When Liesel tried to make her way through, a crackling sound prompted her to think that the fire had already begun. It hadn’t. The sound was kinetic humans, flowing, charging up.
They’ve started without me!
Although something inside told her that this was a crime—after all, her three books were the most precious items she owned—she was compelled to see the thing lit. She couldn’t help it. I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that’s where they begin. Their great skill is their capacity to escalate.
The thought of missing it was eased when she found a gap in the bodies and was able to see the mound of guilt, still intact. It was prodded and splashed, even spat on. It reminded her of an unpopular child, forlorn and bewildered, powerless to alter its fate. No one liked it. Head down. Hands in pockets. Forever. Amen.
Bits and pieces continued falling to its sides as Liesel hunted for Rudy. Where is that Saukerl?
When she looked up, the sky was crouching.
A horizon of Nazi flags and uniforms rose upward, crippling her view every time she attempted to see over a smaller child’s head. It was pointless. The crowd was itself. There was no swaying it, squeezing through, or reasoning with it. You breathed with it and you sang its songs. You waited for its fire.
Silence was requested by a man on a podium. His uniform was shiny brown. The iron was practically still on it. The silence began.
His first words: “Heil Hitler!”
His first action: the salute to the Führer.
“Today is a beautiful day,” he continued. “Not only is it our great leader’s birthday—but we also stop our enemies once again. We stop them reaching into our minds ….”
Liesel still attempted to fight her way through.
“We put an end to the disease that has been spread through Germany for the last twenty years, if not more!” He was performing now what is called a Schreierei—a consummate exhibition of passionate shouting—warning the crowd to be watchful,
to be vigilant, to seek out and destroy the evil machinations plotting to infect the motherland with its deplorable ways. “The immoral! The Kommunisten!” That word again. That old word. Dark rooms. Suit-wearing men. “Die Juden—the Jews!”
Halfway through the speech, Liesel surrendered. As the word communist seized her, the remainder of the Nazi recital swept by, either side, lost somewhere in the German feet around her. Waterfalls of words. A girl treading water. She thought it again. Kommunisten.
Up until now, at the BDM, they had been told that Germany was the superior race, but no one else in particular had been mentioned. Of course, everyone knew about the Jews, as they were the main offender in regard to violating the German ideal. Not once, however, had the communists been mentioned until today, regardless of the fact that people of such political creed were also to be punished.
She had to get out.
In front of her, a head with parted blond hair and pigtails sat absolutely still on its shoulders. Staring into it, Liesel revisited those dark rooms of her past and her mother answering questions made up of one word.
She saw it all so clearly.
Her starving mother, her missing father. Kommunisten.
Her dead brother.
“And now we say goodbye to this trash, this poison.”
Just before Liesel Meminger pivoted with nausea to exit the crowd, the shiny, brown-shirted creature walked from the podium. He received a torch from an accomplice and lit the mound, which dwarfed him in all its culpability. “Heil Hitler!”
The audience: “Heil Hitler!”
A collection of men walked from a platform and surrounded the heap, igniting it, much to the approval of everyone. Voices climbed over shoulders and the smell of pure German sweat struggled at first, then poured out. It rounded corner after corner, till they were all swimming in it. The words, the sweat. And smiling. Let’s not forget the smiling.
Many jocular comments followed, as did another onslaught of “heil Hitlering.” You know, it actually makes me wonder if anyone ever lost an eye or injured a hand or wrist with all of that. You’d only need to be facing the wrong way at the wrong time or stand marginally too close to another person. Perhaps people did get injured. Personally, I can only tell you that no one died from it, or at least, not physically. There was, of course, the matter of forty million people I picked up by the time the whole thing was finished, but that’s getting all metaphoric. Allow me to return us to the fire.
The orange flames waved at the crowd as paper and print dissolved inside them. Burning words were torn from their sentences.
On the other side, beyond the blurry heat, it was possible to see the brownshirts and swastikas joining hands. You didn’t see people. Only uniforms and signs.
Birds above did laps.
They circled, somehow attracted to the glow—until they came too close to the heat. Or was it the humans? Certainly, the heat was nothing.