Through the overcast sky, I looked up and saw the tin-can planes. I watched their stomachs open and the bombs drop casually out. They were off target, of course. They were often off target.

Again, I offer you a glimpse of the end. Perhaps it's to soften the blow for later, or to better prepare myself for the telling. Either way, I must inform you that it was raining on Himmel Street when the world ended for Liesel Meminger.

No one would bomb a place named after heaven, would they?

Like a tap that a child has tried its hardest to turn off but hasn't quite managed. The first drops were cool. I felt them on my hands as I stood outside Frau Diller's.

Above me, I could hear them.

The bombs came down, and soon, the clouds would bake and the cold raindrops would turn to ash. Hot snowflakes would shower to the ground.

No one wanted to bomb Himmel Street.

A SMALL, SAD HOPE

In short, Himmel Street was flattened.

Would they?

Houses were splashed from one side of the street to the other. A framed photo of a very serious-looking Fuhrer was bashed and beaten on the shattered floor. Yet he smiled, in that serious way of his. He knew something we all didn't know. But I knew something he didn't know. All while people slept.

The sky was dripping.

The man had such a nice laugh. He was delivering a newborn child. "I can't believe it -- she's alive!"

She survived because she was sitting in a basement reading through the story of her own life, checking for mistakes. Previously, the room had been declared too shallow, but on that night, October 7, it was enough. The shells of wreckage cantered down, and hours later, when the strange, unkempt silence settled itself in Molching, the local LSE could hear something. An echo. Down there, somewhere, a girl was hammering a paint can with a pencil.

They all stopped, with bent ears and bodies, and when they heard it again, they started digging.

They threw all of it upward.

PASSED ITEMS, HAND TO HAND

Only one person survived.

Blocks of cement and roof tiles.

Rudy Steiner slept. Mama and Papa slept. Frau Holtzapfel, Frau Diller. Tommy Muller. All sleeping. All dying.

An unhappy-looking accordion, peering through its eaten case.

A piece of wall with a dripping sun painted on it.

When another piece of broken wall was removed, one of them saw the book thief's hair.

There was so much joy among the cluttering, calling men, but I could not fully share their enthusiasm.

Farther away, their bodies were laid out, like the rest. Papa's lovely silver eyes were already starting to rust, and Mama's cardboard lips were fixed half open, most likely the shape of an incomplete snore. To blaspheme like the Germans -- Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

The rescuing hands pulled Liesel out and brushed the crumbs of rubble from her clothes. "Young girl," they said, "the sirens were too late. What were you doing in the basement? How did you know?"

A second time. Her face creased as she reached a higher, more panic-stricken pitch. "Papa, Papa!"

What they didn't notice was that the girl was still holding the book. She screamed her reply. A stunning scream of the living.

"Papa!"

They passed her up as she shouted, wailed, and cried. If she was injured, she did not yet know it, for she struggled free and searched and called and wailed some more.

Earlier, I'd held her papa in one arm and her mama in the other. Each soul was so soft.

She was holding desperately on to the words who had saved her life.

She was still clutching the book.