Another of Max’s projects was the remainder of Mein Kampf. Each page was gently stripped
from the book and laid out on the floor to receive a coat of paint. It was then hung up to dry
and replaced between the front and back covers. When Liesel came down one day after
school, she found Max, Rosa, and her papa all painting the various pages. Many of them were
already hanging from a drawn-out string with pegs, just as they must have done for The
Standover Man.
All three people looked up and spoke.
“Hi, Liesel.”
“Here’s a brush, Liesel.”
“About time, Saumensch. Where have you been so long?”
As she started painting, Liesel thought about Max Vandenburg fighting the F exactly as
he’d explained it.
BASEMENT VISIONS, JUNE 1941
Punches are thrown, the crowd climbs out of
the walls. Max and the Ffight for their
lives, each rebounding off the stairway.
There’s blood in the F’s mustache, as
well as in his part line, on the right side
of his head. “Come on, F” says the
Jew. He waves him forward. “Come on, F ”
When the visions dissipated and she finished her first page, Papa winked at her. Mama
castigated her for hogging the paint. Max examined each and every page, perhaps watching
what he planned to produce on them. Many months later, he would also paint over the cover
of that book and give it a new title, after one of the stories he would write and illustrate inside
it.
That afternoon, in the secret ground below 33 Himmel Street, the Hubermanns, Liesel
Meminger, and Max Vandenburg prepared the pages of The Word Shaker.
It felt good to be a painter.
The Showdown: June 24
Then came the seventh side of the die. Two days after Germany invaded Russia. Three days
before Britain and the Soviets joined forces.
Seven.
You roll and watch it coming, realizing completely that this is no regular die. You claim it to
be bad luck, but you’ve known all along that it had to come. You brought it into the room.
The table could smell it on your breath. The Jew was sticking out of your pocket from the
outset. He’s smeared to your lapel, and the moment you roll, you know it’s a seven—the one
thing that somehow finds a way to hurt you. It lands. It stares you in each eye, miraculous and
loathsome, and you turn away with it feeding on your chest.
Just bad luck.
That’s what you say.
Of no consequence.
That’s what you make yourself believe—because deep down, you know that this small piece
of changing fortune is a signal of things to come. You hide a Jew. You pay. Somehow or
other, you must.
In hindsight, Liesel told herself that it was not such a big deal. Perhaps it was because so
much more had happened by the time she wrote her story in the basement. In the great scheme
of things, she reasoned that Rosa being fired by the mayor and his wife was not bad luck at
all. It had nothing whatsoever to do with hiding Jews. It had everything to do with the greater
context of the war. At the time, though, there was most definitely a feeling of punishment.
The beginning was actually a week or so earlier than June 24. Liesel scavenged a newspaper
for Max Vandenburg as she always did. She reached into a garbage can just off Munich Street
and tucked it under her arm. Once she delivered it to Max and he’d commenced his first
reading, he glanced across at her and pointed to a picture on the front page. “Isn’t this whose
washing and ironing you deliver?”
Liesel came over from the wall. She’d been writing the word argument six times, next to
Max’s picture of the ropy cloud and the dripping sun. Max handed her the paper and she
confirmed it. “That’s him.”
When she went on to read the article, Heinz Hermann, the mayor, was quoted as saying that
although the war was progressing splendidly, the people of Molching, like all responsible
Germans, should take adequate measures and prepare for the possibility of harder times. “You
never know,” he stated, “what our enemies are thinking, or how they will try to debilitate us.”
A week later, the mayor’s words came to nasty fruition. Liesel, as she always did, showed up
at Grande Strasse and read from The Whistler on the floor of the mayor’s library. The mayor’s wife showed no signs of abnormality (or, let’s be frank, no additional signs) until it was time to leave.
This time, when she offered Liesel The Whistler, she insisted on the girl taking it. “Please.”
She almost begged. The book was held out in a tight, measured fist. “Take it. Please, take it.”
Liesel, touched by the strangeness of this woman, couldn’t bear to disappoint her again. The
gray-covered book with its yellowing pages found its way into her hand and she began to
walk the corridor. As she was about to ask for the washing, the mayor’s wife gave her a final
look of bathrobed sorrow. She reached into the chest of drawers and withdrew an envelope.
Her voice, lumpy from lack of use, coughed out the words. “I’m sorry. It’s for your mama.”
Liesel stopped breathing.
She was suddenly aware of how empty her feet felt inside her shoes. Something ridiculed her
throat. She trembled. When finally she reached out and took possession of the letter, she
noticed the sound of the clock in the library. Grimly, she realized that clocks don’t make a
sound that even remotely resembles ticking, tocking. It was more the sound of a hammer,
upside down, hacking methodically at the earth. It was the sound of a grave. If only mine was
ready now, she thought—because Liesel Meminger, at that moment, wanted to die. When the
others had canceled, it hadn’t hurt so much. There was always the mayor, his library, and her
connection with his wife. Also, this was the last one, the last hope, gone. This time, it felt like
the greatest betrayal.
How could she face her mama?
For Rosa, the few scraps of money had still helped in various alleyways. An extra handful of
flour. A piece of fat.
Ilsa Hermann was dying now herself—to get rid of her. Liesel could see it somewhere in the
way she hugged the robe a little tighter. The clumsiness of sorrow still kept her at close
proximity, but clearly, she wanted this to be over. “Tell your mama,” she spoke again. Her
voice was adjusting now, as one sentence turned into two. “That we’re sorry.” She started
shepherding the girl toward the door.
Liesel felt it now in the shoulders. The pain, the impact of final rejection.
That’s it? she asked internally. You just boot me out?
Slowly, she picked up her empty bag and edged toward the door. Once outside, she turned
and faced the mayor’s wife for the second to last time that day. She looked her in the eyes
with an almost savage brand of pride. she said, and Ilsa Hermann smiled in a
rather useless, beaten way.
“If you ever want to come just to read,” the woman lied (or at least the girl, in her shocked,
saddened state, perceived it as a lie), “you’re very welcome.”
At that moment, Liesel was amazed by the width of the doorway. There was so much space.
Why did people need so much space to get through the door? Had Rudy been there, he’d have
called her an idiot—it was to get all their stuff inside.
“Goodbye,” the girl said, and slowly, with great morosity, the door was closed.
Liesel did not leave.
For a long time, she sat on the steps and watched Molching. It was neither warm nor cool and
the town was clear and still. Molching was in a jar.
She opened the letter. In it, Mayor Heinz Hermann diplomatically outlined exactly why he
had to terminate the services of Rosa Hubermann. For the most part, he explained that he
would be a hypocrite if he maintained his own small luxuries while advising others to prepare
for harder times.
When she eventually stood and walked home, her moment of reaction came once again when
she saw the STEINER-SCHNEIDERMEISTER sign on Munich Street. Her sadness left her and
she was overwhelmed with anger. “That bastard mayor,” she whispered. “That pathetic
woman.” The fact that harder times were coming was surely the best reason for keeping Rosa
employed, but no, they fired her. At any rate, she decided, they could do their own blasted
washing and ironing, like normal people. Like poor people.
In her hand, The Whistler tightened.
“So you give me the book,” the girl said, “for pity—to make yourself feel better....” The fact
that she’d also been offered the book prior to that day mattered little.
She turned as she had once before and marched back to 8 Grande Strasse. The temptation to
run was immense, but she refrained so that she’d have enough in reserve for the words.
When she arrived, she was disappointed that the mayor himself was not there. No car was
slotted nicely on the side of the road, which was perhaps a good thing. Had it been there, there
was no telling what she might have done to it in this moment of rich versus poor.
Two steps at a time, she reached the door and banged it hard enough to hurt. She enjoyed the
small fragments of pain.
Evidently, the mayor’s wife was shocked when she saw her again. Her fluffy hair was slightly
wet and her wrinkles widened when she noticed the obvious fury on Liesel’s usually pallid
face. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out, which was handy, really, for it was Liesel
who possessed the talking.
“You think,” she said, “you can buy me off with this book?” Her voice, though shaken,
hooked at the woman’s throat. The glittering anger was thick and unnerving, but she toiled
through it. She worked herself up even further, to the point where she needed to wipe the tears
from her eyes. “You give me this Saumensch of a book and think it’ll make everything good
when I go and tell my mama that we’ve just lost our last one? While you sit here in your
mansion?”
The mayor’s wife’s arms.
They hung.
Her face slipped.
Liesel, however, did not buckle. She sprayed her words directly into the woman’s eyes.
“You and your husband. Sitting up here.” Now she became spiteful. More spiteful and evil
than she thought herself capable.
The injury of words.
Yes, the brutality of words.
She summoned them from someplace she only now recognized and hurled them at Ilsa
Hermann. “It’s about time,” she informed her, “that you do your own stinking washing
anyway. It’s about time you faced the fact that your son is dead. He got killed! He got
strangled and cut up more than twenty years ago! Or did he freeze to death? Either way, he’s
dead! He’s dead and it’s pathetic that you sit here shivering in your own house to suffer for it.
You think you’re the only one?”
Immediately.
Her brother was next to her.
He whispered for her to stop, but he, too, was dead, and not worth listening to.
He died in a train.
They buried him in the snow.
Liesel glanced at him, but she could not make herself stop. Not yet.
“This book,” she went on. She shoved the boy down the steps, making him fall. “I don’t want
it.” The words were quieter now, but still just as hot. She threw The Whistler at the woman’s
slippered feet, hearing the clack of it as it landed on the cement. “I don’t want your miserable
book....”
Now she managed it. She fell silent.
Her throat was barren now. No words for miles.
Her brother, holding his knee, disappeared.
After a miscarriaged pause, the mayor’s wife edged forward and picked up the book. She was
battered and beaten up, and not from smiling this time. Liesel could see it on her face. Blood
leaked from her nose and licked at her lips. Her eyes had blackened. Cuts had opened up and
a series of wounds were rising to the surface of her skin. All from the words. From Liesel’s
words.
Book in hand, and straightening from a crouch to a standing hunch, Ilsa Hermann began the
process again of saying sorry, but the sentence did not make it out.
Slap me, Liesel thought. Come on, slap me.
Ilsa Hermann didn’t slap her. She merely retreated backward, into the ugly air of her beautiful
house, and Liesel, once again, was left alone, clutching at the steps. She was afraid to turn
around because she knew that when she did, the glass casing of Molching had now been
shattered, and she’d be glad of it.
As her last orders of business, she read the letter one more time, and when she was close to
the gate, she screwed it up as tightly as she could and threw it at the door, as if it were a rock.
I have no idea what the book thief expected, but the ball of paper hit the mighty sheet of wood
and twittered back down the steps. It landed at her feet.
“Typical,” she stated, kicking it onto the grass. “Useless.”
On the way home this time, she imagined the fate of that paper the next time it rained, when
the mended glass house of Molching was turned upside down. She could already see the
words dissolving letter by letter, till there was nothing left. Just paper. Just earth.
At home, as luck would have it, when Liesel walked through the door, Rosa was in the
kitchen. “And?” she asked. “Where’s the washing?”
“No washing today,” Liesel told her.
Rosa came and sat down at the kitchen table. She knew. Suddenly, she appeared much older.
Liesel imagined what she’d look like if she untied her bun, to let it fall out onto her shoulders.
A gray towel of elastic hair.
“What did you do there, you little Saumensch?” The sentence was numb. She could not
muster her usual venom.
“It was my fault,” Liesel answered. “Completely. I insulted the mayor’s wife and told her to
stop crying over her dead son. I called her pathetic. That was when they fired you. Here.” She
walked to the wooden spoons, grabbed a handful, and placed them in front of her. “Take your
pick.”
Rosa touched one and picked it up, but she did not wield it. “I don’t believe you.”
Liesel was torn between distress and total mystification. The one time she desperately wanted
a Watschen and she couldn’t get one! “It’s my fault.”
“It’s not your fault,” Mama said, and she even stood and stroked Liesel’s waxy, unwashed
hair. “I know you wouldn’t say those things.”
“I said them!”
“All right, you said them.”
As Liesel left the room, she could hear the wooden spoons clicking back into position in the
metal jar that held them. By the time she reached her bedroom, the whole lot of them, the jar
included, were thrown to the floor.
Later, she walked down to the basement, where Max was standing in the dark, most likely
boxing with the F
“Max?” The light dimmed on—a red coin, floating in the corner. “Can you teach me how to
do the push-ups?”
Max showed her and occasionally lifted her torso to help, but despite her bony appearance,
Liesel was strong and could hold her body weight nicely. She didn’t count how many she
could do, but that night, in the glow of the basement, the book thief completed enough push-
ups to make her hurt for several days. Even when Max advised her that she’d already done too
many, she continued.
In bed, she read with Papa, who could tell something was wrong. It was the first time in a
month that he’d come in and sat with her, and she was comforted, if only slightly. Somehow,
Hans Hubermann always knew what to say, when to stay, and when to leave her be. Perhaps
Liesel was the one thing he was a true expert at.
“Is it the washing?” he asked.
Liesel shook her head.
Papa hadn’t shaved for a few days and he rubbed the scratchy whiskers every two or three
minutes. His silver eyes were flat and calm, slightly warm, as they always were when it came
to Liesel.
When the reading petered out, Papa fell asleep. It was then that Liesel spoke what she’d
wanted to say all along.
“Papa,” she whispered, “I think I’m going to hell.”
Her legs were warm. Her knees were cold.
She remembered the nights when she’d wet the bed and Papa had washed the sheets and
taught her the letters of the alphabet. Now his breathing blew across the blanket and she
kissed his scratchy cheek.
“You need a shave,” she said.
“You’re not going to hell,” Papa replied.
For a few moments, she watched his face. Then she lay back down, leaned on him, and
together, they slept, very much in Munich, but somewhere on the seventh side of Germany’s
die.
RUDY’S YOUTH
In the end, she had to give it to him.
He knew how to perform.
A PORTRAIT OF RUDY STEINER:
JULY 1941
Strings of mud clench his face. His tie
is a pendulum, long dead in its clock.
His lemon, lamp-lit hair is disheveled
and he wears a sad, absurd smile.
He stood a few meters from the step and spoke with great conviction, great joy.
“Alles ist Scheisse,” he announced.
All is shit.
In the first half of 1941, while Liesel went about the business of concealing Max Vandenburg,
stealing newspapers, and telling off mayors’ wives, Rudy was enduring a new life of his own,
at the Hitler Youth. Since early February, he’d been returning from the meetings in a
considerably worse state than he
by his side, in the same condition. The trouble had three elements to it.
A TRIPLE-TIERED PROBLEM
1. Tommy M
2. Franz Deutscher—the irate Hitler Youth leader.
3. Rudy’s inability to stay out of things.
If only Tommy M
Munich’s history, six years earlier. His ear infections and nerve damage were still contorting
the marching pattern at the Hitler Youth, which, I can assure you, was not a positive thing.
To begin with, the downward slide of momentum was gradual, but as the months progressed,
Tommy was consistently gathering the ire of the Hitler Youth leaders, especially when it
came to the marching. Remember Hitler’s birthday the previous year? For some time, the ear
infections were getting worse. They had reached the point where Tommy had genuine
problems hearing. He could not make out the commands that were shouted at the group as
they marched in line. It didn’t matter if it was in the hall or outside, in the snow or the mud or
the slits of rain.
The goal was always to have everyone stop at the same time.
“One click!” they were told. “That’s all the F wants to hear. Everyone united. Everyone
together as one!”
Then Tommy.
It was his left ear, I think. That was the most troublesome of the two, and when the bitter cry
of “Halt!” wet the ears of everybody else, Tommy marched comically and obliviously on. He
could transform a marching line into a dog’s breakfast in the blink of an eye.
On one particular Saturday, at the beginning of July, just after three-thirty and a litany of
Tommy-inspired failed marching attempts, Franz Deutscher (the ultimate name for the
ultimate teenage Nazi) was completely fed up.
du A fe!” His thick blond hair massaged his head and his words manipulated
Tommy’s face. “You ape—what’s wrong with you?”
Tommy slouched fearfully back, but his left cheek still managed to twitch in a manic, cheerful
contortion. He appeared not only to be laughing with a triumphant smirk, but accepting the
bucketing with glee. And Franz Deutscher wasn’t having any of it. His pale eyes cooked him.
“Well?” he asked. “What can you say for yourself?”
Tommy’s twitch only increased, in both speed and depth.
“Are you mocking me?”
“Heil,” twitched Tommy, in a desperate attempt to buy some approval, but he did not make it
to the “Hitler” part.
That was when Rudy stepped forward. He faced Franz Deutscher, looking up at him. “He’s
got a problem, sir—”
“I can see that!”
“With his ears,” Rudy finished. “He can’t—”
“Right, that’s it.” Deutscher rubbed his hands together. “Both of you—six laps of the
grounds.” They obeyed, but not fast enough. “Schnell!” His voice chased them.
When the six laps were completed, they were given some drills of the run–drop down–get up–
get down again variety, and after fifteen very long minutes, they were ordered to the ground
for what should have been the last time.
Rudy looked down.
A warped circle of mud grinned up at him.
What might you be looking at? it seemed to ask.
“Down!” Franz ordered.
Rudy naturally jumped over it and dropped to his stomach.
“Up!” Franz smiled. “One step back.” They did it. “Down!”
The message was clear and now, Rudy accepted it. He dived at the mud and held his breath,
and at that moment, lying ear to sodden earth, the drill ended.
“Vielen Dank, meine Herren,” Franz Deutscher politely said. “Many thanks, my gentlemen.”
Rudy climbed to his knees, did some gardening in his ear, and looked across at Tommy.
Tommy closed his eyes, and he twitched.
When they returned to Himmel Street that day, Liesel was playing hopscotch with some of
the younger kids, still in her BDM uniform. From the corner of her eye, she saw the two
melancholic figures walking toward her. One of them called out.
They met on the front step of the Steiners’ concrete shoe box of a house, and Rudy told her all
about the day’s episode.
After ten minutes, Liesel sat down.
After eleven minutes, Tommy, who was sitting next to her, said, “It’s all my fault,” but Rudy
waved him away, somewhere between sentence and smile, chopping a mud streak in half with
his finger. “It’s my—” Tommy tried again, but Rudy broke the sentence completely and
pointed at him.
“Tommy, please.” There was a peculiar look of contentment on Rudy’s face. Liesel had never
seen someone so miserable yet so wholeheartedly alive. “Just sit there and—twitch—or
something,” and he continued with the story.
He paced.
He wrestled his tie.
The words were flung at her, landing somewhere on the concrete step.
“That Deutscher,” he summed up buoyantly. “He got us, huh, Tommy?”
Tommy nodded, twitched, and spoke, not necessarily in that order. “It was because of me.”
“Tommy, what did I say?”
“When?”
“Now! Just keep quiet.”
“Sure, Rudy.”
When Tommy walked forlornly home a short while later, Rudy tried what appeared to be a
masterful new tactic.
Pity.
On the step, he perused the mud that had dried as a crusty sheet on his uniform, then looked
Liesel hopelessly in the face. “What about it, Saumensch?”
“What about what?”
“You know....”
Liesel responded in the usual fashion.
“Saukerl,” she laughed, and she walked the short distance home. A disconcerting mixture of
mud and pity was one thing, but kissing Rudy Steiner was something entirely different.
Smiling sadly on the step, he called out, rummaging a hand through his hair. “One day,” he
warned her. “One day, Liesel!”
In the basement, just over two years later, Liesel ached sometimes to go next door and see
him, even if she was writing in the early hours of morning. She also realized it was most
likely those sodden days at the Hitler Youth that had fed his, and subsequently her own,
desire for crime.
After all, despite the usual bouts of rain, summer was beginning to arrive properly. The Klar
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