The Book Thieves

by Anders Rydell

  In April 1942, Johannes Pohl, from the Institute for Research on the Jewish Question in Frankfurt, traveled with three other “experts on Jewry” to Vilnius.40 By this time only a third of Vilnius’s Jews were still alive. Forty thousand had been executed by the Einsatz group in the late summer and autumn of 1941. Just before Pohl’s arrival the pace of mass executions had started slowing down. The Wehrmacht and Germany’s armaments industry needed more slave workers at the same time as the SS had started changing its strategy for the mass murders, from firing squads to extermination camps. The twenty thousand Jews who were still alive had been forced into a cramped ghetto, which had been set up in the Jewish quarter.

  The beginning of 1942 was marked by a treacherous sense of calm in the ghetto, where life as far as possible had returned to a sort of normality. A library had even been set up in the ghetto, under the guidance of a librarian, Herman Kruk. The library, a clear manifestation of the spiritual resistance of the residents of the ghetto, had been established right in the midst of the mass executions. The library was housed in a building on Straszuna 6, which is still there today. A beautiful red house with red pointing, it remains the most imposing building on the street despite its obvious dilapidation.

  The ghetto dwellers had donated their books, archives, and artworks to the library. But the books had also been taken from abandoned apartments in which the residents had been murdered. The house on Straszuna 6 was more than a library, and became known as The Museum for Jewish Art and Culture. In addition to a library comprising 45,000 volumes, the building offered a bookshop, a museum, an archive, and a research department. Secretly, evidence of Nazi crimes was collected as they took place. Eyewitnesses wrote down their accounts, and German orders and other documents were stored. A group of writers started working on a history of the ghetto.

  “In spite of all the pain, all the troubles, and in spite of the difficult circumstances of the ghetto, a heart of culture beats here,” Kruk wrote in his diary. Thousands of Jews in the ghetto came to their library to borrow books. Reading gave both hope and consolation to the inhabitants, as a fifteen-year-old boy, Yitzhak Rudashevski, wrote in his diary on the same day that the library celebrated its hundred thousandth book loan: “‘Hundreds of people read in the ghetto. Reading has become the ghetto’s greatest pleasure. Books give one a feeling of freedom; books connect us to the world. The loan of the hundred thousandth copy is something the ghetto can be proud of.’”41

  Herman Kruk would keep careful notes on the library’s activities, who borrowed books and what was most popular. He found that one group of readers looked for analogies of their own situation in the ghetto. The history of the Jews during medieval times, the Crusades, and the Inquisition were such subjects, but most popular of all with these readers was Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Another group sought the opposite; they wanted literature that “bore them away from reality and took them to far countries.” In both groups the drive to read was strong: “A human being can endure hunger, poverty, and pain, but she cannot endure isolation. Then, more than ever, the need for books and reading is at its greatest,” wrote Kruk.42

  It was during this period of relative calm in the ghetto that the ERR began its work. A dozen learned Jews had been selected for the forced labor. Included in the group was Khaykl Lunski, who had also survived the extermination campaign of the autumn.

  The designated leaders were Herman Kruk and an earlier colleague of his at YIVO, the philologist and historian Zelig Kalmanovitj. Large premises were set in order outside the ghetto as a sorting station, in a building belonging to Vilnius’s university library.

  The group’s work consisted of the sorting and packing of literary treasures for transportation to Germany. The first consignment to arrive was forty thousand books from the Strashun Library. Kruk, Kalmanovitj, Lunski, and the others in the group were faced with a choice, either option being just as terrible.

  They were forced to select and catalog the books of greatest “value” in the collection, and in so doing they would be contributing to research, which would fundamentally have the intention of justifying the Holocaust. The alternative was hardly any better, because books that were not selected were sent to a nearby paper mill, where they were pulped.

  Either they helped the Nazis and “saved” the most valuable books or they refused and had to see these works being lost. “Kalmanovitj and I do not know if we are redeemers or gravediggers,” Kruk wrote dejectedly in his diary.43

  What gave strength to the group, which would later become known in the ghetto as Die Papier Brigade (The Paper Brigade), was in spite of it all the hope that they were saving this literary heritage. Soon, books started arriving from synagogues and also a valuable collection of books from Elijah ben Solomon Zalman’s school.

  The work was so successful that the ERR was soon expanding its operations. In the spring of 1942 a second sorting station was set up at the YIVO Institute on Vivulskio gatvé 18. The Paper Brigade grew until it numbered just over forty persons, including the thirty-year-old poet Abraham Sutzkever. With his intellectual prominence, his slanted black-rimmed glasses, and an almost religious belief in the power of language, he had become a figurehead for the younger generation of poets in Yiddish in the Yung Vilne group.

  The ERR also sent both sorting stations the stock of Jewish libraries plundered in nearby towns and villages. The work was carefully checked by the ERR: “Just as in the Holocaust, minute records were kept of the destruction of Jewish books, with reports submitted every other week including statistics of how many books had been sent to Germany and how many to the paper mill, with the books subdivided by their language and year of publication,” writes the historian David E. Fishman.44

  The Paper Brigade could not save more books by letting less valuable books pass the selection procedure. The ERR had imposed specific quotas in advance, whereby some two-thirds of the books had to be destroyed. Kruk writes in his diary that the work is “heart-breaking” and that members of the group have tears in their eyes as they go about their compulsory tasks: “YIVO is dying; and its mass grave is a paper mill.”45 Sutzkever describes the work in Vivulskio gatvé 18 as “a Ponar for our Jewish culture.” Watched over by their German guards, “we are digging the grave for our souls.”46

  But from the very beginning the members of the Paper Brigade tried to find opportunities to put up resistance. One such way was passivity: as soon as the Germans left the building, the members stopped working. Sutzkever, who worked in the YIVO building, used to give poetry readings in Yiddish to the others. Several of the members carried on writing poetry, theses, and journals throughout their time in the ghetto. It had been a question of survival, Sutzkever said afterward: “I thought that, just as an attentive Jew believes in the Messiah, as long as I kept writing, as long as I was a poet, I had a weapon against death.”47

  Before long the Paper Brigade starting involving itself in more active forms of resistance, by smuggling out valuable works. At the end of their working day, before they were brought back to the ghetto, Sutzkever and others in the brigade hid manuscripts in their clothes. This was less risky on the days when their guards were from the Jewish ghetto police. Well aware of what was going on, these were also the guards that gave the group its nickname. The Paper Brigade were warriors of paper, who risked their own lives to smuggle one document after another into the ghetto. “Other Jews looked at us as if we were mad. They smuggled food into the ghetto, hidden in their clothes and boots, but we smuggled in books, scraps of paper, and sometimes a Torah,” wrote one of the members of the group.48

  Sutzkever, the group’s most active smuggler, managed to bring out among other things a diary that had belonged to the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl. He was also the one to come up with the idea of asking the Germans for permission to remove “spare paper.” Sutzkever convinced the Germans that this would be burned in stoves in the ghetto. By means of this permission, various “rubbish”
was saved, such as letters and manuscripts by Tolstoy, Gorky, and Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, and drawings by Chagall.

  Despite this risky and courageous action, another dilemma remained: the brigade had merely smuggled books and manuscripts from one prison to another—where could they be moved to after that? Herman Kruk had some of the stash hidden away in the ghetto library, while Abraham Sutzkever divided up his material between a number of hiding places, including behind the wallpaper in his apartment. The most ingenious hiding place was a bunker that had been covertly constructed by an engineer by the name of Gerson Abramovitsj. The bunker, as deep as sixty feet underground, had both electricity and its own ventilation system. Abramovitsj had built the bunker to hide his handicapped mother from the Nazis. Soon she also had the company of manuscripts, letters, books, and works of art, which were buried under the floor.49 The Paper Brigade managed to smuggle some of the material out of the ghetto, partly by the efforts of Ona Simaite, the Lithuanian librarian, who tricked her way into the ghetto by alleging that she wanted to reclaim books that Jewish students had not returned. When she left she brought out valuable books and manuscripts. She also hid a Jewish girl but was caught in 1944. Simaite was detained, tortured, and deported to Dachau, the concentration camp, but she managed to survive the war.50

  Abraham Sutzkever smuggled not only books but also weapons. He was a member of the clandestine group Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye (Unified Partisan Organizations), a militant Jewish resistance group that had been formed in the ghetto and whose motto was “We will not let ourselves be taken like sheep to slaughter.” Using Lithuanian contacts, while working at the YIVO building Sutzkever received pistols and parts of submachine guns, which were smuggled in and assembled in the ghetto.

  As time passed, the Paper Brigade members grew more daring and brought out large volumes of materials. As a final desperate measure, the brigade started hiding books in the actual YIVO building. Between the spring of 1943 and September 1944, the Paper Brigade succeeded in smuggling out thousands of books and manuscripts. But in the final analysis, what was saved was a small part of the hundreds of thousands of books and manuscripts that were either sent to the paper mill or to Germany.

  • • •

  Late in the summer of 1943 the members of the Paper Brigade realized that their work would soon be over. No more libraries were being delivered for sorting, and the ERR started shutting down the operation.

  Kalmanovitj makes one of his last journal entries at the end of August: “All week I have selected books, thousands of them, and thrown them into a rubbish pile with my own two hands. A pile of books in YIVO’s reading room, a place of burial for books, a brother’s grave, books that were afflicted by war like Gog and Magog, just as their owners. . . . Whatever we can save will survive with God’s help! We will see them again when we come back here as human beings.”51

  It was not only the ERR’s work that was being wound down, but the entire German eastern campaign. After its defeat at Stalingrad in the winter of 1943, the German army was in retreat. This meant that the German armaments industry in the east was disassembled and millions of slave workers became superfluous. Many were sent directly to the gas chambers.

  The Jewish uprising in Warsaw in the spring of 1943 had also made Heinrich Himmler nervous. He suspected, justifiably so, that Jews in other ghettos were planning armed resistance. A few weeks after the revolt, Himmler issued an order about the discontinuation of the ghettos in Ostland (the Baltic region). The ghetto in Vilnius, regarded by the German intelligence service as a potential hive of resistance, had to be destroyed as soon as possible.52

  The deportations of Vilnius’s remaining Jews began early in August of 1943. Within two months the ghetto had been emptied. Those of working age were sent to labor camps to carry out tasks such as the digging of trenches. Those who were too old, too young, or too sick were murdered.

  But before the liquidation of the ghetto, the 180 members of the Unified Partisan Organizations managed to flee and hide in the forests outside Vilnius. One of them was Abraham Sutzkever, who got away on September 12 with his wife and another poet from the Yung Vilne group, Shmerke Kaczerginski. Back in the ghetto, Sutzkever had already lost both his mother and his newborn son, who had been poisoned by the Nazis in the ghetto hospital.53

  News of Abraham Sutzkever’s flight soon reached Moscow. Early in 1944, Ilya Ehrenburg, the most renowned writer and journalist in the Soviet Union, helped Sutzkever and his wife flee to Moscow. A light Soviet aircraft managed to cross the front and land on a frozen lake in the forests outside Vilnius. Under heavy flak from the Germans, the plane succeeded in making it back to the Soviet side. Ehrenburg’s article about Sutzkever in Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, was the first to ever mention the mass murder of Jews in the Soviet Union.54

  However, most of the people in the ghetto and the Paper Brigade did not manage to escape. In Ponar, the SS continued with the mass executions. One of those executed toward the end of this period was the fifteen-year-old diary writer, Yitzhak Rudashevski. At the same time the SS launched a wide-ranging campaign to cover up the mass murders. In the autumn of 1943 inmates of a nearby concentration camp, Stutthof, were forced to dig up tens of thousands of decomposing bodies in Ponar. The corpses were burned in enormous fires and the ashes mixed with sand and buried. It took several months for the slave workers to burn the remains of 100,000 victims.

  YIVO’s spiritual father, Simon Dubnov, had already been murdered in 1941. Dubnov, who was eighty years old when the war broke out, had settled in Riga in the 1930s to write his memoirs. Friends, who could see the approaching danger, had helped Dubnov get a Swedish visa in 1940, but he chose not to make use of it. When the Nazis occupied Riga in 1941, Dubnov was kicked out of his apartment and had to see his large library confiscated. With the rest of the city’s Jewish population he was shut up in a ghetto. Early in 1941 the SS forced 24,000 Jews to leave the ghetto and go to the forest of Rumbula, outside Riga. Here Soviet prisoners of war had dug six large pits, where the Jews were executed. Simon Dubnov, who was too sick to walk several miles to the spot, was shot in the street by a Gestapo officer. According to witnesses, Dubnov to the very end exhorted the inhabitants of the ghetto, “Jews, write and keep a record.”

  How the librarian Khaykl Lunski died is unclear. According to one witness he was deported with his daughter to Treblinka, while another testimony suggests he was beaten to death in September 1943. Zelig Kalmanovitj, the head of the Paper Brigade, was transported to the concentration camp of Vaivara in Estonia, where he died in 1944. Herman Kruk was deported to a forced-labor camp in Lagedi, Estonia. He would continue keeping a journal to the very end. On September 17 he wrote a final note: “I am burying the manuscripts in Lagedi, in Herr Schulma’s barrack opposite the guardhouse. Six people are present for the funeral.”55 Kruk had a sense of what awaited him. The next day he and two thousand other prisoners were forced to carry wooden logs to a forest in the vicinity. The logs were put down in long rows, whereupon the prisoners were forced to lie down on top of them. They had built their own funeral pyres. After the SS guards shot the prisoners in the head, another layer of logs and prisoners was added on top—and thereafter the bodies were burned. But when the Red Army reached the scene a few days later, unburned bodies still lay in piles. One of the witnesses of Kruk’s “funeral” managed to flee and went back to dig up his diaries.

  By then, Vilnius had been liberated by the Red Army. In the first week of July 1944 an offensive was launched against the city, and by July 13 the last of the Nazis had withdrawn. Among the liberators were Abraham Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski, who were fighting for the Jewish partisan group Nekome (the Avengers). Once the battle was over, they started to look for hidden manuscripts and books. With great sadness they found that the YIVO Institute at Vivulskio gatvé 18 was a burned-out, gutted ruin, after the house was hit by artillery fire. Kruk’s hiding place in the ghetto library had
been discovered and the books burned in the courtyard. On the other hand, the secret bunker had not been destroyed. From beneath the floor, Sutzkever and Kaczerginski dug out manuscripts, letters, diaries, and a bust of Tolstoy. As they continued digging, a hand suddenly appeared in the ground. One of the Jews who had hidden in the bunker died there, and someone buried him among the books.56

  [ 12 ]

  THE TALMUD UNIT

  Theresienstadt

  From the bridge I can see the light brown backs of the fish against the sandy bottom. From time to time one of them swivels, turning its scales toward the sun and projecting a silvery reflection. On the other side of the bridge I see families with children, lying on an exposed sand spit reaching into the river Ohře. It is high summer and the water level is low. The children throw themselves into the current and let themselves be pulled along to a calmer section. Farther down, where the trees along the riverbank stop, the ashes of 22,000 camp prisoners were dumped in the river.

  Twelve or so miles south of the Zittau mountain chain, which forms the boundary between Germany and the Czech Republic, lies the old Hapsburg fortress and garrison town of Theresienstadt, or Terezín as it is known today. In the parking area where the bus stops, one can buy soft drinks, key rings, and postcards of concentration camp prisoners in tents. But today there are few customers, the thermometer is inching toward 104 degrees Fahrenheit, and the town streets are eerily deserted—apart from a few girls on bicycles with rolled-up towels on their parcel racks, on their way to the river. These days, only a couple of thousand people live inside the star-shaped fortress walls, in a town that has not changed significantly since the war, apart from a few apartment blocks that catch the eye because of their Soviet bleakness.