Rudy In The Book Thief

Throughout The Book Thief, all of the most beautiful actions that characters take are rooted in an understanding that others are just as valuable and human as they are. Though Rudy was starving and had to steal to get by, he saw the pain of the Jews who were being marched through Molching on their way to concentration camps, and gave them what he could. As they waited for the food they’d left to be discovered, Liesel observed the strangeness of the fact that “she heard his stomach growl- and he was giving people bread.” (440). The beauty of his actions was not so much in his selflessness as in the degree of understanding that he exhibited. While he was capable of providing aid for himself when necessary, he knew that if he did not help those

When Alex Steiner tried to explain the reasoning of the Nazi party to his son, Rudy, he told him that he “shouldn’t want to be like black people or Jewish people or anyone who is… not us.” While Alex Steiner only supported the party to preserve the safety of his family, his ability to endorse the ideology of a party that blames other races so as to keep his own, and, specifically, his family, safe, is not too far from the foundations of Nazi beliefs and the idea that life is a battle between “them” and “us.” It is a small step from putting aside your values to protect loved ones at the cost of the lives of others to beginning to split humanity into those that are valuable and need to be saved, and those who do not. Of course, trying to do the best that he could for his family in a place as dire as Nazi Germany did not make Alex Steiner an entirely bad person, necessarily. It did, however, make him a good example of the way that war leads people to forget their morality, and to decide to value some lives above others, dehumanizing those which are seen as other to protect your own. Thus, war leads those who value safety above ethics to act inhumanely, and to provide a glimpse into how ugly desperate situations can make some be. Not only can failing to see the worth of other individuals reveal the ugliness of humans- so, too, can losing oneself within the mob that one is forced into. By stripping one of the ability to see people as individuals instead of as worthless components of larger groups, one loses themselves in the mob that they have been told that they belong in. When Ludwig Shmeikl was injured at the bonfire celebrating Hitler’s birthday, he was separated from the mass of people he had lost the ability to be anything but part of. By the time that Liesel found him,