The Book Thieves

by Anders Rydell

  “We don’t know how much never came back, because even lists, inventories, registers, and catalogs from the prewar years disappeared. The librarian, after the war, estimated that about 50 percent of the books were returned; the rest had been removed and were never found,” said Jean-Claude Kuperminc at the Alliance.

  Even parts of the archive disappeared. A half century later, documents with the organization’s stamp appeared in Minsk, Moscow, and Lithuania. In all, Seymour J. Pomrenze and his colleagues would hand back about two and a half million books from the Offenbach Archival Depot. Another half million books were returned by the British army from Tanzenberg.33

  Despite the extensive amount of work that had been done, only a small proportion of what had been plundered was ever sent back. From Offenbach, 323,836 books were sent to France, which was far off the estimate of 1.7 million books that had been plundered, not counting those taken when 29,000 apartments in Paris were cleared of their contents in the ERR’s M-Aktion. Belgium, where hundreds of thousands of books had been plundered, only took return delivery of 198 crates of materials.34 The Netherlands, relative to its size, got the most books back: 329,000. The Western Allies also returned books to Italy, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Greece.

  Of all the libraries and archives that were plundered in Thessaloniki, only some ten thousand books were handed back to Greece, but not even these came back to their proper homes. When I met with Erika Perahia Zemour in Thessaloniki, she commented, “I don’t think any books came back to Thessaloniki, ever. The books that were repatriated were stored in Athens. Then they disappeared. No one knows what happened to them after the war. We have tried to look for them, but we haven’t found anything. Most likely they were taken by the Jewish congregation in Athens.”

  On the other hand, the Western Allies found a larger amount of Jewish archival material from Greece. “A total of 17 tons of archive material was shipped to Athens, of which seven tons came to Thessaloniki. Unfortunately, someone sent most of this to Jerusalem after the war. The Americans also mistakenly sent material from Thessaloniki to YIVO in New York. But a lot of it also ended up in Moscow. We have a little left here, but most of it was scattered all over the world,” Zemour told me.

  In the end it was private collectors who were hardest hit by the plundering. Books in private collections were more difficult to identify because they had rarely been cataloged. If the books lacked owners’ marks they were in practice absolutely impossible to trace back.

  The Western Allies model, which worked in such a way that the final restitution had to be handled by national governments, proved ineffectual when it came to returning books to private individuals. While organizations and institutions were better placed to pressure authorities and gain compensation, individuals tended to relocate and many had also changed their nationalities, which hardly made the recovery process easier.

  But the national restitution authorities were guilty of a significant share of the blame. For instance, the Belgian restitution authority, the Office de Récupération Economique, did very little to return private collections even when their owners had been identified at Offenbach and Tanzenberg.35 One possible explanation for this was that after the war, the Office de Récupération Economique, like so many restitution authorities in other European countries, focused on financial compensation for, and restitution of, goods that were more valuable than books—such as art, gemstones, and gold.

  Private owners who demanded restitution of their libraries, after the war, were mostly unsuccessful. If they recovered any books, this would usually be a case of a few copies from large collections. For instance, one Belgian citizen, Valérie Marie, had sixty-one books returned from a library that had amounted to two thousand volumes. In another case, Salvatore Van Wien got eight books out of six hundred.

  The Office de Récupération Economique did not actively seek the owners, even when the origins of a particular library had been established. This was a passive approach to restitution, which would also characterize the process in many other countries.36 By the end of the 1940s, the Office de Récupération Economique began selling off books that had not been claimed.

  The Western Allies ended up returning a relatively large number of collections to the Soviet Union, primarily books that had been stolen from the Communist Party and other state institutions. Almost a quarter of a million books were dispatched from Offenbach to the Soviet Union in August 1946. Several railroad-car loads were also sent from Tanzenberg. Unfortunately, there was a paucity of traffic in the other direction.37

  But the Western Allies were not entirely innocent themselves. Almost a million books were sent to the Library of Congress in Washington. Several large American libraries sent delegations to Europe to top up their collections. Some books were purchased, but many German libraries were also confiscated—sometimes on rather unclear grounds. Books that were seized from Nazi individuals, organizations, or public institutions were regarded as “enemy literature” and “propaganda.” For instance, the “working library” of Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage, about twenty thousand books, was sent to Washington. According to regulations, no “Nazi plundered” books were allowed to be taken out of Germany. But in many cases this was impossible to establish, in cases where the books lacked owners’ marks. Long afterward it would emerge that plundered books had also been taken to the United States.38

  Nor is there any doubt that large numbers of books, just as had happened on the eastern front, were plundered by American, French, and British soldiers. Sargent Burrage Child, an archive specialist with the Monuments Men who came to Europe in 1945, made the claim in a letter that American soldiers all over Germany were “liberating books.” “I have now gained a better understanding of the old stories of northerners plundering in the South. Their grandchildren, and also the grandchildren of the Yankees, are now following the same pattern.”39

  When the first round of sifting had been completed at Offenbach and Tanzenberg, hundreds of thousands of books remained whose origins or owners could not be established. Seymour Pomrenze and his colleagues often felt compelled to ask themselves whether there would even be anyone left to give these books to. Many of these books, as Pomrenze’s successor, Isaac Bencowitz, stated, were the leavings of communities and people that no longer existed:

  In the sorting room, I would come upon a box of books which the sorters had brought together, like scattered sheep into one fold—books from a library which once had been in some distant town in Poland, or an extinct Yeshiva. There was something sad and mournful about these volumes . . . as if they were whispering a tale of yearning and hope since obliterated. . . . I would find myself straightening out these books and arranging them in the boxes with a personal sense of tenderness as if they had belonged to someone dear to me, someone recently deceased.40

  Officers at the Offenbach Archival Depot faced a difficult dilemma. Europe, after the Second World War, was no longer the same. Communities had been wiped out, entire populations had been ejected, and the geographical map had been redrawn. While the restitution process was in motion, one of the biggest refugee crises in European history was under way, with about 30 million people fleeing or being moved in Central and Eastern Europe.41 Thousands of Jewish communities all over Europe, but especially in the East, had disappeared. In many cases the survivors did not go back to their homes, especially not if these were in Eastern Europe, where the war in many cases had not impacted on a deep-rooted anti-Semitism. Already in 1946 a pogrom had broken out in the town of Kielce in Poland, after rumors that Jews had kidnapped and ritually murdered a Polish boy—the medieval myth resuscitated only a year after the liberation of the concentration camps. Forty-two Jews were shot or beaten to death in the pogrom. The perpetrators were both civilian Poles and Communist security officials. Hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors were in flight, most of them heading for Palestine, South America, or the United States to
start new lives or reunite with relatives.

  The hundreds of thousands of Jewish books at Offenbach that were regarded as “ownerless” required a special solution, and this came about with the help of an organization called Jewish Cultural Reconstruction (JCR), set up in 1947 and financed by various Jewish groups. The organization was led by the eminent historian Salo Baron, and the philosopher Hannah Arendt also sat on the executive committee.

  In 1949, when most of the identifiable collections had been returned, about half a million books were handed to JCR to help rebuild Jewish communities and congregations. These books would follow the streams of Jewish refugees and immigrants in the years following the war. The largest proportion, almost 200,000 books, were sent to Israel, while almost 160,000 were taken to the United States.42 Books were also sent to Great Britain, Canada, South Africa, and a number of countries in South America: Argentina, 5,053 books; Bolivia, 1,218 books; and Ecuador, 225 books. The books went mainly to congregations, but in certain cases also to schools. The Hebrew University in Jerusalem received a large number of valuable books and manuscripts. The recipients were barred from selling the books, and in many countries the books were marked with a special ex libris. Each of the 2,031 books shared out among congregations in Canada carried the following text inside: “This book was once owned by a Jew, a victim of the great massacre in Europe.”43

  • • •

  In February 1947 a young American historian by the name of Lucy S. Dawidowicz came to the Offenbach Archival Depot. Her task was to select less valuable “ownerless” books for dispatch to refugee camps for Holocaust survivors, where there was a great demand for books. However, when Dawidowicz started going through the collections, she discovered books and archive materials that she recognized.

  Dawidowicz, a child of Polish-Jewish immigrants, had specialized in European Jewish history while a student at Columbia University in the 1930s. Determined to learn Yiddish, she went to Vilnius in 1938 to work at the YIVO Institute. Later she described how she had traveled to Vilnius “with the romantic conviction that the city would turn into a world center for independent Yiddish culture.”44 She described the scenes that met her at the famous Strashun Library: “In a single day you might see, at the two long tables of the reading room, venerable elderly men in beards and hats, absorbed in Talmudic texts, sitting beside young bareheaded men and even women with bare shoulders on warm days. Sometimes you heard the old men muttering and complaining about the state of the world. And the young people tittering.”45 Dawidowicz left Vilnius in August 1939, just a few weeks before the outbreak of war and the beginning of the catastrophe that would exterminate Jewish Vilnius.

  One of YIVO’s founders, Max Weinreich, who was in Copenhagen when the war broke out in 1939, made his way to New York and set up the institute’s new headquarters there. Dawidowicz, who had gotten close to Weinreich and the other YIVO researchers, started working for the institute. In YIVO’s new headquarters there were fears that priceless collections, which had been built up over decades, had been lost forever. YIVO’s original mission, to strengthen and highlight Yiddish culture, had now changed in a most tragic way. It was no longer a case of highlighting a living culture, rather of saving something from a lost civilization. The great, living body of Yiddish culture went under in the Holocaust. In Israel, Hebrew would dominate, while Yiddish was resisted when the new nation had to create a strong linguistic and cultural identity.

  In 1947, when Lucy Dawidowicz started sifting through the piles of books in Offenbach, she found documents and books that she had seen before in Vilnius.46 “A feeling came over me that was almost holy, as if I was touching something spiritual. . . . Every surviving book from that world has become a historical document, a cultural artifact, and a testament to a murdered civilization,” wrote Dawidowicz in her memoirs. At the same time as she felt reverence as she went through the collections, she also had an awareness of “a stench of death emanating from these hundreds of thousands of books and religious objects, which had lost their parents, and were the mute remnants of their murdered owners.”47

  Dawidowicz found journals, books, and archive materials of historical and ethnographic documentation, collected by YIVO’s researchers in communities in Russia, the Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania that were no longer in existence. There were poems, letters, photographs, audio recordings, and compositions of Yiddish songs. Among these enormous mounds of material, she also found the remains of the Strashun Library, with its valuable religious books and manuscripts.

  After negotiations, it was decided that the collections would not be returned to Lithuania, where the institute had been nationalized by the Bolsheviks even before the German invasion in 1941, but rather to the new headquarters of the institute in New York. YIVO also managed to appropriate the right to the remains of the Strashun Library, as the collection was regarded as “ownerless.” Of the sixty thousand or so Jews that had lived in Vilnius at the outbreak of the war, few remained alive. In July 1949, the fragments of this “civilization” were loaded into 420 crates and left Europe on the American ship SS Pioneer Cove.

  That the Jewish culture in Vilnius had completely disappeared was not quite true, but there were other compelling reasons for not sending the collections back there. For at the same time, in Vilnius, another rescue operation was under way in YIVO’s name, of the books that had been smuggled out of sight and hidden by the Jewish sorters in the Paper Brigade. And material that the poets and partisans, Abraham Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski, had dug out from under the floor of the bunker in the ghetto. Just two weeks after the liberation of Vilnius in July 1944 they founded the Museum for Jewish Art and Culture. The museum was established in the one building of the former ghetto that had not been nationalized by the Communists, namely the house at Straszuna 6 where once the ghetto library had been.

  In the coming months, Sutzkever, who became the curator of the museum, and a small group of volunteers, managed to save more hidden treasures. One of the most important finds was made at a local paper mill, where twenty tons of paper from YIVO and other Jewish collections had not yet had time to be pulped. Another thirty tons were found with the government authority that was in charge of clearing ruined buildings. The citizens of Vilnius who had secretly helped hide material handed in potato sacks filled with books and manuscripts. Impressively, they managed to collect 25,000 books in Yiddish and Hebrew, 10,000 in other European languages, and 600 sacks of archive material.48

  All the work in saving these valuable books and documents was done only with the help of volunteers. Sutzkever’s pleas to the Soviet authorities for practical and financial support went unanswered. Instead, these efforts to rebuild a Jewish cultural identity in Vilnius were met with suspicion and later with animosity. In the Soviet system there was no room for alternative identities.

  Sutzkever was the first to understand that these treasures, which had been saved from the Nazis with such enormous effort, now had to be saved once more. In September 1944 he had already gone to Moscow, smuggling out with him selections from the collection. Among other things he brought the diaries of the murdered Herman Kruk. With the help of a foreign correspondent he managed to send off a parcel to YIVO in New York.

  Shmerke Kaczerginski, who was more sympathetic to the new regime, replaced Sutzkever as the curator of the museum. But before long Kaczerginski was also forced to recognize what was happening, when the KGB became regulars at the museum. They started by forbidding the library from issuing any book loans unless they had first been approved by the regime censors. Unfortunately, none of the books that Kaczerginski sent off for inspection ever came back.

  Kaczerginski found out that the thirty tons of books and archive material that had been found were being loaded on a train bound for a paper mill. He hurried off to the platform and managed to save a few works from YIVO and the Strashun Library from the open railroad cars. But while he was contacting the authorities and trying to have the
transport stopped, the train moved off and the cargo was destroyed.49

  “That is when we, the group of museum activists, had a bizarre realization—we must save our treasures again, and get them out of here. Otherwise, they will perish. In the best of cases, they will survive but will never see the light of day in the Jewish world,” wrote Kaczerginski.50

  In secret, Sutzkever and some Jewish activists began smuggling out the most valuable parts of the collection, while Kaczerginski maintained the facade of a loyal Soviet citizen, planning for the museum’s future. One by one the activists fled to the West, bringing by subterfuge as much material as they could carry. By mid-1946, both Kaczerginski and Sutzkever had left Vilnius with their bags packed full. To their great sorrow they had to leave most of the collection behind, and once again watch as it fell into the hands of a totalitarian regime. Not long after their flight, the KGB raided the museum, which was confiscated. The collection was loaded onto trucks and driven to an old church in the city, where it was dumped in the cellars.

  Shmerke Kaczerginski and Abraham Sutzkever made their way to Paris, and from there they sent what they had been able to save to New York. And then the two friends, who together had survived the Nazi occupation, the partisan war in the forests, and the Soviet regime, took their leave of each other. Kaczerginski emigrated to Argentina and Sutzkever went to Palestine. But before Sutzkever left Europe he gave a widely publicized testimony against those who had destroyed his culture for all time. On February 27, 1946, he stepped onto the witness stand at the Nuremberg trials. He wanted to give his testimony in his mother tongue, Yiddish, something that he had been denied from the very beginning by the tribunal. He was made to speak in Russian. In protest about this decision, like the other witnesses, he refused to sit despite being told to do so several times. He wanted to remain standing, as if he were reciting from the sacred scriptures. “For two nights before this testimony I have not been able to sleep at all. I saw before me how my mother ran, naked, across a snow-covered field; the warm blood running down her injured body started dripping from the walls of my room, and it engulfed me. It is difficult to compare feelings. Which is the strongest, the suffering or the longing for revenge?”51