Inklings Link-Up~January 2021

Inklings for a new year! Here's my list of Inklings posts from last year!

1. At any time during the month, on your own blog post a scene from a book or film that matches the prompt.

2. Link-back to Heidi's blog in the comments section with a link to you Inklings prompt.

January Prompt

A new beginning in book or film

The Librarian of Auschwitz by Antonio Iturbe

Chapter 32

     "What will happen to Mengele? Have they hanged him?" Dita wonders

     "Not yet, but they're looking for him."

     "Will they find him?"

     "Of course they will. Half a dozen armies are looking for him. They'll catch him and put him on trial."

     I hope they hang him straightaway. He's a criminal."

     "No Dita. They have to give him a trial."

     "Why waste time on procedures?"

     "We are better than them."

     "Fredy Hirsch used to say that, too!"

     "Hirsch..."

     "How I miss him."

     It's her turn at the window--time to resolve all her issues. That's it. They are still two strangers. It's the moment to wish each other luck and say good-bye. But Ota asks her where she's going next. She tells him she's off to the Jewish Community Office and asks if what they told her is true: that she can request a small orphan pension.

     Ota asks her if she's mind if he accompanied her there. 

     "It's on my way," he says, so seriously that she doesn't know whether to believe him or not.

      It's an excuse to stay with her, but it isn't a lie. Dita's way is always part of his path. 

     A few days later, in Teplice, some kilometers from Prague, Margit Barnai is sweeping the entrance to her building. As she she sweeps, she daydreams about a young man who does deliveries on his bicycle and rings his bell merrily each time he cycles past her. She thinks that perhaps it's about time to start paying attention to her hair in the mornings and putting a new ribbon in it. Suddenly, out of the corner of her eye she glimpses the shadow of someone coming through the entrance.

     "You're a very fat, girl!" the person shouts.

      Her first impulse is to give a rude response to her rude neighbor. But then the broom almost falls out of her hand.

     It's Dita's voice.

     Margit is the older of the two girls, but she's always felt like the younger sister. She throws herself into Dita's arms in the way little children do--not worrying about the speed, not holding back.

     "We're going to fall!" says Dita, laughing

     "And what does that matter, as long as we're together!"

     It was true. Finally, something good was true. They were waiting for her.

Based on the true story of Edita "Dita" Kraus, a survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. During her imprisonment, Dita was given the job as the librarian at the camp's tiny school. A job that could have gotten her killed. Dita spends her fragile teenage years in a never-ending hell of fear, death, manipulation and increasingly no hope of survival. When she is finally liberated, she is entirely alone. She's watched her parents die and as her friends were taken away. 

How does one move on in life when they have born witness to the most evil depths of mankind? Yet, Dita does move on. She survived Auschwitz, she survived the Nazis, she survived the gas chambers, she survived sickness, she survived separation. Her liberation from the camp was not her beginning. It was the ending of her former life. Her beginning was when she determined to start a new life. Finding her friends, learning to live and entering a world beyond the barbed wire of a concentration camp. 

Dita Kraus then and now