Book Thief Essay

In the epilogue of The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, the story has come to an end as we learn the destiny of the book thief. Death, the narrator, says, “Liesel Meminger lived to a very old age, far away from Molching and the demise of Himmel Street. She died in a suburb of Sydney. The house number was forty-five—the same as the Fielders’ shelter—and the sky was the best blue of afternoon. Like her papa, her soul was sitting up. In her final visions, she saw her three children, her grandchildren, her husband, and the long list of lives that merged with hers. Among them, lit like lanterns, were Hans and Rosa Hubermann, her brother, and the boy whose hair remained the color of lemons forever” (397). Liesel, the “perpetual survivor” and so full of

There’s one more “loved one” left in her life; it is Max. “After the war was over and Hitler delivered himself to [Death’s] arms, Alex Steiner resumed work in his tailor shop . . . he busied himself there for a few hours a day, and Liesel often accompanied him” (400). The two of them often walk to Dachau concentration camp after its liberation to look for Max. However, the Americans now holding the camp will not let them in. Yet one day, “in October 1945, a man with swampy eyes, feathers of hair, and clean-shaven face walked into the shop” (400) and asks for Liesel. It is Max! Apparently, he survived the concentration camp and is happily reunited with Liesel. Death says they embrace and fall weeping on the ground. I find this part exasperating because I thought this is the beginning of Max and Liesel’s “love story”; however, Max’s story ends here. Max is such a loveable character, and I wanted to know about the rest of his life after the war. I wanted to know if he took Liesel with him to Australia since a lot of Jews and Germans migrated to Australia, U.S.A., and Canada after the World War II. However, Death, being the paradoxical narrator as he is, left me in confusion about whom Liesel married; and if Max was the man she married and started a family with. How I would love to think it was Max. I would like to think that Max and her fell in love and left for a new start in Australia. After all, they are all