Book Thief Essay

Friendship in “The Book Thief”

Friendship plays a major role with all of the characters throughout the novel “The Book Thief”. It starts at the beginning of the story with Liesel, the protagonist, forming an instant friendship with her new foster father, Hans and overtime her foster mother, Rosa. Their friendship teaches Liesel to love and trust again after her biological mother and brother die. They are there to love, protect and care for Liesel throughout the novel. Soon after moving in with her new parents, Liesel becomes best friends with a boy named Rudy Steiner, her neighbor. Rudy and Liesel help each other every day as best friends do. Their friendship is very strong and unbreakable, they never leave each other’s sides and many times in the novel their loyalty and love is shown. Liesel becomes friends with a Jew who is hiding in their basement. Together they both share a lot of similarities and a love for reading and creativity thus creating an incredible story of friendship and how it can be the source of peace and happiness during times of great distress.
The friendship that develops between Liesel and Max is touching, heart-wrenching and extremely powerful. Although one might think that nothing good came about because of the Nazi Germany, Liesel and Max’s friendship disproves that. Liesel and Max find themselves living together because of terrible events that have occurred to them and their families. Liesel’s father had been taken away and killed or imprisoned by the Nazi’s which cuts off at least half of her family’s income. The family’s poverty was so extreme that the mother had to send her to a foster family as well as her mother was communist and during World War Two nothing good could have happened for that. Max’s father had been killed during World War I, and the rest of his family has been recently taken away by the Nazi’s. Perhaps the reason these two characters gravitate towards each other is because of their incredible similarities. Both...