The Secret Society of Librarians
Available in:
- eBook
- Paperback
- Audiobook
- Book info
- Sample
- Media
- Author updates
- Lists
Synopsis
The Secret Society of Librarians is a heartbreaking yet heartwarming wartime library-set novel, inspired by real people, real stories, and extensive research.
Meeting through real-life Secret Society of Librarians in London, two women form a close bond. When WW2 hits, they take their libraries underground, creating create a roaming underground library.
But when one of them is taken to Poland and a concentration camp, they think there is no chance of ever being reunited again...
This is an inspirational, true and compelling story about friendship, everyday bravery and the power of books, with a dual narrative set between London and Poland in the 1940s.
Release date: July 21, 2026
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Print pages: 480
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
Reader buzz
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
Author updates
Close
The Secret Society of Librarians
Kate Thompson
“Libertatem per Lectio” Bulletin No. 2 Occupied Poland, September 1939
Friends, I know we’re usually concerned with the movement of books, not people, but already I have a plea for help. I don’t know how much is being reported on the news in England, but Poland is in chaos.
Łódź is now occupied. It makes me ill to my stomach to write these words. Nazi flags smother our buildings. The Grand Hotel, remember, where you all stayed last summer when you came to visit on that happy, carefree holiday? It’s now the headquarters for the Nazi administration. There are thousands of Volksdeutsche on the streets, greeting the invaders with happy cries of “Heil Hitler.” They are persecuting my people. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would never believe it. Jewish leaders are forced to clean lavatories with their prayer shawls, and laughing soldiers shaved the beards off Jewish men and threw their holy books in the mud. We are in the dark ages once more.
Our library is still standing and as yet untouched, but time is running out. I received your letter about the forming of Libertatem per Lectio on the very day my city fell to the Germans.
“If people can’t get to the books, we take books to the people.” I love it. How clever you all are. When I dreamt up the Secret Society in more innocent times, I had no idea of its true potential.
Which is why I need you, friends. I need to get my younger sister, Adela, out of the country. I’ve heard that, in England, there are jobs to be had for Jewish refugees as housekeepers or nannies. Can anyone act as a guarantor for Adela? We are terrified for all our safety, but there simply isn’t the money to get us all out. It is only right the youngest leave. Please help if you can. This is her last and only chance. She has secured papers, but we need to act fast to get her out now.
As a librarian, I feel helpless to protect my patrons, but perhaps, with your help, I can do this one thing for my sister.
I’m risking my life to send this letter. The Nazis are fast encroaching on public life. Where hatred, fear and ignorance take root, censorship is never slow to grow. This might be my last letter to you all. But do not worry, SSL. It will take more than bigotry to drive me from my library.
I’ll leave you with my favorite line from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
Until we meet again.
Your friend, Dorotha.
One year later
“You want to start a mobile library…?” The chief librarian’s voice climbed to even shriller proportions. “In a city where one is never more than a Tube ride away from a library?”
Joyce girded her loins. Hildegard March, chief librarian of Camden Library, was about to blow a gasket.
“Yes, that’s right… I know it’s a little unconventional, but the library has been quiet of late. Lots of our patrons, through no fault of their own, aren’t able to reach the library. They’re all working longer hours in wartime work.
“Also,” she stumbled gamely on, “there are many housebound, elderly, and lonely people in Camden who’d value a mobile library service. So…” She blew a loose strand of hair from her eyes. “I thought, if people can’t come to the books, should we not take books to the people?”
“Out of the question!” Hildegard retorted, before the question had barely left Joyce’s lips. “We’re in London, not the rural regions. If people want a book, they can jolly well get off their bottoms and come and get it.”
Virginia Woolf whispered slyly in her ear. It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.
“But—”
“Besides, I dispute your claim we’re quieter,” Hildegard interrupted. “Every time I come out of my office, it seems another D-class reader is checking out some Mills & Boon rubbish.”
“Mills & Boon isn’t rubbish,” Joyce protested hotly. “It’s well-crafted and researched.”
“Perhaps,” Hildegard mused. “Even the most foolish book is a leaky boat on a sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.” She had an almost evangelical zeal about self-improvement. Enjoyment be damned! “However, when it comes to some of our patrons,” she prattled on, “we should be doing them a real service if we prevented them from reading at all.”
Joyce closed her eyes.
When she opened them, Hildegard was buttoning up her tweed jacket and preparing to leave for the evening, the conversation clearly over.
“You’re undone, Miss Kindred!”
“Sorry?”
“Your hair!”
Joyce touched the strand of fair hair that had fallen loose from her bun.
“Smarten yourself up. And no more fanciful ideas! You’d do well to remember your place.”
With that, she stomped across the library, calling over her shoulder, “Remember the blackout blinds before you lock up. We wouldn’t want anyone to see a light in the library, would we?”
Joyce nodded, blinking back tears and glancing down at the report she’d spent the past twelve months preparing about her idea for a mobile library, ever since she had first mooted it with the Secret Society. It was a good one. She knew it. If she was being honest with herself, she’d been a coward, sitting on the report all these months, trying to summon the bravery to share her big idea.
When the Ministry of Information had issued a circular recently to all libraries asking how they intended to rise to the challenges of war and continue and even extend their library provision, she had finally galvanized herself to take action. For all the good it had done her. Joyce sighed, feeling like a discarded dishrag.
The problem was that her “place,” as Hildegard March had reminded her, was at the bottom of the pile. Maybe she ought to face facts. She was a library assistant who still, aged twenty-one, lived with her mother in an unassuming terrace in St. Pancras and spoke to Virginia Woolf in her head. Like her literary heroine, she longed to write great novels, pioneering streams of consciousness, but frankly, the well was dry.
Joyce thought to the evening that stretched ahead. Cold meat supper at six, followed by an evening spent sitting by the fireside with her mother, listening to her stream of invective about the neighbors’ shortcomings. Frankly, Joyce couldn’t care less whether the women of her street took down their nets to wash weekly, or scrubbed their doorsteps. When had her mother become so judgemental? Her father’s death had possibly been the catalyst. No one ever talked about how Charles Kindred died, and to this day he remained an enigma, staring back blankly in an army uniform behind a glass frame.
Joyce often felt she’d sacrificed the best part of her youth to keep her mother company, listening to her daily grumble in their stultifying terraced house. She loved her job here in Camden Library but she wasn’t exactly breaking ground. There had been no romance, no grand adventures. Just dependable, reliable bookworm Joyce. With her long, mousy-brown hair always tied back in a bun, cardigans and sensible lisle stockings, she realized, somewhat depressingly, that she probably fitted every stereotyped image the general public had of a librarian.
If only she had some of Dorotha’s chutzpah. Even at library school, Dorotha had been the bravest of them all; always ready to challenge authority and question why women patrons weren’t allowed to take out more romance novels, if that’s what they desired. Dorotha fought for what she believed in. War had only sharpened her edges.
I am risking my life to send this letter.
Dorotha’s voice echoed in her ear, and Joyce felt a deep chasm of pain. Dorotha’s desperate bulletin a year ago had indeed been the last proper letter they had received from their founder. There had been two Red Cross messages in the year since then, bland news that testified to her suspicions of Nazi censorship. The humanitarian organization message service was restricted to twenty-five words, but it was better than nothing.
They had at least been able to oblige Dorotha’s last request, though, and with a flurry of meetings, Joyce had acted as a guarantor for Adela, saving her from Poland just in the nick of time. Guilt bloomed. If only she had been able to save Dorotha too.
In the nearly eleven months since Dorotha’s sister had been in England, Joyce had scarcely seen her. Adela’s new employers seemed to be keeping her very busy as a housemaid, and although Joyce had tried to regularly check in with her, there was little she could do in the face of paid employment.
It felt like there were two wars: the one raging over the Channel and their war here, at home. Blackouts and powdered eggs were irksome, yes, but they were hardly worth documenting. In contrast, the news from the Continent was terrifying. In the last three months, German troops had smashed through the Maginot Line and, one by one, Europe’s nations had fallen. Even dear sweet Jersey, land of milk and honey, was now occupied. They hadn’t heard a thing from Grace since the news broke.
But while there may have been bloodshed and horror lapping at their shores, none of it permeated the tranquil rhythm of Joyce’s beloved library.
Now, she pinned up the blackout blinds as her boss had demanded, locked the doors and left, grabbing her secret book bag as she did.
Outside, the September evening felt surprisingly soft and warm for the time of year. Friday evening and the pubs were full, patrons spilling out on the pavement, laughing and supping pints, shirtsleeves rolled up. The air smelt of beer and coal smoke. A group of red-lipped Wrens and tall, blond RAF aircrew in blue laughed outrageously at a joke, clearly tight.
Joyce felt a pang of loneliness. She missed her friends in the Secret Society desperately. The bulletins were all well and good, but it wasn’t the same as their gin-fueled weekends.
Arriving at 35 Harrington Square, Joyce knocked. Mitsy Bouvoir answered, dressed in a lilac silk marabou-trimmed robe, clutching her white Bichon Frisé dog. She was a little bird of a woman, and Joyce had never seen her without her red lipstick, which always bled a little into the lines around her mouth. Her wispy white hair was whipped up high on her head like a trifle.
“Do you have them, darling?” she asked breathlessly.
“Fear not, Mrs. Bouvoir. Right here.”
“Oh wonderful.” The elderly lady closed her eyes in relief. “You’ll come and have a sherry, won’t you?”
Joyce followed Mitsy up a dimly lit passage into what was once a grand dining room. Despite making deliveries to her house for several years, now, she had never made it further than the doorstep, and she was intrigued to see what lay beyond. She suspected Mitsy was a stage name she’d never quite been able to let go of. Mitsy never tired of telling Joyce about her previous career as a silent-movie star.
Looking round the room, Joyce’s eyes lingered on a black-and-white photo of a young Mitsy in front of the pyramids in Egypt, her arms wrapped around a beautiful man.
“My husband, Cedric Bouvoir,” she said, catching Joyce’s gaze and pouring her a generous measure of sherry. “Wasn’t he divine?”
“I should say,” Joyce replied, tearing her eyes away from the photo. “How long were you married?”
“Fifty good years. Then two bad,” Mitsy sighed, lowering herself down into an armchair so big it seemed to swallow her. “Cancer is a savage brute.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. We lived and loved enough for five lifetimes.”
Joyce spied a bed in the corner behind a Chinese silk screen. “Why do you sleep in here, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“My legs, darling. I once climbed the Pyrenees. Now I can’t even climb my stairs.”
Joyce tilted her head.
“Don’t you dare feel sorry for me,” Mitsy scolded. “My life may be reduced to this room, but I have Missy Dog and my books—thanks to you, anyway.”
Joyce took a sip of her sherry and smiled. “You have a book, you have a friend.”
Mitsy pushed her library card across the coffee table, and Joyce realized this was her signal to go.
“I’ll make sure this gets stamped,” she promised, making a mental note to get in before Hildegard tomorrow.
“Be a dear and fetch my reading glasses, would you? I think I’ll start with The Serpent in the Garden. Romance and mystery on the French Riviera. How’s a girl to say no?”
“How indeed?” Joyce smiled. She fetched her glasses and a soft rug, which she placed around Mitsy’s shoulders.
“Dear girl, you’re an unofficial traveling library. Why don’t you set up an actual mobile library? I can’t tell you what a tonic your visit’s been. Apart from you, the milkman’s the only other person I see.”
“Great minds, Mrs. Bouvoir. I did suggest that very idea to my superior earlier. In fact, it’s something I’ve been trying to get off the ground for a year, now.”
“Hildegard March?”
Joyce nodded. “Yes. She wasn’t as enthusiastic as I’d hoped.”
“Hildegard March is a toffee-nose twit with the imagination of a Brussel sprout.”
Joyce burst out laughing.
“I’m serious. Don’t let her bury your dreams. Start your traveling library.” Her eyes, the pale blue-green of sea glass, shone in the gloom. “See where it takes you.”
Arriving home to Unwin Terrace, Joyce mentally steeled herself for a cold meat supper for one. But as she walked up to the front door, she realized a figure sat hunched over on the doorstep.
“Hallo…” she said cautiously. “Can I help you?” As she got closer, though, she recognized the figure and breathed a sigh of relief. “Oh, Adela, it’s you. I didn’t know you had the weekend off. What a super surprise—”
“I can’t go back,” the young woman interrupted, bursting into tears.
Joyce was taken aback. “Hey, hey,” she soothed, putting down the gas mask all civilians were forced to carry now, and immediately wrapping the seventeen-year-old in her arms. “Whatever’s wrong?”
“Th-the Barclay-Millers are evacuating to Oxfordshire,” she stammered. “They expect me to go with them, but I can’t. What about when Dorotha and my parents manage to get out of Poland and come to find me? If I move, they won’t know how. You can’t make me go back. You can’t.”
Joyce felt a trapdoor open in her tummy. In the extremely unlikely event Adela’s family did make it out of Poland, of course they’d be able to find her, Joyce would make sure of that, but this wasn’t the time or place to have that conversation. The girl was plainly terrified. As Joyce’s eyes adjusted to the darkened doorstep, she was alarmed to see how much weight Adela had lost. When she’d met her at the station last year, she’d had soft round curves and cheeks like apples. Now she looked gaunt, and far older than her seventeen years.
“No,” she soothed. “No one is sending you back. I’ll write to them and say you’re not feeling well and are staying with me to convalesce.” Joyce got the distinct feeling she wasn’t in possession of the full story here, but now was not the time to question her further. Something was plainly troubling her, and Joyce had made a promise to Dorotha to look out for her younger sister, so look out for her she would.
“What will happen when the Barclay-Millers report me missing?” Adela wept. “Will I get sent back to Poland?”
“No, no, we’ll work it out,” Joyce reassured again, without a real answer as to what the solution was.
More tears spilled like ink from Adela’s pale blue eyes. “I’m in big trouble.”
Joyce squeezed her shoulders, trying to ground the girl. “You’re perfectly safe. I assure you.” Gently, she brushed back Adela’s dark hair. “Just breathe, deep into your diaphragm.”
Adela gulped in juddering breaths and slowly her body stilled.
“That’s better,” Joyce soothed.
“Could I work for you and your mother as a housemaid?” she asked.
“I’m sorry, my love, but we can’t afford to pay you a wage. But I’ll talk to my mother and see whether you can stay with us until you’ve found a new job.”
“But the war will be over soon, won’t it? Nothing seems to be happening, and I can return home to Łódź to Mama, Tatuś, my bubbe, and Dorotha?”
Clearly, none of Churchill’s speeches or the daily newspapers had made their way below stairs at the Barclay-Millers’, but who was she to crush a young refugee’s hopes?
“I very much hope so, my love. Now come on. Let’s get you off this doorstep.”
As Joyce fumbled with her key in the lock and a dim hall light faintly illuminated the porch, she was stunned at the change in the girl now she could see her more clearly. When Adela had arrived the previous October, Joyce had traveled to Liverpool Street Station to meet her train, fully expecting a deluge of tears. It had been a long journey from Poland involving multiple trains and a ferry from the Hook of Holland to Harwich. But Adela had clearly bonded with the other girls on her transport, also fleeing their homes. She had appeared calm and self-contained, hugging the girls as they were all dispatched to various families by an officious lady with a clipboard. At the time it had reassured Joyce. Perhaps Adela needed less looking after than Dorotha had originally suggested?
Although Joyce had hoped to take Adela to a Lyons Corner House for cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off and tea and scones, before she’d had the chance, the Barclay-Millers’ housekeeper had arrived and whisked her off into the waiting chauffeur-driven car. And so—apart from a few brief meet-ups in Hyde Park on Sunday afternoons—Adela had been a stranger to her.
Inside the hallway, Joyce was relieved to see her mother had already retired to bed, so Joyce was able to usher Adela into the “good room.” Joyce could never fathom why the front parlor was saved for best, like Christmas Day or the arrival of special guests from the whist club. Her mother only allowed her to set foot in it to plump the cushions and dust the aspidistra plant.
In a rare moment of bravery, she pulled the dust sheet off the sofa.
“You can sleep here this evening, and we’ll figure something out tomorrow.”
In the kitchen, Joyce found a piece of Spam and some limp lettuce leaves sweating under a tea towel and found her appetite had deserted her. Instead, she fixed them both a cup of warm, frothy cocoa and a cheese sandwich for Adela and set it down in front of her.
“Sorry, cheese is a bit stale, but hopefully it’ll fill a gap.”
Adela was clearly ravenous and tucked in with gusto. Joyce said nothing as she ate. When Adela had hoovered up every last crumb, she picked up her cocoa and studied Joyce.
“You know, I often wonder how you and my sister are friends,” she remarked. “You are very different. How do you say, chalks and cheeses?”
Joyce laughed and sipped from the milky drink. “We are. Very different,” she admitted. “Dorotha’s as loquacious as I am introverted. Do you know, when I first met your sister, I was hiding in a broom cupboard?”
Adela laughed, choking a little on her cocoa. “Why?”
“We met at the London School of Economics in 1936. We were attending a summer school for young trainees to prepare us for our library entrance exams. It struck me as a terribly brave thing to do to travel all the way from Poland.”
“It was always her dream to study in England,” Adela replied, unsurprised by her sister’s bravery: clearly it was something unquestionable in her character.
“Anyway, it was a lunchtime, and I’d been ushered out of the university library by a caretaker, and so I took refuge in a broom cupboard. I wanted to read in peace, you see.”
Joyce laughed, remembering Dorotha’s bright gray eyes observing her shrewdly as she opened the cupboard door and found her perched on an upturned bucket.
“She gave me her copy of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and told me I ought to find my own ideas and room.” She tapped her head. “If only up here.” Joyce smiled and cradled her warm cup. “From that moment on, I fell in love with Virginia, and with your sister. She was the most dynamic, impressive woman I’d ever met. Your sister saw something in me. She made me feel…” Joyce kicked off her shoes and curled her stockinged feet up under her. “Understood. It was her idea to form the Secret Society of Librarians, you know.”
“A secret society?” Adela gasped, leaning forward.
“Ha. It makes us sound terribly cloak and dagger. Originally, we formed the group with other women in the summer school to lend support and feel connected to like-minded souls. It wasn’t strictly speaking ‘secret’; we just liked the camaraderie it gave us. But now the war is upon us, we all feel we have so much more to offer, and it feels like it’s really starting to come into its own.” Joyce mused on that. “Words and friendships are powerful weapons, you know. Have you stayed in touch with the girls you traveled with?”
Adela shook her head. “I haven’t had the time. The Barclay-Millers’ housekeeper has kept me busy.”
“What did your duties involve?” Joyce asked, curiosity getting the better of her.
Adela blew out, sending little ripples across the surface of her cocoa. “Oy vey, that house had a lot of rooms. Then there was the stove to blacklead, all the grates to be cleaned out, making beds, vacuuming and emptying chamber pots, scrubbing the front steps, and assisting cook with peeling vegetables…” She broke off and yawned. “But scrubbing mainly.”
“That’s a lot of work for one day.”
“One day? That was just before ten a.m.”
Joyce swallowed down her anger. “How many days off have you had?”
“We get one Sunday afternoon a month off.”
It had been easy for Joyce to find Adela the job with the Barclay-Millers, and now it was obvious to her why that was: clearly, they had seen taking in a refugee as an opportunity for cheap labor. Joyce had heard of a similar thing happening to evacuees. She despaired of humankind at times. What kind of a person would turn the war to their advantage? It wasn’t just the spivs and black-market racketeers who’d come crawling out of the woodwork since the war began. It was the Barclay-Millers of the world too, using their titles and privileges to take advantage of a young and vulnerable refugee. No wonder the poor girl was so thin.
“Can I ask you something, Miss Kindred?”
“Please, Adela, call me Joyce.”
“What’s a ghetto?”
The unexpected question breezed into the warm, snug room like a sour smell, throwing Joyce. She set down her cup carefully. “I think, and don’t quote me on this, the word originated from the Venetian dialect in the sixteenth century, when the senate restricted Jews to one area in the city. My understanding is that it’s a walled-off area, forcing Jewish people to live in one place.”
“Like a prison you mean?”
Joyce shook her head. “I really don’t know enough to say. Why do you ask?”
“I overheard Mr. Barclay-Miller in his study last week whilst I was dusting outside. He was talking to someone and said he’d seen intelligence reports from Poland that the Nazis are forcing Jews into ghettos. He was talking about my home city, Łódź. I know I shouldn’t have, but I stayed to listen to the whole conversation. He said that the Germans had made it part of the Reich, called it Litzmannstadt, and that they had made a ghetto for the Jews in the northeastern part of the city.” Adela’s voice was high and shaky, her eyes burning with intensity.
Joyce shifted uneasily. Adela was clearly far better informed than she had given her credit.
“When did you last hear from Dorotha?” Joyce asked, trying to keep the fear out of her voice.
“About five months ago. A Red Cross message saying that she and the family were fine, but she missed me.”
“April?”
Adela nodded. “That’s right. And you?”
“The same,” she admitted, a feeling of unease curling through her. “Just because we haven’t heard from her in five months doesn’t mean she’s in some sort of ghetto.” The word dragged like barbed wire in her mouth.
“So where is my sister, then, Miss Kindred?” Adela pressed, her small chin jutting out. “And why have we not heard from her?”
Joyce stared at the empty plate and realized she didn’t have the faintest clue how to respond.
“Libertatem per Lectio” Bulletin No. 85
Friends,
Since the Nazis sealed the gates on 30 April 1940, the mortality rate in the Łódź ghetto has been horrifying. More than 13,000 people have died in the first seven months of 1942. Disease is rampant. I have seen people drop dead in the street in front of me, to be iced over in winter or settled upon by swarms of blowflies in the summer. I can’t find words to describe our suffering. Cold, hard numbers provide a more eloquent testimony to our plight than words ever could. By some “luck,” if one can call it such a thing, I am working in the administration block, which means occasionally I have access to the lists. I observe. I document. The Nazis have forced me from my library into a cage, but I am still a librarian. Freedom through reading.
Yours, Dorotha.
On her walk home from work, Dorotha looked up and down the huddle of mean streets. At the jumble of old wooden shanty houses that leaned inward like old drunks propping each other up. At the children of the Scheisskommando, their filthy, sticky feet wrapped in tattered shreds, straining to push a giant wooden cart filled with human excrement. Even one of her favorite authors, Charles Dickens, couldn’t have dreamt up the depravity of the Łódź ghetto.
As she drew closer, the sharp, acrid stench of the contents of the cart prickled in her nostrils and, for a moment, she thought she might faint. She stopped and sucked in a stale breath. The children drew level, their bodies so frail and withered they barely cast a shadow on the street. But it was their eyes, dull and vacant, that hollowed Dorotha out. It was a fact that—in such a position—most of them would soon be dead from disease.
Dorotha wanted to weep and rage at the sight of those children, but she didn’t even have the strength to cry. Instead, she turned and trudged toward her room on Brzezińska. She crossed over the footbridge, passing over the “Aryan” Limanowskiego Street, the street that carried non-Jewish traffic, pausing at the top as a tram rattled beneath her and stopped. Below her, a young couple disembarked onto the “Aryan” street beneath the footbridge, spilling out into the evening sunshine, well-fed and well-dressed. They looked like creatures from another world as they paused to embrace. Did they not see the barbed wire that separated their world from hers? Were they blind to the suffering of the people on the other side? The couple pulled apart and, as if drawn by a magnet, the woman’s eyes traveled up and met Dorotha’s.
Realization shivered through Dorotha. She knew the woman! It was Magda Nowak. Once upon a time—in what felt like a different lifetime—Magda had been one of Dorotha’s most avid patrons in the library, visiting weekly with eager smiles and book requests. Magda had had a penchant for medieval romance, which she concealed beneath more serious literary classics, hidden from view to keep her mother happy.
Now, Dorotha raised her arm in recognition to her former library patron. The woman’s face fell, etched with surprise and then something else. Shame, regret? She clutched her sweetheart’s arm and whispered something in his ear before they both strode quickly away from the ghetto, back to “their” side of the city. No, Dorotha thought bitterly, revulsion.
Dorotha had once kept Magda’s secrets, laughed with her over the stacks and recommended books to her. How had her brain been so polluted that Magda, like so many other fellow Poles, seemed to be happy their side of the city was judenfrei, free of Jews?
Dorotha wondered what it would feel like to jump from this spot, at the top of the footbridge, like so many hundreds had done over the past two years. Scoured with pain, hunger, and a desperate wish for an end to this suffering, she gripped the wooden handrail and looked down at the tram tracks twenty-five feet below.
But then she heard it. Joyce’s voice, rattling in her brain. Come on, old girl, what’s all this? What would Virginia say?
Dorotha blinked, the dust from the tracks shimmering in a heat haze. “The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages,” she murmured, finding comfort in their favorite author’s words. She pulled herself back from the edge and carried on her way, repeating her mantra with every slap of her old clogs on the pavement. Survive. I must survive.
Back at the slum tenement block they called “home,” Dorotha trudged up the dark concrete stairwell and opened the door to their room on the third floor, pausing to nail on a smile for the sake of her parents. “Mama. Tatuś. Look what I managed to get…”
She pulled a cabbage from her bag. In peacetime, she wouldn’t have paid a single złoty for this, but in the ghetto, it was a precious gift. A plague of caterpillars had recently eaten what little food supply they had. “We can put this into tonight’s soup…” Her words trailed off as she saw her mother’s face.
“Dorotha. We have two new house guests,” announced her mother.
A young woman stumbled forward, her pale face drenched in sweat. An older woman was seated on the couch
Friends, I know we’re usually concerned with the movement of books, not people, but already I have a plea for help. I don’t know how much is being reported on the news in England, but Poland is in chaos.
Łódź is now occupied. It makes me ill to my stomach to write these words. Nazi flags smother our buildings. The Grand Hotel, remember, where you all stayed last summer when you came to visit on that happy, carefree holiday? It’s now the headquarters for the Nazi administration. There are thousands of Volksdeutsche on the streets, greeting the invaders with happy cries of “Heil Hitler.” They are persecuting my people. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would never believe it. Jewish leaders are forced to clean lavatories with their prayer shawls, and laughing soldiers shaved the beards off Jewish men and threw their holy books in the mud. We are in the dark ages once more.
Our library is still standing and as yet untouched, but time is running out. I received your letter about the forming of Libertatem per Lectio on the very day my city fell to the Germans.
“If people can’t get to the books, we take books to the people.” I love it. How clever you all are. When I dreamt up the Secret Society in more innocent times, I had no idea of its true potential.
Which is why I need you, friends. I need to get my younger sister, Adela, out of the country. I’ve heard that, in England, there are jobs to be had for Jewish refugees as housekeepers or nannies. Can anyone act as a guarantor for Adela? We are terrified for all our safety, but there simply isn’t the money to get us all out. It is only right the youngest leave. Please help if you can. This is her last and only chance. She has secured papers, but we need to act fast to get her out now.
As a librarian, I feel helpless to protect my patrons, but perhaps, with your help, I can do this one thing for my sister.
I’m risking my life to send this letter. The Nazis are fast encroaching on public life. Where hatred, fear and ignorance take root, censorship is never slow to grow. This might be my last letter to you all. But do not worry, SSL. It will take more than bigotry to drive me from my library.
I’ll leave you with my favorite line from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
Until we meet again.
Your friend, Dorotha.
One year later
“You want to start a mobile library…?” The chief librarian’s voice climbed to even shriller proportions. “In a city where one is never more than a Tube ride away from a library?”
Joyce girded her loins. Hildegard March, chief librarian of Camden Library, was about to blow a gasket.
“Yes, that’s right… I know it’s a little unconventional, but the library has been quiet of late. Lots of our patrons, through no fault of their own, aren’t able to reach the library. They’re all working longer hours in wartime work.
“Also,” she stumbled gamely on, “there are many housebound, elderly, and lonely people in Camden who’d value a mobile library service. So…” She blew a loose strand of hair from her eyes. “I thought, if people can’t come to the books, should we not take books to the people?”
“Out of the question!” Hildegard retorted, before the question had barely left Joyce’s lips. “We’re in London, not the rural regions. If people want a book, they can jolly well get off their bottoms and come and get it.”
Virginia Woolf whispered slyly in her ear. It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.
“But—”
“Besides, I dispute your claim we’re quieter,” Hildegard interrupted. “Every time I come out of my office, it seems another D-class reader is checking out some Mills & Boon rubbish.”
“Mills & Boon isn’t rubbish,” Joyce protested hotly. “It’s well-crafted and researched.”
“Perhaps,” Hildegard mused. “Even the most foolish book is a leaky boat on a sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.” She had an almost evangelical zeal about self-improvement. Enjoyment be damned! “However, when it comes to some of our patrons,” she prattled on, “we should be doing them a real service if we prevented them from reading at all.”
Joyce closed her eyes.
When she opened them, Hildegard was buttoning up her tweed jacket and preparing to leave for the evening, the conversation clearly over.
“You’re undone, Miss Kindred!”
“Sorry?”
“Your hair!”
Joyce touched the strand of fair hair that had fallen loose from her bun.
“Smarten yourself up. And no more fanciful ideas! You’d do well to remember your place.”
With that, she stomped across the library, calling over her shoulder, “Remember the blackout blinds before you lock up. We wouldn’t want anyone to see a light in the library, would we?”
Joyce nodded, blinking back tears and glancing down at the report she’d spent the past twelve months preparing about her idea for a mobile library, ever since she had first mooted it with the Secret Society. It was a good one. She knew it. If she was being honest with herself, she’d been a coward, sitting on the report all these months, trying to summon the bravery to share her big idea.
When the Ministry of Information had issued a circular recently to all libraries asking how they intended to rise to the challenges of war and continue and even extend their library provision, she had finally galvanized herself to take action. For all the good it had done her. Joyce sighed, feeling like a discarded dishrag.
The problem was that her “place,” as Hildegard March had reminded her, was at the bottom of the pile. Maybe she ought to face facts. She was a library assistant who still, aged twenty-one, lived with her mother in an unassuming terrace in St. Pancras and spoke to Virginia Woolf in her head. Like her literary heroine, she longed to write great novels, pioneering streams of consciousness, but frankly, the well was dry.
Joyce thought to the evening that stretched ahead. Cold meat supper at six, followed by an evening spent sitting by the fireside with her mother, listening to her stream of invective about the neighbors’ shortcomings. Frankly, Joyce couldn’t care less whether the women of her street took down their nets to wash weekly, or scrubbed their doorsteps. When had her mother become so judgemental? Her father’s death had possibly been the catalyst. No one ever talked about how Charles Kindred died, and to this day he remained an enigma, staring back blankly in an army uniform behind a glass frame.
Joyce often felt she’d sacrificed the best part of her youth to keep her mother company, listening to her daily grumble in their stultifying terraced house. She loved her job here in Camden Library but she wasn’t exactly breaking ground. There had been no romance, no grand adventures. Just dependable, reliable bookworm Joyce. With her long, mousy-brown hair always tied back in a bun, cardigans and sensible lisle stockings, she realized, somewhat depressingly, that she probably fitted every stereotyped image the general public had of a librarian.
If only she had some of Dorotha’s chutzpah. Even at library school, Dorotha had been the bravest of them all; always ready to challenge authority and question why women patrons weren’t allowed to take out more romance novels, if that’s what they desired. Dorotha fought for what she believed in. War had only sharpened her edges.
I am risking my life to send this letter.
Dorotha’s voice echoed in her ear, and Joyce felt a deep chasm of pain. Dorotha’s desperate bulletin a year ago had indeed been the last proper letter they had received from their founder. There had been two Red Cross messages in the year since then, bland news that testified to her suspicions of Nazi censorship. The humanitarian organization message service was restricted to twenty-five words, but it was better than nothing.
They had at least been able to oblige Dorotha’s last request, though, and with a flurry of meetings, Joyce had acted as a guarantor for Adela, saving her from Poland just in the nick of time. Guilt bloomed. If only she had been able to save Dorotha too.
In the nearly eleven months since Dorotha’s sister had been in England, Joyce had scarcely seen her. Adela’s new employers seemed to be keeping her very busy as a housemaid, and although Joyce had tried to regularly check in with her, there was little she could do in the face of paid employment.
It felt like there were two wars: the one raging over the Channel and their war here, at home. Blackouts and powdered eggs were irksome, yes, but they were hardly worth documenting. In contrast, the news from the Continent was terrifying. In the last three months, German troops had smashed through the Maginot Line and, one by one, Europe’s nations had fallen. Even dear sweet Jersey, land of milk and honey, was now occupied. They hadn’t heard a thing from Grace since the news broke.
But while there may have been bloodshed and horror lapping at their shores, none of it permeated the tranquil rhythm of Joyce’s beloved library.
Now, she pinned up the blackout blinds as her boss had demanded, locked the doors and left, grabbing her secret book bag as she did.
Outside, the September evening felt surprisingly soft and warm for the time of year. Friday evening and the pubs were full, patrons spilling out on the pavement, laughing and supping pints, shirtsleeves rolled up. The air smelt of beer and coal smoke. A group of red-lipped Wrens and tall, blond RAF aircrew in blue laughed outrageously at a joke, clearly tight.
Joyce felt a pang of loneliness. She missed her friends in the Secret Society desperately. The bulletins were all well and good, but it wasn’t the same as their gin-fueled weekends.
Arriving at 35 Harrington Square, Joyce knocked. Mitsy Bouvoir answered, dressed in a lilac silk marabou-trimmed robe, clutching her white Bichon Frisé dog. She was a little bird of a woman, and Joyce had never seen her without her red lipstick, which always bled a little into the lines around her mouth. Her wispy white hair was whipped up high on her head like a trifle.
“Do you have them, darling?” she asked breathlessly.
“Fear not, Mrs. Bouvoir. Right here.”
“Oh wonderful.” The elderly lady closed her eyes in relief. “You’ll come and have a sherry, won’t you?”
Joyce followed Mitsy up a dimly lit passage into what was once a grand dining room. Despite making deliveries to her house for several years, now, she had never made it further than the doorstep, and she was intrigued to see what lay beyond. She suspected Mitsy was a stage name she’d never quite been able to let go of. Mitsy never tired of telling Joyce about her previous career as a silent-movie star.
Looking round the room, Joyce’s eyes lingered on a black-and-white photo of a young Mitsy in front of the pyramids in Egypt, her arms wrapped around a beautiful man.
“My husband, Cedric Bouvoir,” she said, catching Joyce’s gaze and pouring her a generous measure of sherry. “Wasn’t he divine?”
“I should say,” Joyce replied, tearing her eyes away from the photo. “How long were you married?”
“Fifty good years. Then two bad,” Mitsy sighed, lowering herself down into an armchair so big it seemed to swallow her. “Cancer is a savage brute.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. We lived and loved enough for five lifetimes.”
Joyce spied a bed in the corner behind a Chinese silk screen. “Why do you sleep in here, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“My legs, darling. I once climbed the Pyrenees. Now I can’t even climb my stairs.”
Joyce tilted her head.
“Don’t you dare feel sorry for me,” Mitsy scolded. “My life may be reduced to this room, but I have Missy Dog and my books—thanks to you, anyway.”
Joyce took a sip of her sherry and smiled. “You have a book, you have a friend.”
Mitsy pushed her library card across the coffee table, and Joyce realized this was her signal to go.
“I’ll make sure this gets stamped,” she promised, making a mental note to get in before Hildegard tomorrow.
“Be a dear and fetch my reading glasses, would you? I think I’ll start with The Serpent in the Garden. Romance and mystery on the French Riviera. How’s a girl to say no?”
“How indeed?” Joyce smiled. She fetched her glasses and a soft rug, which she placed around Mitsy’s shoulders.
“Dear girl, you’re an unofficial traveling library. Why don’t you set up an actual mobile library? I can’t tell you what a tonic your visit’s been. Apart from you, the milkman’s the only other person I see.”
“Great minds, Mrs. Bouvoir. I did suggest that very idea to my superior earlier. In fact, it’s something I’ve been trying to get off the ground for a year, now.”
“Hildegard March?”
Joyce nodded. “Yes. She wasn’t as enthusiastic as I’d hoped.”
“Hildegard March is a toffee-nose twit with the imagination of a Brussel sprout.”
Joyce burst out laughing.
“I’m serious. Don’t let her bury your dreams. Start your traveling library.” Her eyes, the pale blue-green of sea glass, shone in the gloom. “See where it takes you.”
Arriving home to Unwin Terrace, Joyce mentally steeled herself for a cold meat supper for one. But as she walked up to the front door, she realized a figure sat hunched over on the doorstep.
“Hallo…” she said cautiously. “Can I help you?” As she got closer, though, she recognized the figure and breathed a sigh of relief. “Oh, Adela, it’s you. I didn’t know you had the weekend off. What a super surprise—”
“I can’t go back,” the young woman interrupted, bursting into tears.
Joyce was taken aback. “Hey, hey,” she soothed, putting down the gas mask all civilians were forced to carry now, and immediately wrapping the seventeen-year-old in her arms. “Whatever’s wrong?”
“Th-the Barclay-Millers are evacuating to Oxfordshire,” she stammered. “They expect me to go with them, but I can’t. What about when Dorotha and my parents manage to get out of Poland and come to find me? If I move, they won’t know how. You can’t make me go back. You can’t.”
Joyce felt a trapdoor open in her tummy. In the extremely unlikely event Adela’s family did make it out of Poland, of course they’d be able to find her, Joyce would make sure of that, but this wasn’t the time or place to have that conversation. The girl was plainly terrified. As Joyce’s eyes adjusted to the darkened doorstep, she was alarmed to see how much weight Adela had lost. When she’d met her at the station last year, she’d had soft round curves and cheeks like apples. Now she looked gaunt, and far older than her seventeen years.
“No,” she soothed. “No one is sending you back. I’ll write to them and say you’re not feeling well and are staying with me to convalesce.” Joyce got the distinct feeling she wasn’t in possession of the full story here, but now was not the time to question her further. Something was plainly troubling her, and Joyce had made a promise to Dorotha to look out for her younger sister, so look out for her she would.
“What will happen when the Barclay-Millers report me missing?” Adela wept. “Will I get sent back to Poland?”
“No, no, we’ll work it out,” Joyce reassured again, without a real answer as to what the solution was.
More tears spilled like ink from Adela’s pale blue eyes. “I’m in big trouble.”
Joyce squeezed her shoulders, trying to ground the girl. “You’re perfectly safe. I assure you.” Gently, she brushed back Adela’s dark hair. “Just breathe, deep into your diaphragm.”
Adela gulped in juddering breaths and slowly her body stilled.
“That’s better,” Joyce soothed.
“Could I work for you and your mother as a housemaid?” she asked.
“I’m sorry, my love, but we can’t afford to pay you a wage. But I’ll talk to my mother and see whether you can stay with us until you’ve found a new job.”
“But the war will be over soon, won’t it? Nothing seems to be happening, and I can return home to Łódź to Mama, Tatuś, my bubbe, and Dorotha?”
Clearly, none of Churchill’s speeches or the daily newspapers had made their way below stairs at the Barclay-Millers’, but who was she to crush a young refugee’s hopes?
“I very much hope so, my love. Now come on. Let’s get you off this doorstep.”
As Joyce fumbled with her key in the lock and a dim hall light faintly illuminated the porch, she was stunned at the change in the girl now she could see her more clearly. When Adela had arrived the previous October, Joyce had traveled to Liverpool Street Station to meet her train, fully expecting a deluge of tears. It had been a long journey from Poland involving multiple trains and a ferry from the Hook of Holland to Harwich. But Adela had clearly bonded with the other girls on her transport, also fleeing their homes. She had appeared calm and self-contained, hugging the girls as they were all dispatched to various families by an officious lady with a clipboard. At the time it had reassured Joyce. Perhaps Adela needed less looking after than Dorotha had originally suggested?
Although Joyce had hoped to take Adela to a Lyons Corner House for cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off and tea and scones, before she’d had the chance, the Barclay-Millers’ housekeeper had arrived and whisked her off into the waiting chauffeur-driven car. And so—apart from a few brief meet-ups in Hyde Park on Sunday afternoons—Adela had been a stranger to her.
Inside the hallway, Joyce was relieved to see her mother had already retired to bed, so Joyce was able to usher Adela into the “good room.” Joyce could never fathom why the front parlor was saved for best, like Christmas Day or the arrival of special guests from the whist club. Her mother only allowed her to set foot in it to plump the cushions and dust the aspidistra plant.
In a rare moment of bravery, she pulled the dust sheet off the sofa.
“You can sleep here this evening, and we’ll figure something out tomorrow.”
In the kitchen, Joyce found a piece of Spam and some limp lettuce leaves sweating under a tea towel and found her appetite had deserted her. Instead, she fixed them both a cup of warm, frothy cocoa and a cheese sandwich for Adela and set it down in front of her.
“Sorry, cheese is a bit stale, but hopefully it’ll fill a gap.”
Adela was clearly ravenous and tucked in with gusto. Joyce said nothing as she ate. When Adela had hoovered up every last crumb, she picked up her cocoa and studied Joyce.
“You know, I often wonder how you and my sister are friends,” she remarked. “You are very different. How do you say, chalks and cheeses?”
Joyce laughed and sipped from the milky drink. “We are. Very different,” she admitted. “Dorotha’s as loquacious as I am introverted. Do you know, when I first met your sister, I was hiding in a broom cupboard?”
Adela laughed, choking a little on her cocoa. “Why?”
“We met at the London School of Economics in 1936. We were attending a summer school for young trainees to prepare us for our library entrance exams. It struck me as a terribly brave thing to do to travel all the way from Poland.”
“It was always her dream to study in England,” Adela replied, unsurprised by her sister’s bravery: clearly it was something unquestionable in her character.
“Anyway, it was a lunchtime, and I’d been ushered out of the university library by a caretaker, and so I took refuge in a broom cupboard. I wanted to read in peace, you see.”
Joyce laughed, remembering Dorotha’s bright gray eyes observing her shrewdly as she opened the cupboard door and found her perched on an upturned bucket.
“She gave me her copy of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and told me I ought to find my own ideas and room.” She tapped her head. “If only up here.” Joyce smiled and cradled her warm cup. “From that moment on, I fell in love with Virginia, and with your sister. She was the most dynamic, impressive woman I’d ever met. Your sister saw something in me. She made me feel…” Joyce kicked off her shoes and curled her stockinged feet up under her. “Understood. It was her idea to form the Secret Society of Librarians, you know.”
“A secret society?” Adela gasped, leaning forward.
“Ha. It makes us sound terribly cloak and dagger. Originally, we formed the group with other women in the summer school to lend support and feel connected to like-minded souls. It wasn’t strictly speaking ‘secret’; we just liked the camaraderie it gave us. But now the war is upon us, we all feel we have so much more to offer, and it feels like it’s really starting to come into its own.” Joyce mused on that. “Words and friendships are powerful weapons, you know. Have you stayed in touch with the girls you traveled with?”
Adela shook her head. “I haven’t had the time. The Barclay-Millers’ housekeeper has kept me busy.”
“What did your duties involve?” Joyce asked, curiosity getting the better of her.
Adela blew out, sending little ripples across the surface of her cocoa. “Oy vey, that house had a lot of rooms. Then there was the stove to blacklead, all the grates to be cleaned out, making beds, vacuuming and emptying chamber pots, scrubbing the front steps, and assisting cook with peeling vegetables…” She broke off and yawned. “But scrubbing mainly.”
“That’s a lot of work for one day.”
“One day? That was just before ten a.m.”
Joyce swallowed down her anger. “How many days off have you had?”
“We get one Sunday afternoon a month off.”
It had been easy for Joyce to find Adela the job with the Barclay-Millers, and now it was obvious to her why that was: clearly, they had seen taking in a refugee as an opportunity for cheap labor. Joyce had heard of a similar thing happening to evacuees. She despaired of humankind at times. What kind of a person would turn the war to their advantage? It wasn’t just the spivs and black-market racketeers who’d come crawling out of the woodwork since the war began. It was the Barclay-Millers of the world too, using their titles and privileges to take advantage of a young and vulnerable refugee. No wonder the poor girl was so thin.
“Can I ask you something, Miss Kindred?”
“Please, Adela, call me Joyce.”
“What’s a ghetto?”
The unexpected question breezed into the warm, snug room like a sour smell, throwing Joyce. She set down her cup carefully. “I think, and don’t quote me on this, the word originated from the Venetian dialect in the sixteenth century, when the senate restricted Jews to one area in the city. My understanding is that it’s a walled-off area, forcing Jewish people to live in one place.”
“Like a prison you mean?”
Joyce shook her head. “I really don’t know enough to say. Why do you ask?”
“I overheard Mr. Barclay-Miller in his study last week whilst I was dusting outside. He was talking to someone and said he’d seen intelligence reports from Poland that the Nazis are forcing Jews into ghettos. He was talking about my home city, Łódź. I know I shouldn’t have, but I stayed to listen to the whole conversation. He said that the Germans had made it part of the Reich, called it Litzmannstadt, and that they had made a ghetto for the Jews in the northeastern part of the city.” Adela’s voice was high and shaky, her eyes burning with intensity.
Joyce shifted uneasily. Adela was clearly far better informed than she had given her credit.
“When did you last hear from Dorotha?” Joyce asked, trying to keep the fear out of her voice.
“About five months ago. A Red Cross message saying that she and the family were fine, but she missed me.”
“April?”
Adela nodded. “That’s right. And you?”
“The same,” she admitted, a feeling of unease curling through her. “Just because we haven’t heard from her in five months doesn’t mean she’s in some sort of ghetto.” The word dragged like barbed wire in her mouth.
“So where is my sister, then, Miss Kindred?” Adela pressed, her small chin jutting out. “And why have we not heard from her?”
Joyce stared at the empty plate and realized she didn’t have the faintest clue how to respond.
“Libertatem per Lectio” Bulletin No. 85
Friends,
Since the Nazis sealed the gates on 30 April 1940, the mortality rate in the Łódź ghetto has been horrifying. More than 13,000 people have died in the first seven months of 1942. Disease is rampant. I have seen people drop dead in the street in front of me, to be iced over in winter or settled upon by swarms of blowflies in the summer. I can’t find words to describe our suffering. Cold, hard numbers provide a more eloquent testimony to our plight than words ever could. By some “luck,” if one can call it such a thing, I am working in the administration block, which means occasionally I have access to the lists. I observe. I document. The Nazis have forced me from my library into a cage, but I am still a librarian. Freedom through reading.
Yours, Dorotha.
On her walk home from work, Dorotha looked up and down the huddle of mean streets. At the jumble of old wooden shanty houses that leaned inward like old drunks propping each other up. At the children of the Scheisskommando, their filthy, sticky feet wrapped in tattered shreds, straining to push a giant wooden cart filled with human excrement. Even one of her favorite authors, Charles Dickens, couldn’t have dreamt up the depravity of the Łódź ghetto.
As she drew closer, the sharp, acrid stench of the contents of the cart prickled in her nostrils and, for a moment, she thought she might faint. She stopped and sucked in a stale breath. The children drew level, their bodies so frail and withered they barely cast a shadow on the street. But it was their eyes, dull and vacant, that hollowed Dorotha out. It was a fact that—in such a position—most of them would soon be dead from disease.
Dorotha wanted to weep and rage at the sight of those children, but she didn’t even have the strength to cry. Instead, she turned and trudged toward her room on Brzezińska. She crossed over the footbridge, passing over the “Aryan” Limanowskiego Street, the street that carried non-Jewish traffic, pausing at the top as a tram rattled beneath her and stopped. Below her, a young couple disembarked onto the “Aryan” street beneath the footbridge, spilling out into the evening sunshine, well-fed and well-dressed. They looked like creatures from another world as they paused to embrace. Did they not see the barbed wire that separated their world from hers? Were they blind to the suffering of the people on the other side? The couple pulled apart and, as if drawn by a magnet, the woman’s eyes traveled up and met Dorotha’s.
Realization shivered through Dorotha. She knew the woman! It was Magda Nowak. Once upon a time—in what felt like a different lifetime—Magda had been one of Dorotha’s most avid patrons in the library, visiting weekly with eager smiles and book requests. Magda had had a penchant for medieval romance, which she concealed beneath more serious literary classics, hidden from view to keep her mother happy.
Now, Dorotha raised her arm in recognition to her former library patron. The woman’s face fell, etched with surprise and then something else. Shame, regret? She clutched her sweetheart’s arm and whispered something in his ear before they both strode quickly away from the ghetto, back to “their” side of the city. No, Dorotha thought bitterly, revulsion.
Dorotha had once kept Magda’s secrets, laughed with her over the stacks and recommended books to her. How had her brain been so polluted that Magda, like so many other fellow Poles, seemed to be happy their side of the city was judenfrei, free of Jews?
Dorotha wondered what it would feel like to jump from this spot, at the top of the footbridge, like so many hundreds had done over the past two years. Scoured with pain, hunger, and a desperate wish for an end to this suffering, she gripped the wooden handrail and looked down at the tram tracks twenty-five feet below.
But then she heard it. Joyce’s voice, rattling in her brain. Come on, old girl, what’s all this? What would Virginia say?
Dorotha blinked, the dust from the tracks shimmering in a heat haze. “The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages,” she murmured, finding comfort in their favorite author’s words. She pulled herself back from the edge and carried on her way, repeating her mantra with every slap of her old clogs on the pavement. Survive. I must survive.
Back at the slum tenement block they called “home,” Dorotha trudged up the dark concrete stairwell and opened the door to their room on the third floor, pausing to nail on a smile for the sake of her parents. “Mama. Tatuś. Look what I managed to get…”
She pulled a cabbage from her bag. In peacetime, she wouldn’t have paid a single złoty for this, but in the ghetto, it was a precious gift. A plague of caterpillars had recently eaten what little food supply they had. “We can put this into tonight’s soup…” Her words trailed off as she saw her mother’s face.
“Dorotha. We have two new house guests,” announced her mother.
A young woman stumbled forward, her pale face drenched in sweat. An older woman was seated on the couch
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
The Secret Society of Librarians
Kate Thompson
Copyright © 2026 All Rights Reserved
