Examples Of Antisemitism In The Book Thief

Life and Death: Antisemitism and Death’s Importance in The Book Thief

“For the book thief, everything was going nicely. For [Death] the sky was the colo[u]r of Jews” (Zusak 349). The Book Thief by Markus Zusak tells the story of a book-looting, strong-willed, and creative young girl named Liesel living in 1940s, Nazi Germany. The fictional town - Molching - where Liesel lives, is ridden with fatalities just like every other German town during the second world war, thus the story is narrated by the personification of “Death”. The narrator acts like the grim reaper of the book and is an omniscient, all-wise being. The importance of the narrator existing as an omniscient force is indisputable as without Death’s all-seeing abilities, the theme

Had the story been narrated by Liesel, there wouldn't have been content relating to the concentration camps as she is a non-Jewish child who never experiences such a thing, so Death’s narrative is the reader's sole glance into the nature of these awful places. One detail that only Death knows is what happens within the gas chambers. On Death’s first day collecting the dead at Auschwitz, he remarks that “[w]hen their bodies had finished scouring for gaps in the door, their souls rose up” (349). What occurs inside the gas chambers is crucial to know as it re-personifies the Jewish people who can be seen as mere fatalities because there are so many killed in the book, so this human behavior recorded by death is crucial to involving the reader's sympathy. This human moment before death is something completely unknown to Liesel, it is a secret held between only the victim and

When the first death march came through Molching “[s]ome people said that the truck had broken down, but [Death] can personally testify that this was not the case. [He] was there”. Death was able to see that the trucks did not break down and instead the Jewish people were forced by the Nazis to walk all the way to Dachau on foot. This fact was unknown to Liesel and the general public but because Death is all seeing he is able to prove that this was done as punishment and not just because the trucks allegedly broke down. For the reader who knows only what is shared in the narrative, this detail is necessary because it shows how awful the Nazis are toward the Jewish