Germany, 1943. One week before Christmas. Fifteen-year-old Rosemarie Reichert pushed open the door of the tiny bookshop in Rüdesheim am Rhein, a picturesque village nestled at the base of some hills beside the Rhine River. The town was known for its vineyards and for the Ruine Ehrenfels, the remains of a medieval castle. A bell tinkled as Rosemarie stepped inside the store and took in the warmth and the comforting smell of old books.
It was a bleak time. The Nazis’ mounting losses had ravaged the country, and Hitler’s SS had accelerated its campaign to root out spies, traitors, and “undesirables.” Rosemarie’s family had been torn apart—but she didn’t know why. Her father and his side of the family had been in France since before the start of the war, and when she asked about him, the grown-ups changed the subject. Rosemarie had returned home from boarding school to care for her mother, who had lymphoma and was in a hospital across the river.
“Rosemarie!” The shopkeeper clasped the girl’s hand. “How is your mother?” Frau Richter was a prim elderly woman with dark-rimmed glasses and gray hair put up in a neat chignon. She and Rosemarie’s mother had bonded over their love of books.
“Oh! You don’t know,” said Rosemarie. “She is in the hospital.”
“My darling child,” said the shopkeeper, looking stricken. “I am so sorry.”
“I want to get her a special Christmas gift,” said Rosemarie. “She often talked of an author named Thomas Mann. He won a Nobel Prize. I can’t remember the name of his book though.”
“Wait here,” said Frau Richter, lowering her voice. She disappeared into the back of the shop and soon returned bearing a small, plainly bound hardback with a pale red stripe around the cover and a one-word title in blue ink: Buddenbrooks. She looked around, making sure no one was watching, before wrapping the book in newspaper and slipping it into Rosemarie’s hands.
“Trust me, child,” Frau Richter said, “your mother will love this book.”
At home, Rosemarie tore off the newspaper. She leafed through the pages of old-fashioned Gothic script. Then she wrote a brief inscription inside—Für Mama mit Lieben, Weihnachten, 1943 (“For Mama with love, Christmas, 1943”)—and signed her name. She rewrapped the book, boarded a ferry to cross the river, and presented the gift to her mother at the hospital.
“Rosekind, this year I have no gifts for you,” Rosemarie’s mother said.
“Mama, it’s all right. Please open yours.”
Her mother unwrapped the book and gasped.
“Rosemarie, where on earth did you get this?” she asked in an urgent whisper. “It’s a banned book!” She hurriedly stuffed it under the covers and lowered her voice even further. “You were only a small child in 1933 when the Nazis stormed into libraries and universities, even private homes, looking for books by Jewish authors and others they deemed to be against the party. Thomas Mann’s books were among those they burned. It is forbidden to own one.”
“But . . . Frau Richter said you would love it,” said Rosemarie.
“I do love it,” Rosemarie’s mother said. “It is a thoughtful gift. I wish I could keep it, but I cannot. The nurses will find it. You must take it away and tell no one you have it. Get rid of it if you have to. We live in such bad times.” She embraced her daughter.
Frightened, Rosemarie boarded the ferry back home. She prayed for guidance. Frau Richter certainly knew the book was banned—yet she’d entrusted Rosemarie’s mother with it. Rosemarie didn’t want to throw the book away. Her mother said she loved it. It didn’t make sense. Just like her father’s disappearance. Like everything else in that troubled time.
Gazing across the river, Rosemarie glimpsed the old ruined castle, Ruine Ehrenfels, above the streets of Rüdesheim. It was a lonely but beautiful place where Rosemarie and her mother sometimes hiked to have a picnic. She had an idea: climb the hill to the ruins and bury the book in the courtyard. No one would find it. When the war was over, she would return and dig it up.
Rosemarie tucked the book inside an old metal cigar box, taking care to first rip out the page with her inscription—no identifying marks! On Christmas morning, she climbed through the vineyards to the castle. With a trowel, she began to dig by one of the stone walls. The soil was hard but not yet frozen. Her hands felt cold and stiff, but she wiped her face and blew her dripping nose, pressing on. This is one book the Nazis will never burn, she thought. She dropped the box inside the hole, covered it, and stomped the earth flat.
Rosemarie’s mother died two months later. At the war’s end, Rosemarie, evacuated to Bavaria, found work translating for American soldiers. English had been her favorite subject in school. Her uncle Anton, Mama’s family patriarch, finally revealed the truth about her father: he was Jewish. Keeping that a secret had protected Rosemarie and her mother from Nazi persecution. Rosemarie’s father, however, despite fleeing Germany for France, had been betrayed by the Vichy regime and sent to a concentration camp, where he was killed.
Heartbroken and orphaned, Rosemarie resolved to emigrate to America. There was one thing she needed to do first. Had the book survived when so much else had not?
She told Uncle Anton her secret. Together, they returned to Rüdesheim and climbed the hill, creeping along the walls of the ruined castle. In the courtyard, they began to dig. The shovel struck something hard. The box! Rosemarie pulled it from the ground, brushed off the dirt, and opened it. The book was still inside, somehow looking just as it had the day she had buried it.
Later, Rosemarie read the book and knew why her mother had loved it, why Frau Richter had saved it. Mann wrote of a Germany that existed before the Nazis and of a family whose fall from grace mirrored the fall of the country. For Rosemarie, the book became a symbol of the place she was leaving behind.
Rosemarie lived a happy life in America. She married an Air Force officer, Edward McManus, and had three sons and six grandchildren. She and Edward enjoyed a long retirement in the house they had built by a lake in North Carolina near their children and grandchildren.
Only one thing marred her happiness. A hurricane had caused a flood that swamped the storage unit where they’d been keeping their things while waiting to move into their lakeside home. Rosemarie and Edward’s beloved library—hundreds of books they’d collected over the years—had been ruined. Buddenbrooks had been lost. To Rosemarie, it was like losing her mother all over again. The Nazis had killed her father. Cancer had taken her mother. Only the book had survived. And now it was gone. Her act of defiance against the Nazis had saved nothing.
Then came the day Rosemarie and Edward were packing up their house, preparing to move into a retirement home. Their granddaughter Tessa finished packing a few new books Rosemarie and Edward had bought to rebuild their library. “Your books are in here, Omie,” Tessa said, pointing to a small box. “I put them with some other old things.” Rosemarie smiled and thanked her, though it was hard watching a lifetime’s memories pared down and packed away in boxes.
On the final days before the move, Rosemarie found herself thinking back over her life. Wartime Germany. Her evacuation to Bavaria. Her travels with Edward. She sat in the living room watching television, feeling vaguely sad. She thought of the box of books Tessa had packed. Rosemarie could still picture the one book she really wished she had, the small, plainly bound hardback with the pale red stripe around the cover, lost a decade earlier in the flood.
As if moved by some unseen force, Rosemarie sprang out of her chair and hurried to the small book box. She cut through the packing tape and opened the flaps. She reached inside.
There, wedged between several brand-new books, was a volume that appeared to be nearly falling apart. Brittle with age, water-spotted, with some pages stuck together. Gently, Rosemarie pulled it out. She saw the pale red stripe around the cover. The title in blue letters. And the place where she’d torn out the page with her inscription: Für Mama mit Lieben, Weihnachten, 1943.
Every other book from the flood had been dumped, ruined beyond recognition. Not Buddenbrooks. Once buried, never burned, never destroyed, it was a symbol of something indestructible that no evil could ever erase.