Protecting books from the Nazis
While restricted to a ghetto, group of Jewish artists saved their culture from extinction
In this slim but bracing book, David Fishman casts light upon a group of Jewish artists, intellectuals and bibliophiles who took it upon themselves to save their culture from extinction at the hand of the Nazis. Remarkably, they managed to do this while being restricted to a ghetto in Vilna, a city with a large Jewish population known as the “Jerusalem of Lithuania.”
“The Nazis,” Fishman explains in The Book Smugglers, “sought not only to murder the Jews but also to obliterate their culture.” They also wanted to prove the depravity of the Jewish race, which involved collating thousands of rare Jewish books and documents and shipping them off to Germany, where they would be catalogued and analyzed.
The Nazis, being as organized as they were, had a special branch to perform this task, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, which started plundering cultural artifacts in France in 1940.
One of its core beliefs was Judenforschung Ohne Juden — the study of the Jews without the Jews. Ironically, they needed Jews to sort the massive amounts of material they acquired in Vilna, and this group became known as “the Paper Brigade.”
Theirs was a dangerous task. Only 30 per cent of what was collected was sent to Germany, with the rest destined for destruction or recycling. (Torah scrolls were fashioned into boot inserts for the German army.) Because their work took place outside the ghetto, the paper brigade would smuggle what they could back into the ghetto for storage, knowing that if they were caught they would be executed. Much depended on who was guarding the ghetto gate: Germans? Lithuanians? Or the Jewish ghetto police, who wouldn’t search too thoroughly.
It was a huge risk, and some in the ghetto didn’t understand why Brigade members were risking their lives for books instead of food. One member simply replied that the books were “irreplaceable” and “didn’t grow on trees.”
The smuggling went on for months, and when the Soviets “liberated” Vilna in July 1944, the Brigade naturally celebrated. This proved to be premature, however, and once again they found it necessary to come to the rescue of precious cultural artifacts.
Fishman, who used diaries, memoirs and letters, and interviews with inmates of the Vilna ghetto, focuses on a handful of people, drawing intimate portraits of each.
He’s adept at recreating the suffocating tension they experienced and doesn’t shy away from the infighting among those in the brigade (a motley group that included communists, Zionists and those who believed in neither).
At times, however, he gets bogged down in the minutiae of his story, especially when discussing Soviet organizational structures, a reflection more of his academic background than his gifts as a storyteller.
Still, what he has produced is an important work that rightfully celebrates the bravery of a group of people whose lives made a huge difference. James Macgowan is a frequent contributor to the Star’s book section.