When the rebels came to the Spellow library, they used the Division with a documentary literature as a fuck.
Deborah Moore, a library at the time, arrived the next morning and revealed that shelves and sofa purchased as part of a recent renovation were stacked to build a stake. Books that survived the rebellion, part of wave of anti -immigrant, racist riot who erupted throughout Britain in August last year, they turned yellow with smoke and their pages twisted from the heat.
The anger was the first, she said, then sadness, and then the determination to replace hundreds of books that were burned, even though her nostrils filled the stench of their destruction. In last month’s interview, she said that the feeling was, “Look at how we come back from this, because we will not be defeated.”
The library is located in Walton, a poor district of northwestern English city of Liverpool. It was a year and a half before the fire renovatedturning it into the center of the community that offered workshops for unemployed, parents and groups of young children and a contact center for the local council. Then in August it became one of the biggest victims in Britain the greatest outbreak of public order and peace for more than a decade.
In hours after the attacker with a knife killed three young girls In Southport, coastal city about 20 miles from Liverpool, disinformation The claim that he had just arrived in a Muslim immigrant has expanded Accounts of the far right on social networks. He was actually born in Britain, in a Christian family from Rwanda. But the violence against migrants broke out more than a dozen places in England and Northern Ireland, leading to more than 400 arrests.
The killer, Axel Rudakuban, was convicted of life in prison Last week. British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, described his actions as an example of a new type of terrorismwhich includes loneliness obsessed with violence, not guided by any ideology.
Liverpool was among the first places to break into a mess. The pests went so far as to try to prevent firefighters from entering the library, local police said in a statement at the time.
Alex McCormick, a 27-year-old from a nearby suburbs, saw pictures of broken windows and blackened pages in the library and immediately decided to start online collection to help replace books.
“We can’t burn books, we can’t do it,” she said. “We are not like this, but we look like this to the rest of the world now.”
It aimed at £ 500, about $ 610, but soon thousands began to arrive, some of the money from celebrity donors. Mrs. McCormick, who was married that month, was distracted from preparation for the wedding to observe the great and small works of generosity. Young people have mobilized their own libraries to send books; Others donated the books of the late loved ones; while the members of the community gave everything they could. Within three weeks, Gofundme collected £ 250,000.
“It’s an incomprehensible amount of money for one library,” she said. When she returned from the honeymoon, she was called a member of the local council and said that Queen Camilla donated books: the collection included Dnevnik Anne Frank, “Love in the Cholera” and “Tiger who came to tea”, a British children’s classic writer and illustrator who, as a girl, fled Nazi Germany.
Mrs. McCormick, a member of another local library with her daughter named after her favorite literary character, said she hoped to give out the outburst to people a more loyal picture of her city and a public mood in Britain.
“In the end, 11,500 people donated money to raise funds, and hundreds of people donated books in physical form,” said Mrs. McCormick. “There were no 11,500 people at Country Road who were making problems and burning the library.”
The library was reopened in mid -December, four months after its destruction. The Liverpool City Council paid for renovation, at a price of £ 200,000. The Council spokesman said the money raised by Mrs. McCormick would be used for the community programs.
In weeks after violence, the neighborhood was affected by a sense of discomfort, the residents say. People colored skin said they are afraid. A youth worker who helps holding training for young people said he encountered some who participated in the riots and revealed that they were struggling with shame and regret. It is a amplifier that many young people from Walton have already felt.
They all felt abandoned, said Sarah Atherton, who grew up in the neighborhood and whose children use the library. She said parts of the area have been forgotten for a long time.
Police arrested nine people Due to the mess on the county road and one was sentenced to 22 months in prison for participating in violence and throwing glass bottles with police officers.
On the cold night of December, County Road was again full, with dozens of inhabitants carrying lamps in the procession to re -open. Balloon bow above the entrance to the spellow library brought color to the street that lost many small businesses and contents during a decade of austerity measure under the government led by Conservatives in the 2010s.
A few days later, the first Saturday of reopening, a hive was buzzing at the library. A woman came in and exclaimed joyfully, “You’re open!”
The height of the thrush, 11, was delighted that his old library could check new books. He enrolled in a drawing course while his stepmother, Sofia thrush, waited in new teddy chairs and read. For Mrs. Drozdova, who said she fled Russia with her husband and their family because of the Kremlin Anti-Gay LawsThe library became a refuge. Violence in August, she said, there was an exception in an otherwise safe neighborhood.
“I don’t even have a word in my mother tongue,” said Mrs. Drozdova, who was a librarian in Russia, about the fire.
On her first visit, Fungai Chirambe headed to her favorite section: self -help and well -being. In the months since she moved from Zimbabwe to reunite with her mother, she has looked at more than 50 books. The library is at the center of her new home, where most welcomed her, even if someone had been offset by her mother a week before, she said.
“I’m just happy to be healed,” she said, holding a bunch of new books. “There are so many materials.”
The kids gathered around the handicraft table and filled cellophane chocolate powder chocolate and marshmallow cookies to make reindeer with dirty eyes. In a children’s reading corner, the neighborhood family performed Pinokio Pinokio, while in the second corner of a teenager she scraped into a computer screen, trying to figure out her task in mathematics.
“It’s noisy,” said June Serridge, who explored her family tree. “But it’s nice to come back.”