The Book Thieves

by Anders Rydell

  Two hundred and fifty priceless Torah scrolls were stolen from the city’s synagogues along with large collections of religious literature, incunabula, and books printed in Saloníki during the 1500s. Some of these Torah scrolls went back to the Middle Ages and had come to Saloníki with the Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. They were richly decorated in the Arab-Sephardic style, with crowns of silver and gold, manufactured by Jewish tradesmen and artists during the Renaissance. They had been the first texts to be saved from the fire in 1917. Even the rabbinical court, Beth Din Tzedek, was robbed of its library of 2,500 books.

  The archive of Thessaloniki’s largest bank, Union, was a particularly important target for the ERR—it held documents that the Nazis could use to chart the economic networks of the Sephardic Jews.

  There is no existing figure for how much was plundered in Thessaloniki, but according to the historian Mark Mazower, it must have been tens of thousands of books, manuscripts, and incunabula.21 One important library that was lost belonged to Rabbi Haham Haim Habib, a collection that had been built up by his family over several generations. Haim Habib was one of the city’s foremost Orthodox rabbis, and he had become well known for having on one occasion refused to shake the hand of the queen of Greece for religious reasons. Haim Habib’s library contained eight thousand volumes on religion, philosophy, history, and Jewish law.22 But the plundering was so systematic that not even small libraries got away. For instance, a library belonging to Jewish schoolteachers was taken, although it consisted of only six hundred books, mainly on language teaching and modern literature.

  Most but not all of the plundered collections were taken back to Germany by train. Of the 250 confiscated Torah scrolls, 150 went to Germany. However, 100 scrolls, which were probably considered less interesting from a research perspective, were burned in Thessaloniki. For unknown reasons the same fate awaited Haim Habib’s library, which was burned in the internment camp that the Nazis had set up.23

  The deportations to the extermination camps in occupied Poland had started in earnest in Europe in 1942. But in Greece the deportations were delayed by the refusal of the Italians to cooperate. The SS was determined to “solve the Jewish question” in Greece. Heinrich Himmler had already in 1941 warned Hitler that a large Jewish population such as the one in Thessaloniki was a threat to the Reich. SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, in charge of the logistics of the deportations, lost patience and finally, in February 1943, dispatched Dieter Wisliceny and Alois Brunner to Thessaloniki. Wisliceny and Brunner were among the most hardened and brutal murderers in the SS. Brunner, whom Eichmann called “my best man,” had earlier organized the deportations of tens of thousands of Jews in Vienna. He personally executed the well-known Austrian banker Siegmund Bosel, who was dragged out of a hospital in Vienna and shot while still wearing his hospital clothes. After the war, Brunner fled to Syria, where he is believed to have worked as an adviser to the regime. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Brunner very likely died there in 2010, at age ninety-eight.

  In Thessaloniki, Wisliceny and Brunner set up their headquarters in a villa just outside the city center, which they decorated with a black SS flag. Two days after their arrival in the city all Jews over the age of five were ordered to wear a yellow star.24 Within a week Jews were forbidden to use telephones, ride on trams, or move about in public places. At the same time, Wisliceny started drawing up plans for something that had never existed in Thessaloniki: ghettos. One ghetto was created in the western part of the city, another in the eastern suburbs.

  At the same time, the SS, with the help of Jewish forced labor, started building a transit camp by the train station, surrounded by barbed-wire fences. The transit camp was built in such a way that it surrounded an already existing Jewish quarter. Its population would be the first to be deported.

  By March, when Wisliceny and Brunner had forced most of the city’s Jews into ghettos, these were sealed off from the surrounding world. A few thousand of the city’s Jews, mostly young men and women, managed to escape by getting across the Italian-occupied zone or fleeing into the Macedonian mountains and joining ELAS, the Greek Communist resistance movement.

  A little more than a month after Wisliceny and Brunner’s arrival, the first trains started leaving—eighty tightly packed freight cars, with 2,800 people inside. Before their departure, the SS had made them change their drachmas into Polish złotys. In fact, this was a bluff, as the money they received was counterfeit. In the place where they were going, there was no need for money. They had been told that they were going to Kraków, but the actual final destination was Auschwitz-Birkenau. Two days later the next train departed. Jewish working-class people were sent off first, which spread hopeful rumors among the richer ghetto dwellers that only “Communists” would be sent to Poland. By mid-July 1943 there were only two thousand Jews left in Thessaloniki. Wisliceny and Brunner had saved the “privileged” Jews for last: the rabbis, local leaders, rich businessmen, and collaborators such as the units of Jewish security guards that the SS had organized as additional manpower. It was a cynical and efficient strategy for breaking down and murdering a people. The ones saved until last were the leaders, people who in a variety of ways held the society together. For reasons of self-preservation, naïveté, or an inability to appreciate the danger of their situation, these leaders persuaded others to follow the increasingly absurd demands, which step by step moved them closer to the gas chambers.

  Of course, not even those saved till last got away. When the leaders had no one left to lead, it was their turn. Many of the more well-heeled among them were tortured by the SS for information about any caches of gold or other valuables they might have hidden. After that, the “privileged” Jews were sent to Bergen-Belsen.25

  Forty-four thousand of Thessaloniki’s Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.26 Within a few hours of their arrival most of them were dead, if they even got there—many died in the tightly packed freight cars on the long train journey to Poland. The unusually high death rate among Thessaloniki’s Jews has been explained by the fact that many of them were in such a bad state when they arrived that they were sent directly to the gas chambers.

  In a matter of a few months in 1943, four-hundred-year-old Sephardic Thessaloniki ceased to exist. Wisliceny and Brunner were able to report to Eichmann after the summer that Thessaloniki was Judenrein—cleansed of Jews. This was not entirely true. There were still fifteen Jews in Thessaloniki who were married to Greeks, and for this reason had been permitted to stay. But even their positions were precarious. When one of them lost his wife in childbirth, he was immediately deported. The newborn child was allowed to stay for the time being.27

  About thirteen thousand of Thessaloniki’s Jews avoided the gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau by being selected for slave work. Their fate was seldom enviable. Many women and children from Thessaloniki would be subjected to experiments by, among others, Josef Mengele, who had started working at the camp only a few months earlier. Women from Thessaloniki, some of them pregnant, had cancers implanted into their wombs, and men had their testicles removed. Others were used for experiments with contagious diseases. Three hundred young women from Thessaloniki between sixteen and twenty years old were selected for this purpose. All were dead by September 1943. Of all the medical experiments carried out in Auschwitz-Birkenau, a quarter are believed to have been conducted on Jews from Thessaloniki.28

  Many of the men from Thessaloniki were chosen to work in units known as Sonderkommandos, charged with carrying out the dead from the gas chambers and burning the corpses. Those who came into contact with Jews from Thessaloniki in the camps have testified about the impression they made on them, including Primo Levi:

  Next to us there is a group of Greeks, those admirable and terrible Jews of Salonica, tenacious, thieving, wise, ferocious and united, so determined to live, such pitiless opponents in the struggle for life; those Greeks who have conquered in the kitchens
and in the yards, and whom even the Germans respect and the Poles fear. They are in their third year of camp, and nobody knows better than them what the camp means. They now stand closely in a circle, shoulder to shoulder, and sing one of their interminable chants.29

  Short of two thousand would survive and return to Thessaloniki after the war. There was not much to come back to. Most of the survivors came back alone, having lost all their families and relatives in the camps. Their houses, apartments, and companies in Thessaloniki had been taken over by Greeks, who had bought them from the Germans. Any attempts to recover their lost property were stopped by the new, right-wing Greek government. One survivor spoke of how, in Thessaloniki, there was not even “a rabbi who could give us a blessing.”30

  Most chose to move on, as they could not bear living in a city “that had been robbed of its soul,” as Erika Perahia Zemour puts it. Nor would the rich cultural and literary legacy of the Sephardic community ever come back. The greater part of it was scattered and gone, apart from single pages of Jewish writings and pieces of Torah scrolls that showed up in Thessaloniki’s markets after the war. The paper was used as stuffing for shoes and the parchment to make shoe soles.31

  [ 11 ]

  THE MASS GRAVE IS A PAPER MILL

  Vilnius

  With a printed-out map in my hand I have found my way to the address, Vivulskio gatvé 18, in Vilnius, Lithuania. I don’t know what I was expecting to see. Maybe it has always been the same thing that attracts people to places of historical importance. A meadow where once an important battle was fought, or a café where an important novel was allegedly written. The pull of such places is that they offer us a way of getting closer to historical events and the people who figured in them. In our imagination, at least, they seem to offer a way of bridging the gulf of time that separates us.

  At Vivulskio gatvé 18, a newly built nine-story block of apartments rises up, modern and black with glass windows reaching from floor to ceiling. A symbol of the new, young Vilnius with its hipsters, minimalist fusion restaurants, and nightclubs. But to those who know about it, this address is associated with something quite different. It played an important part in the most traumatic chapter in Vilnius’s history.

  In those times, the street name was spelled differently—it was known as Wiwulskiego when Vilnius was a part of Poland. It was the location of the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (Scientific Institute of Yiddish), abbreviated as YIVO. The institute was in a stone house, and the first thing that met visitors in the spacious entrance vestibule was a world map, on which the institute and its branch organizations were marked. When the ERR took over the house in 1942, it had been a barrack for German soldiers. Hanging over the world map was a flag with the German eagle and the swastika.1 In the rooms, the ERR found books and newspapers flattened into the floor. But in the cellar it found what it was really looking for: tens of thousands of books and periodicals that had been flung down there when the soldiers moved in.

  Thrown into that cellar was one of the most important Jewish libraries in Eastern Europe, a library that was the product of an ambitious project to save the literary, cultural, and historical heritage of the Ashkenazi Jews. It was a project, or rather a movement, that had its origins in the late 1800s.

  Unlike in Western Europe, where Jews were given citizen’s rights in the 1800s, most Jews in Eastern Europe were still at the turn of the century living under conditions that had not changed significantly since medieval times. Of the many restrictions imposed on Jews, perhaps the most debilitating was their exclusion from higher education. At least that was how Simon Dubnov saw it.

  He was born in 1860 in the small Russian community of Mszislau, in the Jewish Pale of Settlement. Like other Ashkenazi Jews, his mother tongue was Yiddish, the Germanic language first spoken by Jews in Germany during the medieval era, based on German as then spoken, with additional influences from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic languages. Dubnov had gone to a state Jewish school, where he learned Russian, but his education was cut short by a new law at the end of the 1800s that took away this possibility from Jews. Dubnov continued studying history and linguistics independently, managed to escape from the Jewish settlement area and, with the help of forged papers, went to St. Petersburg.

  Before long he was a leading journalist, activist, and self-taught historian, who wrote about the predicament of Russian Jews. Dubnov fought above all for the right to a modern education for Russian Jews, which, he felt, was the only way to achieve their liberation.

  But he also spoke of the need for more awareness among Jews of their own history and culture. Dubnov described the Ashkenazi Jews as “immature children” who lacked knowledge of their eight-hundred-year-long history in Eastern Europe. What especially concerned Dubnov was that this history was about to be lost, and that old Jewish documents and books were being neglected and ruined: “They are lying in attics, in piles of trash, or in equally unpleasant and filthy rooms, among various broken household items and rags. These manuscripts are rotting away, they are being eaten by mice and are being used by ignorant servants and children who tear off page after page for all sorts of purposes. In one word: year by year they are disappearing and being lost to history,” wrote Dubnov in a pamphlet in 1891. To preserve what was about to be lost, he called for an “archaeological expedition” to collect, preserve, and catalog these literary treasures, which were dispersed all over Eastern Europe. In his pamphlet he spoke enthusiastically, exhorting Jews to take part in this epic expedition: “Let us work, gather our dispersed from their places of exile, arrange them, publish them, and build upon their foundation the temple of our history. Come, let us search and inquire.”2

  Dubnov’s clarion call was taken note of, even though it would take a few more decades before this expedition was implemented on any significant scale. Other Eastern European Yiddish intellectuals had, just like Dubnov, realized the need to save Yiddish culture.

  This culture was not only under assault by cultural neglect but also by two new contemporary movements. On the one hand there were the Zionists, who sought to create a “new Jew,” and on the other there was assimilation, meaning that more and more Jews chose to abandon their Jewish identity. The movement that would later lead to the formation of the YIVO Institute tried to confront both of these currents. There was a desire to save what seemed under threat as increasing numbers of Jews decided to assimilate, while also opposing the Zionists’ attempts to replace other Jewish languages and dialects such as Yiddish, Ladino, and Dzhidi with modern Hebrew—the language spoken in Israel today.

  A new generation of young Jewish historians, authors, ethnographers, and archivists began to take on the research mission that Dubnov had advocated. In the years preceding the outbreak of the First World War, the Russian-Jewish writer and folklore researcher Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport, better known by his pseudonym of S. Ansky, had led an expedition into small villages in the Ukraine, where he had documented hundreds of hours of songs, proverbs, and stories in Yiddish. It was an invaluable portrait of the time, as many of these communities were later wiped out during the pogroms under the Symon Petljura regime after the Russian Revolution.

  YIVO began to take form after the First World War. In 1924, the linguist and historian Nokhem Shtif sketched out an idea for a Yiddish research institute, with departments focusing on history, philology, pedagogy, and economics, as well as an archive and a library. The mission of the institute would be to add legitimacy to Yiddish as a language, but also to modernize the language to ensure its continued use.

  The following year, in 1925, YIVO was founded in Berlin, where two other historians and linguists would be the driving forces: Elias Tcherikower and Max Weinreich. The institute’s headquarters were located in Vilnius, the historical center of Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe.

  Before the Second World War, the city boasted 105 synagogues and meetinghouses and six Jewish daily newspapers. Its Jewish population of about sixty th
ousand represented a third of the city’s total. For hundreds of years, rabbis, Jewish authors, intellectuals, and artists had been drawn to the city. According to legend, when Napoleon stopped there on his way to Moscow in 1812, he called Vilnius “the Jerusalem of the North.”3

  Its most renowned citizen was the eighteenth-century rabbi Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, referred to as the Vilna Gaon (Genius of Vilnius). He was regarded in his time as one of the foremost interpreters of the Torah and the Talmud. Of equal importance was his opposition to orthodox Hasidism, which was spreading almost like a Jewish evangelical movement during the 1700s. He dismissed Hasidism’s more emotional position in relation to faith, and its focus on miracles, and instead urged Jews to study secular sources and science.

  Around the turn of the century, Vilnius had evolved into a center of cultural and political opposition to the pogroms and restrictions that had tormented Jews in the settlement areas. In 1897, the General Jewish Labor Bund in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia was formed, this being a secular socialist party working to improve Jewish rights. The party, often known as Der Bund, advocated the use of Yiddish as the first language of choice of Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian Jews.4

  Vilnius was a city vibrating with activity, with new Jewish schools, libraries, theaters, publishers, and newspapers. The development was further augmented when, after the war, the city was amalgamated into the reincarnated Polish nation. In the interwar years, Vilnius became the home of a movement that sought to renew Yiddish in a literary sense. Yung Vilne (Young Vilnius) was a group of experimental Jewish poets and authors, including Chaim Grade and Abraham Sutzkever.