The Secret Society of Librarians

Author's Note

In October 2022, I had a life-changing encounter. I met a 95-year-old Holocaust survivor in London and agreed to help her write her life story before it was too late. Renee Salt is a survivor of two ghettos and three concentration camps. For nearly six years, she stared into the abyss of almost unimaginable darkness. With the exception of two aunts, her entire extended family, numbering almost 200, were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.

Renee doesn’t remember her experiences of the Łódź ghetto, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen - she relives them through a series of vivid flashbacks.

The tangle of human bodies, the smoking crematoria chimney stacks and sealed cattle carts are all still there, imprinted behind her eyelids.

I learnt that her trauma was a living thing. On many occasions, she would sit and weep, and I would hold her hand in silence, for what words of comfort could I possibly offer?

I vowed to help her piece together her shattered past. This meant travelling in her footsteps, from her old family home in Poland, across Europe to the sites of her persecution.

It was a delicate dance between roles. Journalist, writer, researcher and, finally, friend. Whilst in Łódź researching Renee’s two-year incarceration in the ghetto, I came across the The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, an extraordinary, lasting testimony of day-to-day life in the ghetto, written in secret by a group of prisoners.

Through this, I learnt that there were libraries in the ghetto. Prisoners set up clandestine lending libraries and loaned out books which they stored in hidden rooms.

In September 1942, after a Nazi selection in the ghetto, Director of the Department of Vital Statistics, Henryk Neftalin, urged all ghetto superintendents to search the attics, basements and apartments for forgotten books.

Some 30,000 books, from age-old family heirlooms to holy books, were rescued and lovingly preserved and catalogued. Shelves reaching up to the ceiling were filled with books that had been handed down for generations, forming a unique, but precarious ghetto library.

I couldn’t shake this library from my mind, and I knew that when I finished Renee’s book - A Mother’s Promise, which came out in January 2025 - I would return to the library, if only in my imagination. Aren’t human beings remarkable? The ghetto library testified to the prisoners’ will to do more than just exist and to their desire to hold on to even the most fragile kind of beauty.

The novel began to take shape in my mind. I wanted to share a picture of two very different experiences of war and two very different libraries. One operating under Nazi Occupation in Poland, and the other running in Blitz-battered Britain. I was intrigued by the transformative power and escape of reading, whether that be by candlelight in an underground shelter in London, or in secret in a Nazi ghetto. And it dawned on me, reading is resistance.

No two people had the same experience during the Second World War, but the fundamental urge to pick up a book and read was universal.

What if these two libraries were somehow connected? The answer came to me after interviewing two librarians from the intriguingly named The Society of Secret Library Friends.

This is a contemporary and small grassroots group, formed in Idaho in the United States to offer solidarity and support between librarians. I interviewed two of their members, who preferred to remain anonymous, and was shocked by what they told me. They talked of armed protestors wielding guns outside libraries during Covid, simply for being asked to wear face masks.

They described in detail a growing climate of fear, censorship and power in the United States that has led to books like Anne Frank’s Diary and Maus, by Art Spiegelman, being removed from their shelves. Some library workers have even been dubbed as “evil and predatory” simply for stocking sex education books in their libraries.  They talked too of the new wave of censorship on the rise in the United States, and how librarians have become scape goats for political agenda.

In such a febrile and incendiary atmosphere, it’s little wonder they prefer to remain anonymous. Their name incidentally was inspired by the three secret cities in the United States, in Washington, New Mexico and Tennessee, formed in the 1940s, where work was done to create the atomic bomb. A secret group gives them a protective barrier, which allows them to speak back collectively.

‘Libraries are places of comfort, offering you a book to curl up with, but they also challenge us to expand our understanding of the world around us through access to free technology and increased digital literacy,’ one of the Society members told me.

‘We offer such an important community service,’ another added. ‘A library might be the only place a homeless person can use the bathroom, use free Wi-Fi to apply for a job or ask a library worker for help with a form. Children’s story times are such a great way of fostering early literacy and a good place for mothers to meet. Libraries are social institutions that support communities.’

I could not agree with her more. A library is the only place you can go from cradle to grave that is free, safe, democratic and no one will try to flog you anything. You don’t have to part with a penny to travel the world. It’s the heartbeat of a community, offering precious resources to people in need. It’s a place just to be, to dream, to plan, engage and to escape - with books.

My conversation with the The Society of Secret Library Friends left me feeling inspired and energised. It struck me how very much we all need allies in life. It also got me thinking about the power of a unified voice and how much female librarians would have needed it in a patriarchal 20th century society, where they fought so hard for opportunities. I don’t know of any Secret Societies of Librarians in wartime, but given the imaginative, creative and agile ways female librarians stepped up and proved themselves, I bet there were unofficial groups.

This novel is my way of honouring their achievements, as well as that of their 21st century librarian counterparts, grappling with a global health pandemic and unparalleled library closures.

Wahida Amiri is another librarian I spoke with who inspired me to write about women’s bravery under fire. Wahida had to cope with the abrupt closure of her library. Not due to budget cuts, but something more sinister. After the Fall of Kabul in Afghanistan, and the subsequent Taliban take over in August 2021, Wahida was forced from the women’s library she had helped to found. Soon after, Wahida and her very own secret society, known as the Afghanistan Valorous Women’s Spontaneous Movement, made the decision to publicly protest.

Despite being beaten with electric batons and pepper sprayed by members of Badri 313, the so-called Taliban elite forces, they held their ground for two hours before limping home. Refusing to wear a burka, Wahida continued taking to the streets to protest at the closure of her library and places of education for women in Afghanistan.

‘We were all aware of the extreme danger we were in,’ she told me. ‘Female protestors were being kidnapped and tortured by the Taliban, their genitals electrocuted, their bodies dumped in rivers and deserts like rubbish. It was not a reason to stop protesting, it was only a reason to continue.’

Wahida used a series of safehouses, varying her route around the city, never sticking to a routine, but eventually, in February 2022, her luck ran out and she was kidnapped by the Taliban. Wahida and 29 other women protestors were held for 17 days and nights and subjected to repeated interrogation and abuse by groups of Talibs. She was released and an American charity got her safely out of Afghanistan. In January 2023, I spoke to Wahida in her new home in Pakistan on Zoom, via her former college lecturer Ramin Kamangar, also an activist.

I speak no Persian and Wahida no English, so Ramin kindly translated our conversation. I was intrigued to hear how her protesting was inextricably bound to the author Virginia Woolf.

The life and work of a 20th century feminist writer seems an unlikely ally for a young Afghanistani woman, but the author acted as a muse to the librarian.

‘I could not read until I was 25 years old,’ she told me. ‘My school was closed when the Taliban first rose to power in 1996. I spent my days like most young women, cleaning, doing chores and studying the Koran.’

When she did finally learn to read, she picked up a book and never stopped reading, finding inspiration in a Persian translation of A Room of One’s Own.

Wahida was spellbound. ‘It was as if the author has been watching my whole life and was whispering in my ear. “Women, I am with you.” From that moment on, I would not be parted from Virginia and A Room of One’s Own.’

She read it while stirring soup over the stove, whilst washing dishes, or preparing bread at home, its pages growing dusty with flour. And with every page turned, more questions bloomed in Wahida’s mind. Thanks to Virginia Woolf, Wahida opened a small library in the basement of a building in the north-west of Kabul.

‘The library was my happy place where everyone was welcome, especially women,’ she says. ‘We discussed topics like feminism over chai sabz, the traditional Afghanistan green tea with cardamom and slices of cake.’

Today, thanks to the Taliban, the doors to her library, like all places of work and education for women in Afghanistan, are nailed shut. All that Wahida has left from her library is a battered old copy of A Room of One’s Own. Wahida asked me if I had ever read the book and to my shame, I hadn’t. I bought it the next day and devoured it in two days. This line stood out to me.

'Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.'

It became the mantra that transformed the life of this humble yet heroic librarian, turning her into one of the leading voices against the Taliban’s oppressive regime.

As I chatted with this young Afghanistani librarian, it struck me what amazing connections books can forge. Stories weave us together with women of the past, inspiring us with their strength and creativity. That I, an author living in England, can connect to Virginia Woolf, via a librarian from Afghanistan, now living in Chicago in the United States, shows how literature transcends borders and time. Reading really can take you anywhere.

Women in wartime is a subject close to my heart. I have spent the past decade gathering the memories of librarians and our wartime generation, like a magpie swooping about looking for glimmers of the past. I have lost count of how many interviews I have done, but it runs to hundreds. Many are on my podcast, From the Library with Love. I always keep in mind something a redoubtable cockney called Eileen told me.

“When you’re 80 you’re invisible, when you’re 90 you might as well be dead,” before perking up. ‘‘I may have snow on the roof but I’m not old, darling. I have stories to tell.”

Every single story you read in this book is inspired by a conversation with a librarian, a wartime survivor, or a true story. Sadly, so many of the people who told me these stories are no longer with us. I write this at the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camps and the end of World War Two. We are now at that moment in which living memory slides into archive testimony. Like Renee’s story, many are only just being shared now, after decades of trauma-induced silence, proving that the need to share can overcome the desire to forget.

I recognise what a remarkable privilege it is when someone tells you their unique history.  Stories are living, breathing things. They have a heartbeat. They deserve to be nurtured and cared for. History is never consigned to the past. To me, it has its own emotional pulse and, as I found when researching this book, is blisteringly relevant to our lives today.