Guide to The Book Thief

The Book Thief Characters: Liesel, Max, Rudy and the Hubermanns

A girl, a basement, a street of neighbours and one unusual narrator

By Tori BooksUpdated November 20267 min readContains spoilers

Markus Zusak

Himmel Street is a poor street in a small German town near Munich, and in 1939 it holds a handful of ordinary families trying to get through a war. Death, who tells the story, meets many of them in the end.

Some of them she loves, some she fears, and almost all of them change her.

Liesel Meminger

Liesel is nine when the book begins, travelling with her mother and little brother to a new home. Her brother dies on the journey, and at his burial she picks up her first book, a gravedigger's handbook, though she cannot read. With Hans's help she learns, and words become her way of making sense of a world falling apart. She steals books from a bonfire, from the mayor's library and, in the end, writes her own story.

Hans Hubermann

Hans is a house painter with silver eyes and an accordion, quiet, patient and kind. He teaches Liesel to read in the basement at night, painting words on the walls for her. He owes his life to Max's father, Erik Vandenburg, who saved him during the First World War, and he never forgets the debt.

Hans is brave in small, dangerous ways. When a column of starving prisoners is marched through town, he steps out and gives one of them a piece of bread, and he is whipped in the street for it. Soon afterwards he is sent away to work in an air-raid unit, and the family is left waiting for him.

Rosa Hubermann

Rosa is short, round and fierce, with a constant stream of insults for everyone she loves. She takes in washing for richer families, and Liesel helps her deliver it. Under the shouting she is brave and deeply caring: she nurses Max through a long illness and keeps the family's secret without complaint. Liesel comes to love her as much as Hans.

Rudy Steiner

Rudy lives next door, has hair the colour of lemons and is obsessed with the American runner Jesse Owens, once painting himself black and running round the track at night to be like him. He is Liesel's partner in crime and her best friend, and he constantly asks her for a kiss. His fate is the saddest in the book.

Max Vandenburg

Max is a young fist-fighter whose father saved Hans's life in the First World War. When the Nazis start hunting him, Hans keeps an old promise and hides him in the basement. Max and Liesel bond over their nightmares, and he paints over the pages of a Nazi book to make two small illustrated books for her, The Standover Man and The Word Shaker. He leaves to protect the family, is caught, and survives to find Liesel again after the war.

Ilsa Hermann and the neighbours

Ilsa Hermann is the mayor's wife, silent with grief for her son, who lets Liesel read in her library and later gives her a blank notebook, in which Liesel writes her story. Himmel Street's other neighbours include Frau Holtzapfel, who spits at the Hubermanns' door but later asks Liesel to read to her, and Rudy's family, the Steiners.

Who's who and what becomes of them

More about The Book Thief

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This guide discusses the whole plot, including the ending.