Dita is a vivid, complex, and intelligent young woman who grows up as a prisoner. She has watched her life change from a comfortable existence to one that is a witness of torture and death, but Dita is a strong girl, and the privations she endures are always countered by her desire to live and her love of literature.

For Dita, books are the balm of existence. They provide her with meaning and guide her in her actions. She finds solace in the imagination spurred by the stories she reads, and she consistently meets tragedy and loss with dignity and courage. Dita is aware that she can never truly trust anyone, nor can she ever really know another person, at least not while the horror of the Holocaust unfolds.

While Dita carries with her many attributes of adolescence—she still giggles with her friends and likes to flirt with good looking boys—she is nevertheless mature and dignified. She takes her job as the librarian to heart, and despite the subterfuge and evil of the Nazis, she retains her purity in the form of dignity and responsibility. Dita is a fighter, and she can still see, if only in her memory and in her heart, the small moments of beauty in life.