The Reader: Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary & Analysis

During the trial, Michael reads the English translation of the daughter’s book, as it is the only version available to him. Though he initially believes the book feels alien and distant because of the translation, when he reads the German version, he discovers that the book itself creates distance. The daughter writes with “sobriety,” “exud[ing] the very numbness” that Michael observes in the trial’s spectators.

Hanna’s name doesn’t appear in the book, though he sometimes thinks he recognizes her in the one of guards who is “young, pretty, and conscientiously unscrupulous in the fulfillment of her duties” and who reminds the daughter of “Mare,” a guard from another camp who was also “young, beautiful, and diligent, but cruel and uncontrolled.”

The mother and daughter’s last stop after Auschwitz is the camp near Cracow, whose conditions are slightly better and whose selections are smaller than at Auschwitz. However, when the camp is closed, the prisoners are forced to march and run in the winter with inadequate clothing and little more than rags and newspapers to protect their feet. Within a week, half the women die.

While the guards commandeer a priest’s house, the prisoners shelter in the church. However, bombs soon fall and the church’s steeple burns, crashing through the roof of the church. When the women realize what is happening they scream and throw themselves at the doors, but they don’t open. As the roof was open, most of the women did not suffocate but burned to death. The mother and daughter survived only because the mother had hidden them in the gallery, though it was closer to the fire. They stood against the narrow walls, waiting until the next night to leave, much to the astonishment of the villagers.