In The Book Smugglers, David Fishman tells the story of a group of literary figures from the Vilna Ghetto, led by the poet and resistance fighter Shmerke Kaczerginski, who risked their lives to save their city’s enormous repository of Jewish books and manuscripts from destruction. Cecile Kuznitz writes in her review:
[W]ithin six months of the arrival of the German army [in Vilna] on June 22, 1941, over half of the city’s Jews had been shot and buried in mass graves at Ponar on Vilna’s outskirts. Living Jews were not the Nazis’ only target. A mere week after the initial Nazi foray into Vilna a member of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the Nazi agency in charge of looting cultural property in occupied territory, arrived to survey local libraries, museums, and art collections.
Vilna, which was known as the “Jerusalem of Lithuania,” was a special prize. Its legendary status as a center of Jewish learning was symbolized by two great institutions. The Strashun Library stood in the heart of the traditional Jewish quarter and was famous for its collection of rabbinic works. In a newer part of the city stood the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (Jewish Scholarly Institute, known by its acronym YIVO), . . . which was rooted in a secular vision of the Jewish people as a modern nation. . . .
When the Nazi archivist-looters of the ERR returned to Vilna in 1942, they set up several sorting centers, including one in the YIVO building itself. There they assembled a team of slave laborers who were forced to comb through the YIVO collections as well as books, documents, and art and ritual objects looted from local libraries, museums, and synagogues. The most valuable were shipped to Germany to be used for “Jewish research without Jews,” once the work of extermination had been completed. As it became clear that what was not shipped away would be destroyed, the workers faced a heartrending predicament. . . . [They thus] decided to organize the “paper brigade.”
As Fishman relates, after Germany’s defeat the surviving members of the paper brigade once again had to save the material they had smuggled out of the ghetto or hidden within its walls, this time from the city’s new Soviet rulers.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/3224/a-book-and-a-sword-in-the-vilna-ghetto/