The Grave Digger's Handbook Book Summary

Liesel is an orphan along with her brother who are going to a small German town to be with their new foster parents. Her younger brother dies on the trip there, due to suspicious circumstances and illness. They bury him in the cold winter snow and while they are burying him one the workers drop a book and she picks it up. The book is called “The Grave Digger's Handbook”, but she does not know this because she was never taught to read. The book is the only memory of her brother she has. In a way it is a good thing, his suffering is stopped early. When she first arrives she is reluctant, but soon opens up to her stepfather Hans. She tells him about her brother and her inability to read. Hans then prepares himself to teach her. School is hard for her since she is unable to read, but meets a boy, which eventually becomes her best friend, Rudy. Once she gets the hang of it she creates a new obsession for herself. The first book she reads is “The Grave Digger's
After a few bombings, there is a surprise one. Leisel is in her basement when this happens, writing in her journal. When she uncovered from the rubble of the bombing, she finds everyone she knows dead, at last the war is over. It then skips to when Leisel is old and has grandchildren, she survived, and later on got married and became happy.
The film is for the most part historically accurate, as accurate as a fictional story can be. The events are within the time frame they are supposed to be. This fits into the historic time period of Hitler’s dictatorship, during the Holocaust and WW2. I liked this film because it gave insight on the German people. Usually they focus on the Jews, the concentration camps and the Ghettos, this movie showed a different perspective. I love learning about the genocide, mostly because knowledge is power, we now know to recognize the signs that can lead to another type of catastrophic event such as this