shared by another family. In November 1942, 13-year-old Dita and her parents were sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto, and from there to Auschwitz-Birkenau in December 1943.
Dita and her mother were housed in one of the women’s barracks at Auschwitz. The camp, called Family Camp BIIb, was built to refute the rumors of an extermination camp. It contained a Kinderblock (Children’s Block) overseen by the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele and run by a young, charismatic Zionist called Fredy Hirsch. Dita knew him from Prague, where he was her sports instructor, and she met him again later in the Theresienstadt ghetto, where he was responsible for the young inmates.
“In Auschwitz he arranged with the German commander to have one block empty, without bunks, where the children would be kept during the day so they wouldn’t run around. That was his achievement,” said Dita.
Although they were considered children only until age 14, Hirsch succeeded in arranging for those between the ages of 14 and 16 to be “assistants” for all types of work. One of the jobs was that of librarian, a role Dita shared with a boy.
In Prague, Dita’s parents had had a large library of books in which her father spent much of his free time consuming books in German, Czech and French. At Auschwitz, she found solace in being entrusted to look after the few random books found among the luggage of the arrivals.
While life in the Kinderblock was relatively tolerable, it didn’t save the children from being murdered. The first transport from Theresienstadt to the family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau arrived in September 1943. Each transport was allocated six months to live.
She remembers how, on the night of March 8, 1944, prisoners from the September transport were loaded onto trucks. “That night everyone was gassed to death.”
According to several eyewitnesses, while going to their deaths, the doomed prisoners sang the Czechoslovak anthem, the Jewish anthem “Hatikva” and the “Internationale.”
The unexplained death of her mentor and admired teacher Hirsch had a profound effect on her, even to this day. Informed of the impending mass murder on March 8, Hirsch was asked to lead an uprising. Shortly after, he was found dead of an overdose of sleeping pills.
Kraus is certain he never set out to commit suicide.
“He would never choose to die and leave all the children,” she said. “The teachers and educators of the children in the Kinderblock were the greatest he-roes of all, knowing that they would die, yet dedicating themselves to the children to make their last weeks as pleasant as they could.”
Kraus’s father, Hans, died of starvation at the camp. Then, in July 1944, Dita and her mother were moved to a work camp in Hamburg, Germany, and from there to her final destination of Bergen-Belsen. There, even without gas chambers, the camp was a horrific killing machine, where the starving prisoners died by the thousands.
The British troops who liberated Bergen-Belsen in April 1945 were confronted with what looked from a distance like hills. The “hills” turned out to be piles of skeletal living and dead bodies. Freedom didn’t prevent Dita from catching the deadly typhus that was rife among survivors. While waiting for the quarantine to be lifted so they could return to Prague, her mother became ill on June 27, 1945, and died two days later, leaving 16-year-old Dita all alone to face an unknown future.
“I returned to Prague two days after the death of my mother,” she said. “I had no home and no possessions and no family. Very few of my friends survived.”
She survived two-and-a-half years in the ghetto, concentration and extermination camps. To what does she attribute her survival?
“Perhaps an initial good constitution and luck, luck and, again, luck,” she said.
One day, after the war, standing in line to get her ID card, she recognized one of the instructors from the Children’s Block, a young man to whom she had never spoken. His name was Otto Kraus. In the following months, Dita found a substitute home with her friend Margit in the spa town of Tepice. Otto would write her a letter every day. A year after they first bumped into each other, he said: “Why don’t you come to Prague? I can’t love you from a distance.”
A romance ensued and following their marriage in 1947, they moved to Israel in 1949 with their young son and other survivor friends. In the early years of married life they lived on Kibbutz Givat Haim, near Hadera, where Otto was an English teacher and Dita worked in the shoe-repair shop. Later, they moved to the Hadassim school, where Dita also became an English teacher.
The love of books was a joint passion in the couple’s lives. Otto himself was a writer. One of his books, The Painted Wall, centers around his own experience as one of the instructors in the Children’s Block at Auschwitz. Otto died in 2000.
Still an avid reader, Dita is surrounded by literary works in her Netanya home, her favorite authors being Jonathan Franzen and Meir Shalev. Most noticeable, on one bookshelf, is the copy of Spanish writer Antonio Iturbe’s La bibliotecaria de Auschwitz – The Librarian of Auschwitz (now translated into English). The librarian in question is none other than Dita Kraus.
Upon reading about the library at Auschwitz in Manguel’s book, Iturbe’s interest in the librarian was piqued, and resulted in a semi-fictionalized account of her story.
It’s been nearly 75 years since Kraus’s number, 73305, was tattooed on her arm at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The digits may have faded but the memories have not. As we depart from her home, she pulls up her sleeve to show us the faded digits.
Turning to the children, she issues a chilling warning: “Don’t forget what I have told you, so you can share with others. There are many people today who deny these things ever happened.”


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