Max Vandenburg promised that he would never sleep in Liesel’s room again. What was he thinking that first
night? The very idea of it mortified him.
He rationalized that he was so bewildered upon his arrival that he allowed such a thing. The basement was the
only place for him as far as he was concerned. Forget the cold and the loneliness. He was a Jew, and if there
was one place he was destined to exist, it was a basement or any other such hidden venue of survival.
“I’m sorry,” he confessed to Hans and Rosa on the basement steps. “From now on I will stay down here. You
will not hear from me. I will not make a sound.”
Hans and Rosa, both steeped in the despair of the predicament, made no argument, not even in regard to the
cold. They heaved blankets down and topped up the kerosene lamp. Rosa admitted that there could not be much
food, to which Max fervently asked her to bring only scraps, and only when they were not wanted by anyone
else.
“Na, na,” Rosa assured him. “You will be fed, as best I can.”
They also took the mattress down, from the spare bed in Liesel’s room, replacing it with drop sheets—an
excellent trade.
Downstairs, Hans and Max placed the mattress beneath the steps and built a wall of drop sheets at the side. The
sheets were high enough to cover the whole triangular entrance, and if nothing else, they were easily moved if
Max was in dire need of extra air.
Papa apologized. “It’s quite pathetic. I realize that.”
“Better than nothing,” Max assured him. “Better than I deserve— thank you.”
With some well-positioned paint cans, Hans actually conceded that it did simply look like a collection of junk
gathered sloppily in the corner, out of the way. The one problem was that a person needed only to shift a few
cans and remove a drop sheet or two to smell out the Jew.
“Let’s just hope it’s good enough,” he said.
“It has to be.” Max crawled in. Again, he said it. “Thank you.”
Thank you.
For Max Vandenburg, those were the two most pitiful words he could possibly say, rivaled only by I’m sorry.
There was a constant urge to speak both expressions, spurred on by the affliction of guilt.
How many times in those first few hours of awakeness did he feel like walking out of that basement and leaving
the house altogether? It must have been hundreds.
Each time, though, it was only a twinge.Which made it even worse.
He wanted to walk out—Lord, how he wanted to (or at least he wanted to want to)—but he knew he wouldn’t.
It was much the same as the way he left his family in Stuttgart, under a veil of fabricated loyalty.
To live.
Living was living.
The price was guilt and shame.
For his first few days in the basement, Liesel had nothing to do with him. She denied his existence. His rustling
hair, his cold, slippery fingers.
His tortured presence.
Mama and Papa.
There was such gravity between them, and a lot of failed decision-making.
They considered whether they could move him.
“But where?”
No reply.
In this situation, they were friendless and paralyzed. There was nowhere else for Max Vandenburg to go. It was
them. Hans and Rosa Hubermann. Liesel had never seen them look at each other so much, or with such
solemnity.
It was they who took the food down and organized an empty paint can for Max’s excrement. The contents
would be disposed of by Hans as prudently as possible. Rosa also took him some buckets of hot water to wash
himself. The Jew was filthy.
Outside, a mountain of cold November air was waiting at the front door each time Liesel left the house.
Drizzle came down in spades.
Dead leaves were slumped on the road.
Soon enough, it was the book thief’s turn to visit the basement. They made her.
She walked tentatively down the steps, knowing that no words were required. The scuffing of her feet was
enough to rouse him.
In the middle of the basement, she stood and waited, feeling more like she was standing in the center of a great
dusky field. The sun was setting behind a crop of harvested drop sheets.
When Max came out, he was holding Mein Kampf. Upon his arrival, he’d offered it back to Hans Hubermann
but was told he could keep it.Naturally, Liesel, while holding the dinner, couldn’t take her eyes off it. It was a book she had seen a few times
at the BDM, but it hadn’t been read or used directly in their activities. There were occasional references to its
greatness, as well as promises that the opportunity to study it would come in later years, as they progressed into
the more senior Hitler Youth division.
Max, following her attention, also examined the book.
“Is?” she whispered.
There was a queer strand in her voice, planed off and curly in her mouth.
The Jew moved only his head a little closer. “Bitte? Excuse me?”
She handed him the pea soup and returned upstairs, red, rushed, and foolish.
“Is it a good book?”
She practiced what she’d wanted to say in the washroom, in the small mirror. The smell of urine was still about
her, as Max had just used the paint can before she’d come down. So ein G’schtank, she thought. What a stink.
No one’s urine smells as good as your own.
The days hobbled on.
Each night, before the descent into sleep, she would hear Mama and Papa in the kitchen, discussing what had
been done, what they were doing now, and what needed to happen next. All the while, an image of Max
hovered next to her. It was always the injured, thankful expression on his face and the swamp-filled eyes.
Only once was there an outburst in the kitchen.
Papa.
“I know!”
His voice was abrasive, but he brought it back to a muffled whisper in a hurry.
“I have to keep going, though, at least a few times a week. I can’t be here all the time. We need the money, and
if I quit playing there, they’ll get suspicious. They might wonder why I’ve stopped. I told them you were sick
last week, but now we have to do everything like we always have.”
Therein lay the problem.
Life had altered in the wildest possible way, but it was imperative that they act as if nothing at all had happened.
Imagine smiling after a slap in the face. Then think of doing it twenty-four hours a day.
That was the business of hiding a Jew.
As days turned into weeks, there was now, if nothing else, a beleaguered acceptance of what had transpired—all
the result of war, a promise keeper, and one piano accordion. Also, in the space of just over half a year, the
Hubermanns had lost a son and gained a replacement of epically dangerous proportions.What shocked Liesel most was the change in her mama. Whether it was the calculated way in which she divided
the food, or the considerable muzzling of her notorious mouth, or even the gentler expression on her cardboard
face, one thing was becoming clear.
AN ATTRIBUTE OF ROSA HUBERMANN
She was a good woman for a crisis.
Even when the arthritic Helena Schmidt canceled the washing and ironing service, a month after Max’s debut
on Himmel Street, she simply sat at the table and brought the bowl toward her. “Good soup tonight.”
The soup was terrible.
Every morning when Liesel left for school, or on the days she ventured out to play soccer or complete what was
left of the washing round, Rosa would speak quietly to the girl. “And remember, Liesel . . .” She would point to
her mouth and that was all. When Liesel nodded, she would say, “Good girl, Saumensch. Now get going.”
True to Papa’s words, and even Mama’s now, she was a good girl. She kept her mouth shut everywhere she
went. The secret was buried deep.
She town-walked with Rudy as she always did, listening to his jabbering. Sometimes they compared notes from
their Hitler Youth divisions, Rudy mentioning for the first time a sadistic young leader named Franz Deutscher.
If Rudy wasn’t talking about Deutscher’s intense ways, he was playing his usual broken record, providing
renditions and re-creations of the last goal he scored in the Himmel Street soccer stadium.
“I know,” Liesel would assure him. “I was there.”
“So what?”
“So I saw it, Saukerl.”
“How do I know that? For all I know, you were probably on the ground somewhere, licking up the mud I left
behind when I scored.”
Perhaps it was Rudy who kept her sane, with the stupidity of his talk, his lemon-soaked hair, and his cockiness.
He seemed to resonate with a kind of confidence that life was still nothing but a joke—an endless succession of
soccer goals, trickery, and a constant repertoire of meaningless chatter.
Also, there was the mayor’s wife, and reading in her husband’s library. It was cold in there now, colder with
every visit, but still Liesel could not stay away. She would choose a handful of books and read small segments
of each, until one afternoon, she found one she could not put down. It was called The Whistler. She was
originally drawn to it because of her sporadic sightings of the whistler of Himmel Street— Pfiffikus. There was
the memory of him bent over in his coat and his appearance at the bonfire on the Führer’s birthday.
The first event in the book was a murder. A stabbing. A Vienna street. Not far from the Stephansdom—the
cathedral in the main square.
A SMALL EXCERPT FROM
THE WHISTLER
She lay there, frightened, in a pool of
blood, a strange tune singing in her ear. She recalled the knife, in and
out, and a smile. As always, the
whistler had smiled as he ran away,
into a dark and murderous night. . . .
Liesel was unsure whether it was the words or the open window that caused her to tremble. Every time she
picked up or delivered from the mayor’s house, she read three pages and shivered, but she could not last
forever.
Similarly, Max Vandenburg could not withstand the basement much longer. He didn’t complain—he had no
right—but he could slowly feel himself deteriorating in the cold. As it turned out, his rescue owed itself to some
reading and writing, and a book called The Shoulder Shrug.
“Liesel,” said Hans one night. “Come on.”
Since Max’s arrival, there had been a considerable hiatus in the reading practice of Liesel and her papa. He
clearly felt that now was a good time to resume. “Na, komm,” he told her. “I don’t want you slacking off. Go
and get one of your books. How about The Shoulder Shrug?”
The disturbing element in all of this was that when she came back, book in hand, Papa was motioning that she
should follow him down to their old workroom. The basement.
“But, Papa,” she tried to tell him. “We can’t—”
“What? Is there a monster down there?”
It was early December and the day had been icy. The basement became unfriendlier with each concrete step.
“It’s too cold, Papa.”
“That never bothered you before.”
“Yes, but it was never this cold. . . .”
When they made their way down, Papa whispered to Max, “Can we borrow the lamplight, please?”
With trepidation, the sheets and cans moved and the light was passed out, exchanging hands. Looking at the
flame, Hans shook his head and followed it with some words. “Es ist ja Wahnsinn, net? This is crazy, no?”
Before the hand from within could reposition the sheets, he caught it. “Bring yourself, too. Please, Max.”
Slowly then, the drop sheets were dragged aside and the emaciated body and face of Max Vandenburg
appeared. In the moist light, he stood with a magic discomfort. He shivered.
Hans touched his arm, to bring him closer.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. You cannot stay down here. You’ll freeze to death.” He turned. “Liesel, fill up the
tub. Not too hot. Make it just like it is when it starts cooling down.”
Liesel ran up.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”