THE PERSECUTION OF the Jews of Europe under the Nazi regime fell with terrifying force not just on the People of the Book (as Jews have self-identified for thousands of years) but also on their books. It has been estimated that over 100 million books were destroyed during the Holocaust, in the twelve years from the period of Nazi dominance in Germany in 1933 up to the end of the Second World War.1
Books have always been central to Jewish religion and culture. At the heart of Jewish life is a particular book, the Torah (normally a scroll form), the most important in Jewish life, so much so that when Jerusalem fell to the Romans in CE 70, one of the Torah scrolls kept in the Temple of Jerusalem was paraded by the victorious Emperor Titus through the streets of Rome as a symbol of their victory. A myriad other books have immense significance in the life of Jews and, traditionally in Jewish culture, true wealth was measured in books – it was charity to loan them – and many special laws grew up around the treatment of books, ranging from the way parchment must be treated to make Torah scrolls, to the specifics of handling sacred books: for example, they must never be held upside down, or left open unless being read. Jews have had the preservation of knowledge written into their laws for millennia. The best-known expression of this compulsion to preserve is the genizah, which exists in synagogues all over the Jewish world. Derived from the Persian term ganj meaning ‘hoard’ or ‘hidden treasure’, genizahs are storerooms for the holding of scraps of texts which contain the written word of God; these words are treated in Jewish law as if they are living and when they become worn out they must be honoured appropriately. Normally genizahs take the form of small cupboards but, occasionally, as in the genizah of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat, in Cairo, they were maintained over centuries as vast stores. When the Cairo genizah was dispersed at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, it was found to contain hundreds of thousands of scraps of books and documents dating back to the seventh and eighth centuries, an astonishing archive of Jewish culture now preserved in libraries around the world (including the Bodleian).2
Jewish books were not only publicly destroyed on many occasions, but the subject of deliberate acts of theft and confiscation, as an attempt to chart and understand the culture that the Nazi state sought to eradicate. Along with this mass destruction of books there were acts of preservation by communities and individuals who risked (and sometimes lost) their lives to save the most important physical form of their culture: the book.
The book-burning events of May 1933 took some time to escalate, partly because of the negative international reaction to the book-burnings. Writers were in the vanguard of those speaking out against the burnings and signalling them as a warning sign. The deaf-blind writer Helen Keller published a ‘Letter to the Student Body of Germany’: ‘You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds.’3 The writer H. G. Wells (whose books had also been burned) spoke out against ‘the Clumsy Lout’s revolution against thought, against sanity, and against books’ in September 1933, wondering ‘where it would take Germany’.4
In fact two new libraries were formed as a counterblast. A year later, on 10 May 1934, the Deutsche Freiheitsbibliothek (German Freedom Library, also known as the German Library of Burnt Books) was opened in Paris. The German Freedom Library was founded by German-Jewish writer Alfred Kantorowicz, with support from other writers and intellectuals such as André Gide, Bertrand Russell and Heinrich Mann (the brother of the German writer Thomas Mann), and rapidly collected over 20,000 volumes, not just the books which had been targeted for burning in Germany but also copies of key Nazi texts, in order to help understand the emerging regime. H. G. Wells was happy to have his name associated with the new library. The library became a focus for German émigré intellectuals and organised readings, lectures and exhibitions, much to the disgust of German newspapers. Following the fall of Paris to the Germans in 1940 the library was broken up, with many of the volumes joining the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.5 The Brooklyn Jewish Center in New York established an American Library of Nazi-Banned Books in December 1934, with noted intellectuals on its advisory board, including Albert Einstein and Upton Sinclair. The library was proclaimed as a means of preserving and promoting Jewish culture at a time of renewed oppression.6
The 10 May 1933 book-burning was merely the forerunner of arguably the most concerted and well-resourced eradication of books in history.7 Although the quantity of books destroyed in this early phase was not huge (and may have been overestimated), the psychological impact was devastating, and following these events many Jews left Germany altogether.8 The steady increase in anti-Semitic attacks continued as first Austria, and then the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia were annexed by Germany. Attacks on books were an essential element of this campaign. As the burnings continued, various Nazi groups began to compile lists of undesirable authors (which included communists and homosexuals as well as Jews). The library sector was not immune to the appeal of Nazism, and one leading German librarian, Wolfgang Herrmann, compiled a list of banned authors that became influential throughout Germany, as did Alfred Rosenberg (who would become Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories), whose views on culture and ideas were important to Hitler and other leading Nazis. Such lists, enforced by the police and the Sturmabteilung (the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing), were used by the Propaganda Ministry under Joseph Goebbels to stir up anti-Jewish hatred, resulting in bookshops, libraries and private dwellings being purged of undesirable books. The banned booklists were seeds that landed on fertile soil in the aftermath of the First World War and the economic collapse of the 1920s. The rise of Nazism was supported by all sectors of society, and student groups were encouraged by Herrmann in particular to purge both their local lending libraries and their university libraries of the titles on these lists. Whipping up the hatred, Herrmann described the German lending libraries as ‘literary bordellos’. At a conference of German librarians in 1933 one speaker actively spoke in favour of the book-burnings and seizure of works by Jewish and left-wing writers.9
German society became intoxicated with Nazism, with the world of books, ideas and knowledge fully complicit in this phenomenon. As anti-Jewish laws continued to be passed, attacks on synagogues increased and many Jewish religious libraries were destroyed. The destruction became an integral part of the Holocaust, the most extreme example of organised cultural annihilation. On 10 November 1938, Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the ‘Final Solution’, pointedly referred to the confiscation of Jewish archives in a telegram issued to the Nazi Party on the eve of Kristallnacht called ‘Massnahmen gegen Juden in der heutigen Nacht’ (‘Measures against Jews tonight’). A process of targeting archives of knowledge for destruction then intensified: ‘existing archive material must be confiscated by the police in all synagogues and business premises of the Jewish religious communities so that it is not destroyed in the course of the demonstrations … The archive material must be handed over to the responsible departments of the Sicherheitsdienst [Security Service]’.10
In 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War, the Gestapo began a systematic programme of confiscation, but the motivations for seizing Jewish archival collections were split between confiscation and destruction. The Gestapo’s work was superseded by a quasi-academic body, given official status, staff and funding, called the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage (Institute for Study of the Jewish Question). Based in Frankfurt am Main, this body, which officially opened in 1941, was led by Alfred Rosenberg, the leading strategist for anti-Semitism.11 The institute was intended to investigate the details of Judaism and its history as a religion, and its impact on European political affairs. At the heart of the institute’s work was the accumulation of a massive collection of books and manuscripts in Hebrew or other Semitic languages and of books about Judaism.12
The institute worked alongside an organisation that operated in the field, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg.13 The Einsatzstab (a German term meaning ‘operational group’) had two principal tasks: the collection of material for the institute and the destruction of ‘excess’ material. Much of the leadership of this organisation was left to Dr Johannes Pohl, who had studied biblical archaeology in Jerusalem (1932–4), and who had been a Catholic priest for a time before becoming a member of the National Socialist Party. Pohl left the priesthood, married, and became the curator of Hebraica and Judaica in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (the Berlin State Library), a position made possible by the forced expulsion of the previous curator, Arthur Spanier who was Jewish. Pohl’s motivations are unclear but after he left the priesthood his views became violently anti-Semitic. He began to publish anti-Semitic articles in German newspapers and magazines, using his expertise in the Hebrew language and Jewish studies, for example, to expatiate on the dangers of the Talmud (the central text of Jewish law). In 1941 Pohl moved to Frankfurt to head the Jewish section of Rosenberg’s institute.14 By April 1943, Rosenberg’s institute held over 550,000 volumes seized from the renowned Jewish collection of Frankfurt’s City Library, and from libraries in France, the Netherlands, Poland, Lithuania and Greece. This process was well documented thanks to the institute’s attention to detail and the regime’s desire for orderly, well-documented bureaucracy.15
During the second half of 1941, with the launch of the Eastern Front, the Nazi regime shifted from persecution of the Jews to their destruction. As the German war machine rolled over Poland, Russia and the Baltic states the Jews became major targets for genocide. Various organisations devoted to enforcing extreme anti-Jewish policies moved behind the Blitzkrieg.16
In many ways the mass murder of the Jews by the Nazis was not a new phenomenon. For centuries, the Jewish peoples of Europe had suffered oppression, largely at the hands of the Christian communities they lived among. Waves of persecution had forced Jews to move from country to country: they had been expelled from England in the twelfth century and from Spain in the fifteenth. In other parts of Europe the levels of acceptance of Jews waxed and waned. In 1516 the Venetian authorities forced the Jews of their city to live in a constrained area, known as the Ghetto, from where we derive the term.
Censorship of Jewish books grew during the period 1500–1700: for example, copies of the Talmud were ordered to be burned by papal edict in 1553.17 The following year the first Catholic Index Librorum Prohibitorum (‘Index of Prohibited Books’) was printed in Venice in 1554. This list included more than a thousand condemnations of authors and their works, including the complete works of 290 mostly Protestant authors, ten of the works of Erasmus as well as the compilation of Jewish laws known as the Talmud.18 In recent years scholars have begun to discover leaves from medieval Hebrew manuscripts that had been used by Christian bookbinders as waste material to cover registers of medieval documents in cities such as Cremona, Pavia and Bologna, the original Hebrew manuscript books having been confiscated.19 Central and eastern European countries also persecuted the Jews, and periodically imposed censorship, triggered by the Reformation debates in the early sixteenth century. The Jews of Frankfurt, for example, had their books seized in 1509 and 1510, thanks to the efforts of Johannes Pfefferkorn (1468/9–1521), a religious controversialist, who had been raised a Jew but converted to Catholicism, then dedicated himself to the suppression of Jewish publications in the Catholic German states.20 Further east, pogroms (organised massacres) became a familiar part of the suffering of the Jews (known as Ashkenazi Jews) living in the Pale of Settlement, the circumscribed area of the western parts of the Russian Empire (including what is today Ukraine, Belorussia, the Baltic states, parts of Poland, as well as western Russia), where the Jews were allowed to settle from 1791–1917.21
Despite their persecution, communities of Jews, whether in ghettos or living more freely, were able to thrive. Within eastern and central European culture, Hebrew and Yiddish were the languages of the Jews. Hebrew was used for religious services and rituals and Yiddish (originally a dialect of High German) served for everyday communication. As Hebrew was also the preferred language for intellectual culture, Yiddish was not even regarded as a ‘proper’ language by many Jews throughout the world, and the same went for the culture that coexisted alongside the Yiddish language. Yiddish had, however, by the early twentieth century become the native language of approximately 11 million people – roughly three-quarters of the world’s Jewish population – and was already a language with centuries of historical development and tradition.22 As the vernacular language of the majority of eastern European Jewry, Yiddish was more than a language, it was an entire culture and a way of life.
At the end of the nineteenth century a broad movement began that recognised the importance of Jewish culture in eastern Europe but also its fragility. Emerging from this movement were people who dedicated their lives to preserving Yiddish culture such as Simon Dubnow. Dubnow was a Russian Jewish scholar who, in 1891, published an essay in the journal Voskhod in which he argued that east European Jews did not sufficiently appreciate their own culture. He urged the public to begin collecting material that documented the culture of Ashkenazi Jews.23 The essay inspired many people to send him material and also gave rise to the setting up of several historical societies. The movement continued to gather pace, and by the 1920s there were several similar ideas in the air in the cities of Berlin, Vilna (now known as Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania) and New York for advancing Yiddish scholarship. Dubnow was also aware that the culture of the Jews of eastern Europe was under threat from pogroms, migration and assimilation with Christian communities, processes that had not vanished with the end of the nineteenth century: the pogroms of 1918–20, for instance, killed hundreds of thousands of Jews.
In Vilna in Lithuania, Max Weinreich and Zalman Reisen – who in 1923 had proposed a ‘Union of Yiddish philologists’ – began to meet and they enthusiastically rounded up local activists to consider how best to preserve Jewish culture. Weinreich had studied at St Petersburg University, and completed his education with a doctorate at Marburg in Germany. Two educational organisations in Vilna held a meeting on 24 March 1925 which endorsed proposals to establish a Yiddish Academic Institute, and encouraged colleagues in Poland to do the same, writing that ‘the Yiddish academic institute must and will without fail be created’.24 Vilna was fertile ground for such an initiative. The city had a large Jewish population: in 1939 the Jews comprised just under a third of the city’s demographic. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was known as a powerful centre of Jewish culture and learning, and was the birthplace of prominent religious leaders in the eighteenth century (such as the celebrated Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, the ‘Vilna Gaon’, a brilliant rabbinical scholar), becoming referred to as ‘Jerusalem in Lithuania’.25 Weinreich and Reisen’s new institute, which became known as YIVO (Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut), soon established itself as the focus of a ‘movement’ to collect Jewish history and culture in eastern Europe, and a tremendous energy began to surround the group there.26
Vilna was also a city with a strong culture of libraries, including the university library and other secular collections, but it could also boast one of Europe’s richest collections of Jewish books in the Strashun Library, a community library, arguably the first Jewish public library in the world, which developed as an intellectual centre for the Jewish community in Vilna.27 The library had been established by businessman and bibliophile Matityahu Strashun who, at his death in 1892, bequeathed his large collection of early and rare books to the Jewish community of the city. So a structure to house the collection was built adjacent to the Great Synagogue, with a board established to oversee the institution. The board allowed the library to be open seven days a week, including the Sabbath, such was the demand to access the knowledge in the library.28 Another major collection was the Mefitse Haskala (the Association to Spread Enlightenment), which had been established in 1911 and was owned by the Jewish community, holding over 45,000 volumes in Yiddish, Russian, Polish and Hebrew.29
Once established in Vilna, YIVO grew rapidly through the 1920s and 1930s, becoming ‘the national academy of a stateless people’.30 The priority for Weinreich and Reisen was to survey the available primary documents and through research to identify gaps so that scholars could go out and collect primary data. This process of gathering material, mostly through the work of volunteers, was known in Yiddish as zamlen. The zamlers collected material from living people – both documents and oral testimonies – sending the materials they collected to the institute in Vilna for the scholars there to analyse. The idea at the heart of YIVO was more than just the process of collecting; at the forefront of its work was archiving, preservation and sharing of the knowledge collected by the zamlers. A bibliographic commission was a key part of these activities and during YIVO’s first six weeks they collected 500 citations and within a year 10,000. By 1929 it had registered 100,000 citations and regularly received 300 newspapers of which 260 were in Yiddish. In 1926 they began to register all new books produced in Yiddish as well as all the most important articles in the Yiddish press and about Yiddish in other languages. By September 1926 over two hundred zamlers had donated a total of 10,000 items to the collections at YIVO.31
YIVO was not only to be a centre for Jewish studies, and a major library and archive for Jewish material, it began to be the spearhead of a mass movement. In late 1939 YIVO’s founding director, Max Weinreich, was in Denmark giving a lecture on the work of YIVO and found that he could not get back to Vilna because Soviet forces had invaded eastern Poland and had moved into Vilna. As a result Weinreich looked to the only other place where YIVO was established that could be considered safe. From New York, where he had set up an office, presciently, in 1929–30, Weinreich was able to correspond with the YIVO headquarters in Vilna. In New York he continued the core YIVO mission of collecting; in 1940–1 he sent out a call for material and placed adverts in the Yiddish press in the United States and in YIVO’s own newspaper published in New York. Although Weinreich did not realise it in 1939, YIVO, and the cultural, religious, social and intellectual life that it documented, would only survive because of the office in New York.32
In the hot summer of 1941 Hitler tore up the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and launched ‘Operation Barbarossa’ on an unsuspecting Russia. The Nazi Blitzkrieg was overwhelming, pushing the Russian army back rapidly. As part of this lightning attack, the German army captured Vilna on 24 June 1941. A team of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, led by Dr Herbert Gotthardt (who had been a librarian in Berlin before the war), arrived in the city just a few days later. At first they just visited synagogues and libraries, but soon they were arranging for the Gestapo to arrest Jewish scholars.33 As in other cities with sizeable Jewish populations, a ghetto was established, into which the Jewish population were corralled and controlled. Dr Johannes Pohl, from Rosenberg’s institute in Frankfurt, visited the city in February 1942 with three specialists and, having surveyed the city and the work that had been done since the seizure of Vilna, realised that a larger organisation would be required to deal with the various Jewish collections of books and documents. More to the point, Pohl realised that only Jewish specialists could undertake the task of identifying key materials. He therefore ordered the ghetto to provide him with twelve workers, to sort, pack and ship materials, and appointed a team of three Jewish intellectuals to oversee the work: Herman Kruk, Zelig Kalmanovitch and Chaikl Lunski. The Jewish guards of the ghetto called the group the ‘Paper Brigade’.34
The Einsatzstab team, with their forced labourers from the ghetto in the Paper Brigade, were given space in Vilna University Library. The entire collection of the Strashun Library, all 40,000 volumes, was moved there for selektsia: a sorting between survival and destruction for the books, which mirrored the fate of human beings in the death camps beginning to be used all across eastern Europe.35 Some of the books were to be sent to the Frankfurt Institute, others to nearby paper mills for recycling. The Jewish intellectuals in charge of this process were an extraordinary group of courageous scholars and librarians. They were led by Herman Kruk, who had been director of the Grosser Library, a library specialising in Yiddish and socialist literature in Warsaw, and who had fled to Vilna with other Jewish refugees after the Nazi invasion in 1939. He established a remarkable library in the Vilna Ghetto – technically a revival of the Hevrah Mefitse Haskala Library – and was assisted there by Moshe Abramowicz, who had worked in the library before the Nazi occupation, and a young woman, Dina, whom Abramowicz married in the ghetto. Zelig Kalmanovitch, who acted as Kruk’s deputy, was one of the pre-war directors of YIVO, and Chaikl Lunski, the head of the Strashun Library, now worked as a bibliographic consultant, cataloguing books to be sent to Frankfurt. ‘Kalmanovich and I don’t know whether we are gravediggers or saviors,’ wrote Kruk in his diary.36
A second worksite was soon opened up by Nazis in the YIVO building, and other Jews from the ghetto were needed to join the team making the selections, as the volume of material to be gone through was so great. By this point the Paper Brigade also included other women, such as Rachel Pupko-Krinsky, a former Gymnasium (high school) teacher of history who was skilled in medieval Latin, and creatives such as Abraham Sutzkever, a renowned Yiddish poet. The Nazi rage against Jewish books in Vilna was not confined to institutional libraries; as the Gestapo raided houses looking for Jews, the Einsatzstab squad came afterwards looking for their books to ensure the eradication of their way of life. The hunt for Jewish books became increasingly aggressive; at one point the floor of the reading room of Vilna University Library was ripped up to look for Jewish books which may have been hidden there. By April 1943 the work of the Einsatzstab in Riga, Kaunas, Vilna, Minsk and Kiev had taken control of 280,000 volumes, and 50,000 in Vilna alone awaited shipment to Frankfurt.37
The destruction of Jewish books was recorded in meticulous detail by Pohl’s team, with biweekly lists being kept of books sent to Germany, numbers sent to paper mills, with breakdowns by language and date of publication. A quota of 70 per cent was set for the proportion to be destroyed. Sometimes Nazis who could not tell the difference sent books to Frankfurt based solely on the attractiveness of their bindings.
In June 1942 Kruk recorded in his diary: ‘The Jewish porters occupied with the task are literally in tears; it is heartbreaking to see this happening.’ They knew exactly what fate awaited the books and documents that were not being sent to Frankfurt, and what it would mean for the organisation they were so dedicated to before the war: ‘YIVO is dying,’ wrote Kruk, ‘its mass grave is the paper mill.’38 For a time there was a disagreement about the right way to deal with the books. Some, like Kalmanovitch, argued that it was best for the books to be sent to Frankfurt – at least they would survive there. Others felt that there must be a better way.
As a response to the dreadful destruction being wreaked on the libraries of Vilna, members of the Paper Brigade worked out strategies to save books. Firstly, they realised that one simple response was to drag out the work for as long as possible. They would read the books to each other when the Germans were not in the room. This could be dangerous as the Germans overseeing the process would not look kindly on being duped, but the second strategy was even more dangerous. At the end of the working day they would hide books and documents in their clothes, and take them to the ghetto. Kruk had a pass that allowed him passage in and out of the ghetto without a body search, but if Nazis found books on other workers they risked being immediately stripped and beaten, and they would then be sent to the ghetto prison, or even to the Lukishki prison in Vilna, and then to the execution site for the Jews created by the Nazis at Ponar, outside Vilna. From this destination there was no return.
Between March 1942 and September 1943 thousands of printed books, and tens of thousands of manuscript documents, made their way back to the Vilna Ghetto thanks to the astonishing, risky and dangerous biblio-smuggling of the Paper Brigade.
One of the forced labourers in the Paper Brigade’s sorting teams, the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever, obtained a permit from the Gestapo to bring paper into the ghetto as fuel for the ovens, but instead he brought rare Hebrew and Yiddish printed books, manuscript letters by Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky and Mayim Bialik, one of the diaries of the founder of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, and drawings by Marc Chagall, all of which were immediately and carefully hidden. Many of these documents survive today in the YIVO collections in New York. The Paper Brigade even created a ruse to bring unused office furniture from the YIVO headquarters into the ghetto. The Germans gave them permission, but the Brigade hid hundreds of books and documents inside the furniture. Once in the ghetto, the books and documents were extracted and then secreted in an elaborate and sophisticated system of hiding places. One of the residents of the Vilna Ghetto, Gershon Abramovitsh, who had been a construction engineer before the war, built a bunker sixty feet underground, which had its own ventilation system, an electricity supply, and even a tunnel leading to a well which was physically outside the ghetto.39 The bunker had originally been conceived as a hiding place for the weapons of the ghetto underground – and for Abramovitsh’s mother, but she was happy to share it with the rescued books and documents. Some of the textbooks and children’s books smuggled in were delivered to clandestine schools. Others were of great practical use to the partisan groups forming within the ghetto: one was a book which showed how to make Molotov cocktails.
Despite the personal risks that the Paper Brigade were taking, and their heroic efforts to smuggle books and documents to the ghetto, the majority of the material was still going to the paper mills outside Vilna. Members of the Brigade sensed that their time was almost up. Kalmanovitch wrote in his diary on 23 August: ‘Our work is reaching its conclusion. Thousands of books are being dumped as trash, and the Jewish books will be liquidated. Whatever part we can rescue will be saved, with God’s help. We will find it when we return as free human beings.’40
On the 23 September 1943, after several weeks of occupation spent rounding up the terrified inhabitants, the brutal liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto began. The ghetto’s own extraordinary library was closed and the books destroyed.41 The members of the Paper Brigade received no special treatment; along with their fellow inhabitants of the ghetto most of them were murdered by the Nazis at Ponar, or were sent to forced labour camps in Estonia, most never to return.42
Unknown to the Paper Brigade, a parallel effort to save records of east European Jewish life from destruction was undertaken 300 miles to the south-west of Vilna, in the Warsaw Ghetto. Here a clandestine group called the Oyneg Shabes documented daily life in the ghetto over its three years of existence, creating more than 30,000 pages of essays, poems, letters and photographs. They recorded folk humour, jokes, messianic hopes, stories, poems, but also rants about other Jews working for the Nazis in the ghetto and even details of the behaviour of the Jewish police that controlled the ghetto in concert with the Nazis. Even ephemera such as decorated paper sweet wrappers were preserved.
The material was, as in Vilna, buried in the ghetto (in ten boxes and three metal milk churns), but these materials were not pre-existing books and documents, rescued from the rich book culture of the city: the Warsaw collections were there to document the life of the ghetto itself, and of its inhabitants. As in Vilna these acts of preservation were intended to allow the future to remember the past. Emanuel Ringelblum, the leader of Oyneg Shabes, was discovered hiding with his family and thirty-four other Jews and murdered in March 1944, just a few days after the annihilation of the Warsaw Ghetto.43
The Oyneg Shabes archive was recovered in two parts. The first was in September 1946, the result of a systematic search in the ruins of the ghetto. Two milk churns containing the second part were uncovered on 1 December 1950. The third portion is still missing. Some 1,693 items comprising 35,000 pages were recovered from the Ringelblum part of the archive alone, and they contain minutes, memoranda, diaries, memoirs, last letters, essays, poems, songs, jokes, novels, stories, plays, classroom compositions, diplomas, proclamations, posters, photographs, drawings and paintings. The collection is now in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and is digitally available in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which also displays one of the original milk churns.44
In Vilna, a few members of the Paper Brigade, with other Jews from the ghetto, managed to escape and join the partisans in the forests. One of these was the poet Abraham Sutzkever who joined the Jewish partisan brigade Nekome-nemer (‘The Avengers’). On hearing the news of the liberation of Vilna, Sutzkever and Justas Paleckis, the president-in-exile of Lithuania, raced to the city passing the wreckage of the routed German army on the roads, the corpses of German soldiers issuing a stench of putrefaction that was ‘more pleasant to me than any perfume’, so Sutzkever recorded in his diary.45
When he returned to Vilna after the Germans had been forced out by the Soviet advance, Sutzkever discovered that the YIVO building had been hit by artillery shells, and the documents secretly hidden there had all been destroyed. Most of the members of the Paper Brigade had been moved to forced labour camps or murdered in the final phases of the Nazi genocide. A handful – Sutzkever; fellow poet Schmerke Kaczerginski; librarian Dina Abramowicz; Ruzhka Korczak, a student activist of the socialist Zionist ‘Young Guard’; Noime Markeles, another student and communist who worked in the brigade with his father; Akiva Gershater, a photographer and expert in Esperanto; and Leon Bernstein, a mathematician – were the only members of the Paper Brigade to survive.46 They gathered in the ruins of Vilna and began to look for the hiding places inside the ghetto, some of which had been discovered by the Nazis and their contents burned. Miraculously, the underground store developed by Gershon Abramovitsh was intact and the materials were brought to the surface, their survival a symbol of hope for the few remaining Jews of the city. Two other hiding places in the ghetto were also intact. The surviving members of the Paper Brigade who had escaped from Vilna, led by Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski, were joined by Abba Kovner, former commander of the ghetto underground. They now established a Jewish Museum of Culture and Art as a kind of successor to YIVO with formal approval of the Soviet authorities who were now the official government, under the auspices of the People’s Commissariat for Education. They took this step as they realised that under Soviet control, no private institutes such as YIVO would be tolerated. In the new museum, housed in the former ghetto library, they began to secure the recovered collections. Twenty tons of YIVO materials were found at a paper mill, and thirty more tons of paper materials were found in the courtyard of the Refuse Administration of Vilna. Potato sacks full of books and documents began to arrive at the museum.47
As summer turned to autumn, life turned sour for the Jews returning to Vilna. The Soviet authorities began to assert control and Jewish cultural activities became a target for political suppression. When Sutzkever and his colleagues discovered that the Soviets had sent the thirty tons of books discovered in the Refuse Administration back to the paper mills again, the YIVO members in Vilna realised that the books and documents were going to have to be saved again.
The Soviet authorities were not only vehemently opposed to all forms of religion, but they were particularly anti-Jewish, and throughout the 1940s Jews began to be associated with America as so many Jews had moved there. Gradually, the three museum staff became involved in smuggling the books out again, sending some to the YIVO office in New York. The situation in Vilna had become so severe that Kaczerginski resigned in November 1945, and he and Sutzkever fled to Paris. In 1949 the YIVO collections were requisitioned from the museum by the KGB and placed in the basement of the Church of St George – appropriated as a storage facility by the Book Chamber of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic – located next to a former Carmelite monastery. The materials remained there undisturbed for forty years.
From this point onwards the survival of the YIVO and other Jewish materials in Vilna was due to the heroic efforts of a Lithuanian librarian, Dr Antanas Ulpis.48 Ulpis was director of the Book Chamber, a proto-national library which preserved and documented all books published in Lithuania. His bibliographical survey of Lithuanian publications remains a standard work of reference to this day. Located in the monastery next to the Church of St George, the Book Chamber used the church as a storehouse for its collections. Ulpis was highly sympathetic to the Jews in Lithuania and made the unusual step of appointing Jews to senior staff positions during the 1950s and 1960s. He was allowed to travel through Lithuania seeking material for the Book Chamber and managed to preserve a number of important Jewish collections that had survived the Nazis but were once again vulnerable to destruction under the Soviets.
Ulpis also obtained material from other libraries in Vilna that had inherited parts of the Paper Brigade’s collection. As the government had by now declared all forms of Jewish culture anti-Soviet, and ordered the removal of Yiddish items from circulation, libraries were reluctant to hold on to it. Ulpis persuaded library directors to contribute archival materials outside his collecting policy. He knew that the Jewish materials would be destroyed if the communist authorities became aware of them, so he secreted them in the church – even the organ pipes were used to hide Jewish documents. (Many years later when his son was perplexed to be unable to play the organ, only his father knew the real reason why it wouldn’t sound.) Ulpis hid other books in ‘plain sight’, putting them beneath or within groups of more conventional books. He gambled on the communist authorities not probing too deeply into the hundreds of thousands of books stored there. Ulpis spent many years ensuring that his collection remained a secret, inspired by the hope that one day the political climate would allow him to reveal its presence. Antanas Ulpis died in 1981 before he saw his dream of the return of the Jewish books and documents to the community that had created them. He kept his secret well.
During the 1980s, the policy of glasnost (a Russian term made popular by Mikhail Gorbachev, meaning ‘openness and transparency’), and the general thawing of the Cold War, allowed an opening up of political and intellectual life in the communist countries of eastern Europe. It was now possible for Jewish organisations to meet openly and for Jews to have a public life of their own again. I witnessed glasnost at first hand when visiting Poland in 1987. The Library of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow became one of the sources of change in that city, thanks to a library of English language materials managed by the British Council. All across the Soviet bloc, libraries were an essential part of these massive changes, and the Book Chamber in Vilna was no exception.
In 1988 an article in a Soviet Yiddish magazine claimed there were over 20,000 Yiddish and Hebrew books in the collection. These began to be examined in greater detail, and the director of the Book Chamber opened up discussions with Samuel Norich, then director of YIVO in New York. Norich visited Vilna and discovered that in addition to the printed books there were tens of thousands of documents, many of them the materials collected by the YIVO zamlers, secretly preserved by the Paper Brigade. At this point the collections, which had been saved multiple times by people risking their lives, became embroiled in cultural politics once again. Norich was anxious to have the documents returned to YIVO. With the rebirth of the Lithuanian nation, however, the collections were seen in a different light – a symbol of Lithuanian national culture before the Soviet era. On 30 May 1989 the National Library of Lithuania was created anew out of its previous iterations – national, Nazi-occupied, Soviet and national again – it had begun in 1919 with the founding of the Central Library of Lithuania. In 1990 Lithuania declared independence from the Soviet Union. There was a period of great political volatility – military intervention was narrowly avoided, the Soviet regime finally collapsed and Lithuania returned to democracy. In 1994 it was finally agreed that the documents could be moved to YIVO’s headquarters in New York for conservation, cataloguing and copying, before being returned to the National Library of Lithuania.
On 25 October 2017, the website of the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania posted an announcement that a further 170,000 pages of Jewish documents had been identified in the Church of St George, in the Lithuanian National Archives and in the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. The volume of material that Ulpis managed to hide away was astonishing. In 1991, 150,000 documents were discovered. The material concerned the Jewish communal bodies, the organisation of Jewish life in eastern Europe, the work of Dubnow and others in the early days of YIVO, of Yiddish theatre in the interwar period, and included such treasures as the record book of the Vilna Synagogue, which details the religious life of that institution during the time of Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, the celebrated ‘Vilna Gaon’.49
The collections were once again to be catalogued, preserved and copied at the expense of YIVO, but the physical objects were to remain in Lithuania under the stewardship of the National Library. One of the major differences between this project and the previous initiative was that now digitisation could make the materials accessible via the internet. The director of the National Library, Professor Renaldas Gudauskas, was keen to promote his institution as having ‘preserved one of the most significant collections of Jewish heritage documents in Lithuania and the world’. Ten documents were placed on public exhibition in New York as a symbol of the collaboration between the National Library and YIVO – they included a booklet of poems written in the Vilna Ghetto by Abraham Sutzkever. The survival of this fragile booklet through numerous attempts at destruction was a testament to the astonishing dedication of numerous individuals to preserving the knowledge of the Jewish communities of eastern Europe.50
The treasures that have reappeared in Lithuania after seventy-five years may not be the last pieces of knowledge to have survived the Nazis. After the Allies captured Frankfurt in 1945 the vast looted collections of Rosenberg’s Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question were moved to a depository at Offenbach where they could be appraised, sorted and returned to their rightful owners.51 One American visitor to Offenbach in 1947 described it as ‘a mortuary of books’.52 Various committees were established to deal with the return of these collections, including a ‘Committee on Restoration of Continental Jewish Museums, Libraries, and Archives’, which was chaired by the eminent British scholar Cecil Roth.
To keep Jewish archives in Germany, the country responsible for the Holocaust, was felt by many Jews in Israel to be unthinkable. The prominent Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem wrote to the great rabbi and scholar Leo Baeck that ‘where the Jews have migrated is where their books belong’. There were, however, some cities where a small remnant of earlier Jewish citizenry remained, such as Worms, Augsburg and Hamburg, and where the transfer of archives was fiercely resisted, as it symbolised the failure of continuity of European Jewish settlement. A campaign was mounted in the city of Worms by the former municipal archivist Friedrich Illert, who had helped to save the Jewish records from the Nazis, and who, along with Isidor Kiefer, the former chair of the city’s Jewish community who had settled in New York, hoped that the archives would help create ‘a little Jerusalem’ in Worms once again. The case was symbolic of those Jews in Germany who wanted to keep their communities alive, as the ultimate triumph over evil. In Worms and Hamburg court cases were fought over the fate of the Jewish archives, with German archivists and local Jewish leaders fighting to prevent the transfer of ‘their’ archives to institutions in Israel. They ultimately lost their cases, through political pressure from Konrad Adenauer, the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, who was anxious to show cooperation between post-Nazi West Germany and the state of Israel.53
Some Jewish library collections have remained elusive long into the twentieth century. In the last ten years alone, 30,000 books have been returned to 600 owners, heirs and institutions, these efforts supported more recently by the facility to post lists of books awaiting restitution online (by organisations such as the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, and the World Jewish Restitution Organisation). Since 2002, the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin (ZBB) has been systematically searching for Nazi looted materials among its collections and returning them, funded since 2010 by the Berlin Senate. The task is very slow and difficult: Berlin City Library searched 100,000 books; of the 29,000 books they identified as stolen, just 900 books have been returned to owners in more than twenty countries. Since 2009, 15,000 books from fifteen Austrian libraries have been returned to owners or their heirs.54
Alfred Rosenberg was tried at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945–6 for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The records of the trial of Rosenberg refer frequently to libraries and archives, the Soviet prosecutors focussing on his campaign to plunder Estonia, Latvia and Russia, and he struggled to defend himself against the evidence they presented. His only defence against the French prosecutor was to use the old excuse that he only acted because he had ‘received a government order to confiscate archives’. Rosenberg’s indictment stated that he was ‘responsible for a system of organized plunder of both public and private property throughout the invaded countries of Europe. Acting under Hitler’s orders of January 1940 … he directed the Einsatzstab Rosenberg which plundered museums and libraries’. He was also convicted of planning the Final Solution and was responsible for the segregation, shooting of Jews and forced labour of youths. He was sentenced to death by hanging on 1 October 1946.55
One of the most heavily used collections of Jewish materials in the Bodleian today is the Coppenhagen collection, formed by the family of that name in Amsterdam. Isaac Coppenhagen (1846–1905) was an important teacher and scribe; he, his son Haim (1874–1942) and grandson Jacob (1913–1997) built an important collection of Hebrew books in their home. With the invasion of Holland in 1940 the collection was moved to a Jewish school. As the Nazi persecution of Jews in Holland became more severe the collection was seen to be at risk, and with the aid of non-Jews the books were moved to a nearby Dutch school and hidden. Jacob too was given refuge by non-Jews, but the rest of his family were murdered in the Nazi death camps. Some of the books in the Coppenhagen collection were seized by the Nazis in Amsterdam and were removed by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg: at least two books in the collection in Oxford today have the stamps of the Offenbach Archival Depot, evidence that the books had been plundered from a private library.
Despite the ferocity of the Nazis the impulse for preservation ultimately prevailed. As the smoke cleared from the wreckage, books and archives began, slowly, to resurface. Emanuel Ringelblum, Herman Kruk and countless others were murdered, but their sacrifice enabled the memory of their culture and faith to persist, even if it was only a small fragment of what had existed before. The work of Abraham Sutzkever, Dina Abramowicz, Antanas Ulpis and groups like the Paper Brigade and Oyneg Shabes enabled the documents that survived to have a meaning beyond the paper and parchment they were written on. YIVO in New York, the Bodleian in Oxford, the National Library of Lithuania in Vilnius (as the city became more commonly known) continue to preserve the cultural record of Jewish life. As I write, the new National Library of Israel is being constructed in Jerusalem, a 45,000-square metre building housing the largest collection of written Judaica ever amassed (including the archive of Abraham Sutzkever): a home of the book for the People of the Book.