The
Book Thief

THE GRAVEDIGGER’S HANDBOOK

featuring:

himmel street – the art of saumensching –
an iron-fisted woman – a kiss attempt
– jesse owens – sandpaper – the smell of
friendship – a heavyweight champion – and
the mother of all watschens

ARRIVAL ON HIMMEL STREET

That last time.

That red sky …

How does a book thief end up kneeling and howling and flanked by a man-made heap of ridiculous, greasy, cooked-up rubble?

Years earlier, the start was snow.

The time had come. For one.

A SPECTACULARLY TRAGIC MOMENT

A train was moving quickly.
It was packed with humans.
A six-year-old boy died
in the third carriage.

The book thief and her brother were travelling down towards Munich, where they would soon be given over to foster parents. We now know, of course, that the boy didn’t make it.

HOW IT HAPPENED

There was an intense
spurt of coughing.
Almost an inspired spurt.
And soon after – nothing.

When the coughing stopped, there was nothing but the nothingness of life moving on with a shuffle, or a near-silent twitch. A suddenness found its way onto his lips then, which were a corroded brown colour, and peeling, like old paint. In desperate need of redoing.

Their mother was asleep.

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 had been dreaming about the Führer, Adolf Hitler. In the dream, she was attending a rally at which he spoke, looking at the skull-coloured part in his hair and the perfect square of his moustache. She was listening contentedly to the torrent of words that was 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 gesture 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 kneeled 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 unsavoury 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 gravediggers.

AN OBSERVATION

A pair of train guards.
A pair of gravediggers.
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 travelled 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 amongst 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 gravediggers were rubbing their hands together and whingeing 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, a black book fell innocuously from his coat pocket without his knowledge. He’d taken perhaps two dozen steps.

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 only realised her mother had come back for her 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 METRES 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, 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 towards 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 amongst them, the poor were the most easily recognised. 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 she walk?

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 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.

The girl’s head was 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 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 hadn’t survived 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’d 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 hope that they’d lose the way or change their minds. Amongst it all, her thoughts couldn’t help turning towards 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 grey, the colour of Europe.

Curtains of rain were drawn around the car.

‘Nearly there.’ The foster care lady, Frau Heinrich, turned 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 unit blocks that look
nervous. There is murky snow
spread out like carpet. There
is concrete, empty hatstand
trees, and grey 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 didn’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 hadn’t been 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 smouldering between his fingers. He rolled his own.

The fact was this:

Liesel would not get out of the car.

‘Was ist los mit diesem Kind?’ Rosa Hubermann enquired. 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 before it hit the ground. Fifteen minutes passed till they were able 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.

A TRANSLATION OF ROSA HUBERMANN’S ANNOUNCEMENT

‘What are you arseholes looking at?’

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 gravedigger 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 GRAVEDIGGER’S HANDBOOK

A twelve-step guide to
gravedigging success
Published by the Bayern Cemetery Association

The book thief had struck for the first time – the beginning of an illustrious career.

GROWING UP A SAUMENSCH

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 up, 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 not just to mean 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. Wire-like shins. Coathanger 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-blonde, 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.

There were boarding houses 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. When she asked her mother what it meant, she was told it wasn’t important, that she shouldn’t worry about such things. At one boarding house, 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 word’s 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. She 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 block houses on Himmel Street. A few rooms, a kitchen, and an outhouse shared with neighbours. The roof was flat and there was a shallow basement for storage. It was 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 the greatest 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 arsehole. That word, however, does not differentiate between the sexes. It simply is.

‘Saumensch du dreckigs!’ 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 closet-like 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 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 had the ability to appear in the background, even if he was standing at the front of a queue. 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 foot one inch tall and wore her
browny-grey 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 spoons
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 dreckigs – 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.

THE WOMAN WITH THE IRON FIST

Those first few months were definitely the hardest.

Every night, Liesel would nightmare.

Her brother’s face.

Staring at the floor of the train.

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 boat-like 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 those 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, ‘Shh, 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 he’d always appear mid-scream, 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 would sit sleepy-eyed on the bed as Liesel cried into his sleeves and breathed him in. Every morning, just after two o’clock, she fell asleep again to the smell of him: a mixture of dead cigarettes, decades of paint, and human skin. When morning came in earnest, he was a couple of metres 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 even 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-coloured keys. His left hit the buttons. (She especially loved to see him hit the silver, sparkled one – 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 actual 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 Gravedigger’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 centre of Munich and Trudy held a job as a housemaid and childminder. 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 misery.

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 amongst 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 class.’

Without turning round, Papa answered calmly, but with venom. ‘Well don’t ask her either.’ He dropped some ash outside. ‘She left school in third class.’

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 mid-nightmare, 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 apologised.

‘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 the junior division of what was called the BDM.

EXPLANATION OF THE ABBREVIATION

It stood for Bund Deutscher Mädchen – United 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 to the BDM headquarters 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 frequently 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 turned and called back.

‘Saukerl! Lick my arse! 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 round, 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, she was 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.