Delayed Life

The True Story of the Librarian of Auschwitz

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Dita Kraus: Delayed Life (Paperback, 2020, Ebury Publishing)

Paperback, 320 pages

English language

Published Dec. 30, 2020 by Ebury Publishing.

ISBN:
978-1-5291-0605-3
Copied ISBN!
Goodreads:
46041133

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4 stars (1 review)

The powerful, heart-breaking memoir of Dita Kraus, the real-life Librarian of Auschwitz

Born in Prague to a Jewish family in 1929, Dita Kraus has lived through the most turbulent decades of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Here, Dita writes with startling clarity on the horrors and joys of a life delayed by the Holocaust. From her earliest memories and childhood friendships in Prague before the war, to the Nazi-occupation that saw her and her family sent to the Jewish ghetto at Terezín, to the unimaginable fear and bravery of her imprisonment in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and life after liberation.

Dita writes unflinchingly about the harsh conditions of the camps and her role as librarian of the precious books that her fellow prisoners managed to smuggle past the guards. But she also looks beyond the Holocaust – to the life she rebuilt after the war: her marriage to fellow survivor …

3 editions

Frequently a harrowing read

4 stars

I should start this review by explaining that I haven't actually yet read The Librarian Of Auschwitz and chose to download my review copy of Dita Kraus' autobiography, A Delayed Life, because of her Czech nationality rather than to gain a greater understanding of the fictional novel. A Delayed Life takes readers from Kraus' very earliest memories as a toddler growing up in cosmopolitan Prague to pretty much the present day so covering approximately eighty years of her life. There is very much a sense of three parts to this story: before the war; the Nazi oppression; and after the war. I was fascinated by Kraus' explanations of the long-lasting effects of surviving the Holocaust on her own emotional outlook. She regrets never again being able to live in the moment because of so long spent trying to avoid the horror of the Right Now. I had not considered this …

Subjects

  • Auschwitz (concentration camp)
  • Holocaust survivors
  • Jewish children
  • Jews, biography

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