Blog 3

To me Hans Hubermann is someone who appears at first to be a gentle man with a kind heart.  He takes in Liesel and treats her as his own daughter. She’s afraid when she first arrives at the Hubermann home and Rosa, Han’s wife, yells at Liesel to try to get her out of the car. Han knows better and instead gentle coaxes her from the car. They soon bond over cigarettes, nightmares, and books. Hans teaches Liesel to roll cigarettes, comforts her every night when she wakes up for a nightmare about her dead bother, and teaches her to read. He understand Liesel’s need to read the Grave Digger’s Handbook and never tells her it’s strange or that he won’t help her read it.

As the story progresses we learn more about Hans and realize he’s a more complicated character than was first thought.  We learn that he is one of the few Germans not to be a member of the Nazi Party. He chose not to join a group that blamed a group of people for something they weren’t responsible.  He was a fair man and he owed his life to a Jew.  When it came time for him to return the favor and save the life of his savior’s son he does it.  He knows it’s the right thing to do so he doesn’t think twice.  Hans is also a man who takes care of his family. He wants to speak out, but he doesn’t for fear of what will happen to his family.  His son calls him a coward, but he loves with still.

Hans faced war and death, but still he manages to be a kind and loving man. He knows what’s right and he stands up for it. He risked everything to help a Jewish storeowner that resulted in him not being accepted into the Nazi Party. He risks it all again later in the story by hiding a Jew in his basement, but he does all these things because he knew what was right.  That is why Hans Hubermann is my favorite character in The Book Thief.  

Blog #2

The relationship between Vladik and his son, Artie, is very complicated. Vladik has seen and been through so much that he seems to have a hard time living in the now. He’s so consumed with his past that he spends all his time in the present planning for the future. A Clear example of this is when he picks up the wire that is in the street. It’s trash, but he sees it as valuable because it was rare and useful during the Holocaust. He wants to be prepared in case something of that nature happens again. Artie seems so wrapped up in his father’s story that he dismisses who his father became. Maybe Artie feels that by hearing his father’s survivor story he can better understand who he is now.

Towards the middle of the novel it seemed as though Artie and his father were going to put aside some differences and become closer until Vladik revealed that he had burned his wife’s journals. As soon as Vladik told Artie that he had burnt the journal because they were too much of a reminder after his wife’s death Artie immediately called his father a murderer. I wasn’t sure why exactly he called his father a murderer because Anja committed suicide. Maybe Artie meant Vladik killed his mother’s memory. I think that by looking at this story not only from the text, but from the images allows us to see the story more completely. It’s like reading two stories at once. There’s Vladik’s story of the holocaust and then there’s the story of Artie and his father’s relationship.