Once again this year, the Fundación Tres Culturas joins in the commemoration of the Official Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and the Prevention of Crimes against Humanity, established on 27 January by the United Nations General Assembly in memory of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp on the same day in 1945.
On Wednesday 29 January we will hold the conference The lost library: a reflection on the literary plunder committed by the Nazis during World War II'.. The talk will be given by the writer Benito Olmoauthor of the novel Ink and fireThe book is the result of an investigation into the literary plunder committed by the Nazis, who were responsible for the theft of hundreds of libraries during the Second World War.
As the author himself explains, despite being one of the least known events in contemporary history, there is evidence that the German army, through a department headed by Alfred Rosenberg, looted Europe's most important communist and Jewish libraries in a desperate attempt to destroy their enemies by stealing their identity. Many of these books remain unaccounted for. In Berlin's Central Library there is a department responsible for locating books stolen by the Nazis, identifying their rightful owners and returning them, or their heirs, to them.
With this research, Olmo demonstrates the extent of the totalitarian barbarity carried out by Nazism, which not only aimed at the physical destruction of those who - as Jews, gypsies, political dissidents or disabled people, among others - were considered inferior, but also at their cultural and identity disappearance, for which they tried to erase their history and literary memory by destroying or plundering their books.
About the speaker, Benito Olmo
Writer. Cádiz (1980). His novels include Ink and fire, The turtle manoeuvre -adapted to film by Juan Miguel del Castillo-; and The Big Red OneThe work was awarded the Novelpol Prize for the best crime novel published in 2021. He has also published Happy Days and the audioseries Account mismatch y Wonderland. He has been a finalist for the Cartagena Negra 2019 Award, the III Santa Cruz Award, the I Aragón Negro Award and the Tormo Negro Masfarné Award, among others. He has given talks at universities, institutions and literary festivals such as Getafe Negro, BCNegra, AlicanteNoir.