Years ago, I read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, in which the author argues that there must be something for people to live for in order to survive adversity. That thing might be family, creating art, or even revenge. For the Jewish librarians, writers, and teachers in David E. Fishman’s The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis, the thing that keeps them going in the face of the Holocaust is saving as much of their written heritage as possible from destruction and theft by the Einsatztab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR).
Before World War II, Vilnius, Lithuania was called a Jerusalem by European Jews. It was a center of Jewish culture and learning. It was the home of the first Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut or YIVO, a world renowned center for Jewish research. YIVO, the Vilnius Synagogue, and other centers in the city had thousands of documents and books recording centuries of Jewish life and thought in the city. The city’s cultural and intellectual heritage made it a prime target for the ERR and Nazi pseudo-scientists. When the Nazis took the city in 1941, Jewish citizens were sent to a ghetto and the ERR descended to loot their libraries.
A group of writers, teachers, and librarians was pulled from the ghetto to process looted books and documents. Known as the paper brigade, men and women like Shmerke Kaczerginski, Zelig Kalmanovitch, Herman Kruk, Abraham Sutzkever, and Rachela Krinsky were ordered to identify documents to send either to Germany, to the Nazis’ institute for “Jewish Research,” or be pulped. These heroes did everything they could to hide books and other items from the Nazis so that irreplaceable knowledge would not be lost. They risked their lives to sneak papers into the ghetto, though they were mocked by some of their fellow inmates for not bringing in food or weapons.
After the war, one of the surviving paper brigade members, Rachela Krinsky, explained why they worked so hard to save books:
the books were also, like us, in mortal danger. For many of them, we were their last readers. (Chapter 9*)
In my heart, I too believe in the power of literature and the written word to enlighten, uplift, and transport. And few things sadden me more than the idea that knowledge might be lost and books go unread. Seeing it twisted by agents of the ERR or simply destroyed in a paper mill would have broken my heart. Just reading about this chapter of the Holocaust had me nearly in tears. For the ERR, it wasn’t enough to help murder a people; they had to murder Jewish culture and knowledge, too.
The Book Smugglers documents the paper brigade’s efforts to save as much written material as possible. It follows the surviving members through the war, when it was relatively safe to recover their books and papers. Once it was clear that the Soviet Union was not interested in helping Jewish Vilnius rebuild, the paper brigade shifted gears to smuggling their books (again) out of Europe and to the New York headquarters of YIVO.
I’ve lost count of how many books about the Holocaust I’ve read, but I know that I’ve never read a book on that subject that hit me so hard where I lived before. I am a librarian who works with other librarians and academics, with people just like Kaczerginski and the other members of the paper bridge. The Book Smugglers tells the story of people who did what I hope I would be strong enough to do if I were in their shoes.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss for review consideration. It will be released 3 October 2017.
* Quote is from an ARC provided by ForeEdge. It is not paginated.
This sounds like an absolutely INCREDIBLE book, and considers a topic that many of us readers find dear to our hearts. Wow. Great review! I’m definitely going to look into getting a copy of this for myself.
The Book Smugglers completely blew me away. I plan on buying my own copy so that I can mark it up and love it forever.
Annie, your review is insightful and sensitive. I’m in the middle of “The Book Smugglers” right now, and I also thought of Viktor Frankel when asking myself why people would take such risks to preserve “paper.”
Equally remarkable to me is that people living under such extreme conditions, with the threat of death ever present, retained the desire to read, and to mount and attend concerts, lectures and plays. Do you know the story of the “Defiant Requiem,” a series of sixteen performances of the Verdi Requiem by inmates of the Terezin concentration camp? You can read about it here. https://hub.jhu.edu/magazine/2012/winter/may-it-go-to-heart/. The idea of prisoners learning Verdi’s complex masterpiece by heart after a day of slave labor, while some singers were being deported to Auschwitz, almost defies belief.
“The Book Smugglers” and thinking about Viktor Frankel also brought to mind a much less likely artistic work — the movie “Friday Night Lights,” which chronicles a season of a high school football team. The successes and failures of the team assume an importance to the residents of a small Texas town that, quite simply, exceeds all reason. The viewer is, I think, meant to initially feel that it is nothing short of madness to invest so much emotion — which often exacts a heavy psychic toll and cost to relationships — over something as ultimately unimportant as football. Gradually, though, the viewer is drawn in and comes to realize that the town’s football madness is simply a particular manifestation of the human quest for excellence and “man’s search for meaning.”
One more thought. You might be interested to see the documentary file “Partisans of Vilna,” which relates the better-known story of the ghetto’s armed resistance to the Nazis. It’s available for purchase from the Chisela Foundation, http://cieslafoundation.org/product/partisans-of-vilna-dvd/.
All the best,
Howard