Amongst the many treasures my parents found while cleaning out Bubbie’s - my grandmother’s - beautiful home, was a box of books from the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. My mother, who typically saves everything because it’s “valuable,” wanted to donate them. However, my father, a hoarder of books, decided that they had to keep these treasures. While he couldn’t read these books, as they were all written in Polish and German, he packed them up, transporting them from my grandmother’s Brooklyn home to his house in upstate New York.

The books assumed a perma-spot on my dad’s office bookcase, joining approximately 500 other fictional and non-fiction stories, from Muckrakers and Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint – one of my dad’s favorite books – to The Physics of Sports. No one looked at them, but they sat on the shelves of my father’s disheveled office, which was also filled with mounds of papers and gadgets.

Then, a decade later, my dad died.

My mother decided to clean out his office, getting rid of useless gadgets and papers, compiling everything he wrote and published, and choosing which books should be donated. Amongst this pile of books sat the Polish and German books from my grandmother’s house.

My youngest child picked up a book with the word “Kinder” in the title, asking my mother to translate. The title of the book was “Young German Children Speak: Life in Nazi Germany.” She started flipping through the book, describing what she was reading.

Apparently, in Germany in the early 1930’s, a generation of children and young people felt burdened growing up around Jews. They spoke about how they feared seeing a Jew walking down the street before the Nazis confined the Jews to “their own neighborhoods” or how they felt angry when they saw the Jews trying to leave their neighborhoods and invade the Nazi communities. This book provided a platform for young people, from all over Nazi Germany, to speak in their own voices about the day-to-day experiences of having to live in the same country as the Jews. To put these conversations in context, the authors falsely claim that Jews progressively attempted to take over more and more of Germany and turn it into their own state before Hitler saved the true Aryans. The picture the authors paint of Germany reveals the indoctrinated antisemitism that pervaded Nazi Germany and led to the murder of six million Jews.

My mother shook her head, stating that this book was an unremitting litany of complaints from Nazi Youth and their mentors about the Jews. As my mother told my children, it’s a purely propagandist, fictional account of life in Nazi Germany as it related to the Jews.

In the world in which Bubbie lived, books by Jewish authors, like Sigmund Freud and Bertolt Brecht, were banned. But books like these, propaganda that didn’t account for facts, were elevated and celebrated. Taught as non-fiction despite the blatant lies. It sounded eerily familiar to me…almost too relatable today as Jewish authors manage one-star book reviews because they are Jewish or deal with lists like “Amina’s” viral Jewish author blacklist - “Is Your Favorite Author a Zionist?” Last March, the Daily Telegraph reported that “Half of British publishers ‘won’t take books by Jewish authors.’”

I wanted to understand how Bubbie acquired the 50 thousand words of indoctrination that comprised this story. Bubbie, who went from hiding spot to hiding spot throughout the war, carrying my mother, a toddler, didn’t schlep a box of books with her as well. My mother believed that these were books my step-grandfather purchased or was gifted when they lived in Austria after the war. These were a few of the few things they had and they carried every worldly possession to the United States once they were able to immigrate here.

My mother placed it in the dumpster or donate pile, along with Bubbie’s other Polish and German books.

While I was never one to rescue items that my mother wanted to throw away – as there are so few of them, I decided to take these books. I looked them up online. Searched the authors and the titles and the copyrights. It turned out that some of the items that my mother didn’t want to save actually had significant value. Like Baccarat chandelier value. There was a rare first edition of Thomas Mann’s “Mario und der Zauberer.” And we had a few other first editions within this collection that were never reprinted.

But “Young German Children Speak: Life in Nazi Germany” was worthless. The only modern description I could find of the book was a two-word review – “Nazi Propaganda.” I searched to see how many copies of the book remain in circulation, only to find that we possessed one of 20 copies. My mother said we should just “throw it out.”

I refuse to ban or burn books, but I also refuse to distribute fictional propaganda. So, I still have it.

And then I realized why Bubbie still had the book, why she kept it and schlepped it all of those years. Maybe she knew better than to let books like this get into the wrong hands. Maybe she realized that the day would come again when people were blindly swayed by propaganda about “suffering children.” Even when they’re members of Nazi Youth, a hate group, a terrorist group…you get the point. Maybe sometimes it takes a person who spent years hiding from murderers to remind us not to blindly accept fiction as a fact. Maybe this was Bubbie’s last ditch effort to do her little part to save the world.

While my mother couldn’t explain how or why the book traveled across continents and through cities with my grandparents, she thinks Bubbie simply put it in a box and forgot it was there.

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