Under the Same Stars

Words matter. The right ones can open a door or a heart. The wrong ones can seal your fate.

Never let anyone hide the truth of history and replace it with myth.

What's the use of stories? They're made up things. They're pretty lies." "Oh no, that isn't true. A story is... well, it's a love letter. Sent from the present or the past to the future.

Forgive me, Liebchen. What I have said earlier is a lie. There's no such thing as "just" a story. A story is a form of magic. It changes you from the inside and you are never the same after. Once you know about other lives. So it's no wonder that King Aldred insisted on burning the books. People hurled entire libraries. Philosophy, poetry. Fables and fairy tales. Martyrs, those books. They shrieked as their pages blackened and curled. But the ideas inside them would not burn. Aided by sympathetic wind, the remnants rose up. They pressed themselves against woolen coats and stuck fast, shinning out like singed medals until the curious peeled them off and read each rebellion aloud— "calumny", "serendipitous", "justice", "prevail"— and the spell took hold. No. You cannot kill what lives inside of books.

His ambitions were far greater. For this he needed a war and for war he needed to create an enemy. This was easy, what with the historians and their lessons gone.

It seemed as if the world allowed pretty girls to do and say things for which they punished ordinary girls.

No incident is isolated. The past is with us always. This is the lesson of history and why it is important not to

She loved the first five minutes after midnight—“because that is when everything feels like possibility.

The world needs us to believe in it. That’s the only way any magic ever happens.

The police had great power now. They no longer needed a warrant for a search, they only needed suspicion—and there was a great deal of suspicion to go around.

took to the official radio, sounding angry and hateful, petty and aggrieved about one thing or another. Sophie had never heard him any other way, never seen his dead eyes light up with joy. He frightened her. Those bombastic tirades, the newspaper photos of his face splotchy with rage, a finger jabbing at the air as if it, too, were an offense, as if he had gone mad. But the very traits that upset Sophie seemed to bring other people a sense of comfort and security. “He’s a strong leader,” Fräulein Volker would say. “A real man who is unafraid of his authority. The fatherland demands a strict father to make it great again.

Where you burn books, you ultimately burn people.

Nothing ever happens in a vacuum. No incident is isolated. The past is with us always. This is the lesson of history and why it is important not to forget. We are always in a conversation with history.

Sometimes, Liebchen, you must take a stand even if it makes you an outcast. What the Nazis are doing is wrong. They are not planting a future, they are only planting hate. And if we know that something is wrong and say nothing, do nothing? Then we are also sinning.

When you read about the lives of others, you form a kinship. You learn to see the world not just through your own eyes,” her papa often said. “It exercises the mind—but also, the heart.

They fed Germans disinformation about Jewish people, communists, and intellectuals, and they used mass media to spread their message.” “They reinforced the fascist idea of Aryans as this pure bloodline.” “They banned books, art, music, anything that could present a different viewpoint and derail their narrative.

so, with apologies to Mr. Thoreau, I would add that things do not change until we decide to change them.

Thoreau once said, ‘Things do not change; we change.

That’s good. Once the bastards get it into their heads that they can build a wall, the idea never really comes down. The minute they try it, you’ve got to fight it.

When you read about the lives of others

His heart was scarred by a hunger for power and vengeance that could never find peace.

What happens next is this: He kisses her. It is Sophie's first kiss. It seems to her that, for as long as there are stars and a river of time running backward and forward, carrying the world moment by moment, this kiss will exist in every one of them.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow she'd eat cottage cheese and exercise and be the daughter everyone wanted her to be: a smaller version of herself.

The frog is in a pot of water on the stove. He doesn’t know that, just thinks he’s in a pond. It’s water, after all. But slowly, very slowly, the heat is turned up. So slowly that the frog doesn’t realize he’s in danger. He might think, Boy, this water has gotten warmer. But he gets used to the warmer temperature soon enough. He accepts it as normal. Until the heat is increased again. Now it’s very uncomfortable. Still, he adjusts. On and on it goes, degree by degree, until at last the water is boiling. The frog is starting to cook. I’ve got to get out of this boiling pot now! the frog thinks in a panic. But of course, by that time, it is too late. He is done for. That is how they do it. They take away someone’s rights. Well, you think, it’s not my rights. And maybe that is a bad person. Maybe they did something wrong. People go on with their lives. They adjust. The first outrage seems so long ago, so benign now that they have gotten used to all the others that followed until they can no longer remember a time when what they call normal used to be considered outrageous, immoral, and brutal.

the incremental, desensitizing way the Third Reich made the unthinkable not just possible but acceptable to so many. How the Reichstag Fire in 1933 was used to justify seizing power. The inciting of fear. The Gestapo being given full rein to operate above the law. The creation of a national “enemy” by demonizing Jewish and Roma people, those with disabilities, and anyone queer. Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” which destroyed Jewish homes and businesses. The stripping of rights. The wearing of the yellow star. The deportations. The camps. All of it done so quickly and with such efficiency that it was numbing.

forget. We are always in a conversation with history.