Dita Kraus

was a Holocaust survivor known as the ‘librarian of Auschwitz’. In 1942, she was deported to Theresienstadt with her parents and later to Auschwitz, where her father was murdered and where she regularly encountered Josef Mengele, the ‘Angel of Death’. In Auschwitz, Kraus took on the responsibility of protecting the few meager, strictly forbidden books that were present in the children’s block. In March 1944, half of the children in that block were murdered. From Auschwitz, Kraus and her mother were transported to Hamburg, various labor camps and then Bergen-Belsen, which was liberated by British troops in 1945. In 2012, Antonio Iturbe published The Librarian of Auschwitz, a book based on Kraus’s life story. In 2020, Kraus’s memoirs, A Delayed Life: The True Story of the Librarian of Auschwitz, were published.