The Keeper of Hidden Books

Upon seeing Janina, Zofia wants to cry out and hug her friend, but she worries that someone might see them in the street, so she remains calm and invites her “cousin” inside, unlocking the door with a shaking hand. Janina and Zofia embrace once they are inside the relative safety of the apartment. Matka is distraught when she sees Janina, and Zofia is momentarily worried that her mother will force Janina to go, but instead, Matka offers Janina an emotional apology. Janina bathes, and Zofia combs the lice from her friend’s hair. Zofia does not prod her friend for details, waiting for Janina to share what she wants in her own time.

Janina describes terrible starvation conditions. Neighbors are turning on each other in desperate competition for the few resources available, and the bodies of people killed by starvation and typhus are left on the streets. Mouse, Janina’s precocious young neighbor, was shot by the Nazis while attempting to smuggle food. Janina tells Zofia that she has joined the resistance movement in the ghetto and that the Germans have begun rounding people up and taking them away on trains. The Nazis call this a “resettlement” program. Janina and Zofia are not yet aware that these trains are transporting people to extermination camps like Treblinka.

Janina asks Zofia if she can help smuggle her parents out of the ghetto, and Zofia vows to find a way. She asks her friend to stay, rather than return to the ghetto, but Janina does not want to put her parents at risk or abandon them. She tells Zofia that she must be back in time for her shift at a sewing factory in the morning. After Janina leaves the next morning, Matka says that the Steinmans can live with them after Zofia finds a way to help them escape the ghetto. Matka admits to making a mistake when she refused them a place to stay years ago.

The German General Government announces a one-month closure of the library in order to take inventory, but Zofia and her co-workers worry that the closure will not be temporary. Zofia asks Darek to help get Janina and her family out of the ghetto, and he promises to check with his connections in the underground resistance movement. Days later, he returns to Zofia empty-handed; he couldn’t find anyone to help. At their next book club meeting, they discuss Les Miserables by Victor Hugo and find themselves moved by the power of redemption emphasized in the story. They decide to read Tolstoy’s War and Peace next.

Zofia is near the wall of the ghetto when a young boy hands her a pamphlet titled “Protest.” It is a call to action, beseeching Poles outside the ghetto to “stop ignoring the atrocities being committed against Jews” (236). Zofia takes the pamphlet home and reads it. She is glad that someone is making a public attempt to rally support for the Jews, but she is angered to find that the pamphlet also espouses nationalistic views that Jews are harmful to Poland’s economic and political future. Matka finds the pamphlet in Zofia’s bag and surprises Zofia by inviting the author, Veronica, to their apartment. Zofia expresses her disappointment in Veronica’s nationalistic views but asks her if she knows how to help Janina’s family escape from the ghetto. Veronica assures her that she can provide assistance and asks Janina if she would be willing to work for the clandestine organization that is smuggling people out of the ghetto. Zofia agrees. Matka gives Veronica a pair of ruby earrings to cover the costs of helping the Steinmans.

Herr Nagiel is fired from his role as library director and replaced by two women, Frau Schmidt and Frau Beck. Zofia refers to them collectively as “the Fraus.” These women are strict, efficient, and observant. Zofia realizes that it will be harder to continue their covert efforts to save books now that the Fraus are in charge. Mrs. Mazur has a similar thought and tells Zofia where the key to the hidden warehouse is kept, just in case anything happens to her.

When a man asks Zofia to return a recently checked-out book to the reading room, Zofia realizes that Miss Laska has kept her reading room open despite the system-wide library closure. She asks the man not to tell anyone else that the reading room is open and then rushes across town to speak with Miss Laska, worried for the elderly woman’s safety after this act of defiance. Miss Laska proposes that they start running a secret library out of her reading room. She tells Zofia that they can keep a separate checkout log from the official one in order to begin circulating some of the banned books that they have saved from destruction.

Janina sneaks out of the ghetto again to find Zofia, worried about another set of roundups scheduled for the next day. Zofia passes along the instructions from Veronica about where the Steinmans can collect the fraudulent identification papers that will help them to escape the ghetto. The Steinmans plan to leave the ghetto the next day. Zofia says that she will meet them outside their escape point to help protect her friends from people waiting to prey on or blackmail ghetto escapees.

Zofia waits near the ghetto wall for Janina and her parents, pretending to enjoy the summer weather. She buys a roll from a bakery to complete her disguise; it is the first baked good that she has had in years. Zofia sits on a bench and reads for hours. A man sits beside her and asks her if she is waiting for someone. She becomes suspicious that he is one of the “greasers” who blackmail ghetto escapees by catching them off-guard just after they leave the ghetto. Her worries prove to be true. The man follows them after Janina and her mother emerge from the ghetto. Zofia agrees to pay him a huge amount of money after he tells her that he knows her friends are Jewish. They retreat into an alley to exchange the money, and Zofia hits him over the head with a brick and kills him, fearing that if he were left alive, he would become an ongoing threat. Janina’s father does not join his wife and daughter in escaping the ghetto; he opts to stay behind and work in case their escape is not successful. At work, he is included in a Nazi roundup.

Janina tells Zofia a horrible truth that the underground resistance has just discovered. The trains full of Jews captured during the roundups are not heading to resettlement colonies in the east but to “camps that were built to kill” (257). Janina plans to return to the ghetto the next day to continue helping with the resistance efforts from within the ghetto. She asks Zofia to keep her mother safe and to try to help procure weapons for soon-to-be fighters within the ghetto. Zofia fears for her friend’s safety, but she also recognizes that Janina is dedicated to the cause of freedom and vengeance, just as Zofia is dedicated to her work with the library and the Gray Ranks.

Zofia is plagued by doubts about hitting the man on the head in the alley. She checks the newspaper for mention of a dead body found at the location but sees nothing. Mrs. Mazur is arrested by Gestapo agents at the library and accused of stealing books. The soldiers beat her before taking her away. As she is being arrested, she shouts that she has no regrets about her actions; Zofia knows that this message is meant for her.

days after Janina and her mother escape from the ghetto. One afternoon, Mrs. Borkowska, the neighbor, knocks on their door. She resists Zofia’s attempts to ask her to leave and insists that they speak with her. She scolds them for putting the whole building at risk by harboring a Jew and threatens to report Zofia and Matka to the German soldiers if they don’t find somewhere else for Mrs. Steinman to go. She gives them a package of food and money to help Mrs. Steinman on her way.

Zofia finds an address alongside Mrs. Mazur’s key to the hidden book warehouse. When she goes to the address, she finds Darek there; the address is for the apartment that he shares with Mrs. Mazur, who is his aunt. The apartment is full of Darek’s paintings. Zofia comforts Derek in his grief about his aunt. Zofia visits Miss Laska in the reading room. The old woman has already gotten their clandestine library program up and running. Ewa, the girl whom Zofia taught to read, stops by to check out a book.