A few days before Christmas, there was another raid, although nothing dropped on the town of Molching. According to the radio news, most of the bombs fell in open country.

"And if there are more raids, keep reading in the shelter."

What was most important was the reaction in the Fiedlers' shelter. Once the last few patrons had arrived, everyone settled down solemnly and waited. They looked at her, expectantly.

Papa's voice arrived, loud in her ears.

Liesel waited. She needed to be sure that they wanted it.

Rudy spoke for everyone. "Read, Saumensch."

She opened the book, and again, the words found their way upon all those present in the shelter.

She walked to the living room and took the sheet from the edge of her mattress. In the side, there was a sewn-up slit. If you didn't know beforehand that it was there, there was almost no chance of finding it. Rosa cut it carefully open and inserted her hand, reaching in the length of her entire arm. When it came back out, she was holding Max Vandenburg's sketchbook.

At home, once the sirens had given permission for everyone to return aboveground, Liesel sat in the kitchen with her mama. A preoccupation was at the forefront of Rosa Hubermann's expression, and it was not long until she picked up a knife and left the room. "Come with me."

She embraced her.

There was also a great longing to tell Rosa Hubermann that she loved her. It's a shame she didn't say it.

She wanted to read the book in the basement, for old times' sake, but Mama convinced her otherwise. "There's a reason Max got sick down there," she said, "and I can tell you one thing, girl, I'm not letting you get sick."

Liesel held it with soft hands. She stared. "Thanks, Mama."

A Small Collection of Thoughts for Liesel Meminger

Rosa gave her the book.

The Word Shaker.

The cover looked like this: THE WORD SHAKER

She read in the kitchen.

"He said to give this to you when you were ready," she said. "I was thinking your birthday. Then I brought it back to Christmas." Rosa Hubermann stood and there was a strange look on her face. It was not made up of pride. Perhaps it was the thickness, the heaviness of recollection. She said, "I think you've always been ready, Liesel. From the moment you arrived here, clinging to that gate, you were meant to have this."

Red and yellow gaps in the stove.

She made her way through the countless sketches and stories, and the pictures with captions. Things like Rudy on a dais with three gold medals slung around his neck. Hair the color of lemons was written beneath it. The snowman made an appearance, as did a list of the thirteen presents, not to mention the records of countless nights in the basement or by the fire.

Then came.

Of course, there were many thoughts, sketches, and dreams relating to Stuttgart and Germany and the Fuhrer. Recollections of Max's family were also there. In the end, he could not resist including them. He had to.

It was a fable or a fairy tale. Liesel was not sure which. Even days later, when she looked up both terms in the Duden Dictionary, she couldn't distinguish between the two.

That was where The Word Shaker itself made its appearance.

On the previous page, there was a small note.

Liesel -- I almost scribbled this story out. I thought you might be too old for such a tale, but maybe no one is. I thought of you and your books and words, and this strange story came into my head. I hope you can find some good in it.

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2. He would make himself a small, strange mustache.

But there was no reply. He was already gone.

The young man wandered around for quite some time, thinking, planning, and figuring out exactly how to make the world his. Then one day, out of nowhere, it struck him -- the perfect plan. He'd seen a mother walking with her child. At one point, she admonished the small boy, until finally, he began to cry. Within a few minutes, she spoke very softly to him, after which he was soothed and even smiled.

She turned the page.

3. He would one day rule the world.

The young man rushed to the woman and embraced her. "Words!" He grinned.

THERE WAS once a strange, small man. He decided three important details about his life:

"What?"

1. He would part his hair from the opposite side to everyone else.

Yes, the Fuhrer decided that he would rule the world with words. "I will never fire a gun," he devised. "I will not have to." Still, he was not rash. Let's allow him at least that much. He was not a stupid man at all. His first plan of attack was to plant the words in as many areas of his homeland as possible.

WHILE THE words were growing, our young Fuhrer also planted seeds to create symbols, and these, too, were well on their way to full bloom. Now the time had come. The Fuhrer was ready.

He watched them grow, until eventually, great forests of words had risen throughout Germany… It was a nation of farmed thoughts.

He planted them day and night, and cultivated them.

He invited his people toward his own glorious heart, beckoning them with his finest, ugliest words, handpicked from his forests. And the people came.

They were all placed on a conveyor belt and run through a rampant machine that gave them a lifetime in ten minutes. Words were fed into them. Time disappeared and they now Knew everything they needed to know. They were hypnotized.

Next, they were fitted with their symbols, and everyone was happy.

Soon, the demand for the lovely ugly words and Symbols increased to such a point that as the forests grew, many people were needed to maintain them. Some were employed to climb the trees and throw the words down to those below. They were then fed directly into the remainder of the Fuhrer's people, not to mention those who came back for more.

One day, however, she met a man who was despised by her homeland, even though he was born in it. They became good friends, and when the man was sick, the word shaker allowed a single teardrop to fall on his face. The tear was made of friendship -- a single word -- and it dried and became a seed, and when next the girl was in the forest, she planted that seed among the other trees. She watered it every day.

The people who climbed the trees were called word shakers.

THE BEST word shakers were the ones who understood the true power of words. They were the ones who could climb the highest. One such word shaker was a small, skinny girl. She was renowned as the best word shaker of her region because she knew how powerless a person could be WITHOUT words.

That's why she could climb higher than anyone else. She had desire. She was hungry for them.

At first, there was nothing, but one afternoon, when she checked it after a day of word-shaking, a small sprout had shot up. She stared at it for a long time.

But the tree would not move.

The tree grew every day, faster than everything else, till it was the tallest tree in the forest. Everyone came to look at it. They all whispered about it, and they waited… for the Fuhrer.

The Fuhrer, however, was unmoved. He could not afford to make exceptions. As the word shaker was dragged away, he turned to his right-hand man and made a request. "Ax, please"

Incensed, he immediately ordered the tree to be cut down. That was when the word shaker made her way through the crowd. She fell to her hands and knees. "Please," she cried, "you can't cut it down"

AT THAT moment, the word shaker twisted free. She ran. She boarded the tree, and even as the Fuhrer hammered at the trunk with his ax, she climbed until she reached the highest of the branches. The voices and ax beats continued faintly on. Clouds walked by -- like white monsters with gray hearts. Afraid but stubborn, the word shaker remained. She waited for the tree to fall.

Many hours passed, and still, the Fuhrer's ax could not take a single bite out of the trunk. In a state nearing collapse, he ordered another man to continue.

NO ONE knew how long it had taken, but one afternoon, a new axman walked into town. His bag looked too heavy for him. His eyes dragged. His feet drooped with exhaustion. "The tree," he asked the people. "Where is the tree?"

Weeks took over.

A hundred and ninety-six soldiers could not make any impact on the word shaker's tree.

When the last axman gave up, he called up to her. "Word shaker! You can come down now! There is no one who can defeat this tree!"

The word shaker, who could only just make out the man's sentences, replied with a whisper. She handed it down through the branches. "NO thank you," she said, for she knew that it was only herself who was holding the tree upright.

Days passed.

What they didn't know was that other word shakers threw supplies across, and the girl climbed down to the lower branches to collect them.

IT SNOWED. It rained. Seasons came and went. The word shaker remained.

"But how does she eat?" the people asked. "How does she sleep?"

An audience followed him, and when he arrived, clouds had covered the highest regions of the branches. The word shaker could hear the people calling out that a new axman had come to put an end to her vigil.

They did not know who the axman was, and they did not know that he was undeterred.

The young man did not listen to them. He only looked through his bag for some nails. He placed three of them in his mouth and attempted to hammer a fourth one into the tree. The first branches were now extremely high and he estimated that he needed four nails to use as footholds to reach them.

He opened his bag and pulled out something much smaller than an ax.

"She will not come down," the people said, "for anyone."

"Look at this idiot," roared one of the watching men. "NO one else could chop it down with an ax, and this fool thinks he can do it with --"

The people laughed. They said, "You can't chop a tree down with an old hammer!"

The man fell silent.

His heart wobbled and he held tighter to the branches. "It is."

By the fourth nail, he was up in the arms and continued on his way. He was tempted to call out as he did so, but he decided against it.

The climb seemed to last for miles. It took many hours for him to reach the final branches, and when he did, he found the word shaker asleep in her blankets and the clouds.

Is it from your cheek, she thought, that I took the seed?

She rubbed her eyes, and after a long study of his face, she spoke.

"Is it really you?"

THE FIRST nail entered the tree and was held steady after five blows. Then the second went in, and the young man started to climb.

He reached down, touching her arm, and the word shaker woke up.

The man nodded.

The warmth of the sun heated the cloudy rooftop.

He watched her for many minutes.

TOGETHER, THEY stayed in the summit of the tree. They waited for the clouds to disappear, and when they did, they could see the rest of the forest.

"It wouldn't stop growing," she explained.

"But neither would this." The young man looked at the branch that held his hand. He had a point.

When they had looked and talked enough, they made their way back down. They left the blankets and remaining food behind.

The people could not believe what they were seeing, and the moment the word shaker and the young man set foot in the world, the tree finally began to show the ax marks. Bruises appeared. Slits were made in the trunk and the earth began to shiver.

"It's going to fall!" a young woman screamed. "The tree is going to fall!" She was right.

The word shaker and the young man climbed up to the horizontal trunk. They navigated the branches and began to walk. When they looked back, they noticed that the majority of onlookers had started to return to their own places. In there. Out there. In the forest.

The word shaker's tree, in all its miles and miles of height, slowly began to tip. It moaned as it was sucked to the ground. The world shook, and when everything finally settled, the tree was laid out among the rest of the forest. It could never destroy all of it, but if nothing else, a different-colored path was carved through it.

But as they walked on, they stopped several times, to listen. They thought they could hear voices and words behind them, on the word shaker's tree.

For a long time, Liesel sat at the kitchen table and wondered where Max Vandenburg was, in all that forest out there. The light lay down around her. She fell asleep. Mama made her go to bed, and she did so, with Max's sketchbook against her chest.

She dreamed of the tree.

It was hours later, when she woke up, that the answer to her question came. "Of course," she whispered. "Of course I know where he is," and she went back to sleep.