In “Reinventing the Library,” an Op-Ed in the New York Times dated October 23, 2015 Alberto Manguel describes a collection of children’s books at Auschwitz-Birkenau: 

I don’t know where to start to research this story.  I wonder what the eight volumes were.  What books brought comfort to children in the midst of hopelessness and horror?  Did the books have pictures?  Did the older girls read them to the little girls at night?  Did a book possibly save a child’s life, give a single child the strength to endure until the liberation?  Did a book remind a child of normalcy, of family, of love?  Does anyone out there know where Manguel got this story from, where I could read more about it?  Where did the children hide the books? 
The article also resonated with me as we had to decide what to do with my father’s books as we moved my parents into a rest home.  My father grew up in a small town in Arkansas that did not have a library.  He never had books as a child.  As an adult he collected them feverishly, coffee table art books, cookbooks with beautiful photographs, gardening books, books about opera, and dictionaries and reference books.  We couldn’t explain to him why the dictionaries and reference books were no longer valuable.  His collection for him was symbolic, symbolic of the life he had built as a professor, as a lover of art, and as a family man who passed his love of books on to his daughters and grandchildren.
Books provide comfort to the young and the old and become a part of one’s identity. 
 
Postscript:  I ordered Alberto Manguel’s book, The Library at Night.  I discovered that the secret library was in B lock 31, an extension of Auschwitz set up for propaganda purposes that housed five hundred children in a “family camp” to demonstrate that the Germans were not killing deported children.  Books contained in the library were, H.G. Wells’s A Short History of the World, a Russian school textbook, and an analytical geometry text.  Manguel also mentions the importance of stories that children memorized and told each other at night. 
 
Alberto Manguel discusses reading as an act of resistance to oppression.  I dream about the children at Auschwitz reading to each other at night.  I dream about my father trying to hold on to his library as he loses the ability to hear, the interact, to remember his past.

            Supervised by her governess, Miss Prickett, and shuffled between lessons and fittings by her ambitious mother, Alice could only pretend to be a child of nature.

            Of course it is deeply problematic to idealize and prettify childhood poverty, but Dodgson was on to something in opposing the overly structured lives of middle and upper class Victorian children.   In a letter to May Forshall, one of his child friends, he wrote: “Do you ever play at games?  Or is your idea of life “breakfast, lessons, dinner, lessons, tea, lessons, bed, lessons, breakfast, lessons,” and so on?  It is a very neat plan of life and almost as interesting as being a sewing machine or a coffee grinder.”  Just the word coffee grinder evokes images of Dickens’ Mr. Gradgrind stuffing facts down little childrens’ throats and destroying their imaginations.

            When he asks Miss Forshall if she plays at “games,” Dodgson does not mean exclusive, organized sports like cricket, which he associates with wealth and privilege.

                  Ill fares the place, to luxury a prey,

                  Where wealth accumulates, and minds decay;

                  Athletic sports may flourish or may fade,

                  Fashion may make them, even as it has made;

                  But the broad Parks, the city’s joy and pride,

                 When once destroyed can never be supplied!

                  Rather he means the kind of imaginative games that children invent on their own, games without “pavilions” and “scorers’ tents,” games without winners and losers, games without complicated and absurd rules.  

                  Dodgson was obsessed with childhood and children because they represented for him freedom from the oppressive constraints of Victorian life.  They represented freedom from finicky indoor spaces, freedom from ticking wristwatches, freedom from attention to manners and dress, and finally freedom from the burdens of his academic work.