A Meditation Upon “The Book Smugglers – Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis – The True Story of the Paper Brigade of Vilna”
This posting is not so much a formal book review as it is a personal meditation on “The Book Smugglers”. This book spoke volumes and deeply to me about the value and wealth we have in the written record of the narratives of our lives as individuals, of our communities, a people and culture, of our language and nations, and how important they are to our continuation of ourselves as humans, persons, and peoples. For the treasures of our history, our literature, and the images, musical expressions and the thoughts and stories of our past and present lives – the words, and letters, and pages and photos – we are to rightly cherish physically and within us, and they are to be safeguarded so that they may be handed down and preserved for our children, and grandchildren, and for generations yet to come.
The “Book Smugglers”, as the complete title elucidates, is the story of a group of Jewish partisans and poets, men and women, living in the Lithuanian capital city of Vilna, a city described as the Jerusalem of Lithuania, for its depth and breadth of Jewish scholarship, religious and other, and for its wealth of the flowering of Hebrew and Yiddish culture and literature in all its forms. This treasure of Jewish thought and creativity – books, manuscripts, letters, diaries, documents and records, images and historical archives – all resided within the great libraries and collections of Vilna’s Jewish cultural institutions and synagogues. And it is this irreplaceable wealth of treasures that the book centers upon, which when the German army during World War II occupied Vilna in June 1941, all of this was scheduled for looting or destruction – books and documents to paper mills, the leather Torah scrolls – the soul of the synagogue services and worship – to be made into inserts to repair the soles of German army boots.
It was these treasures of the Jewish soul that the paper brigade risked their lives to save. The massive Yiddish and Hebrew content of the libraries and collections in Vilna, had been gathered over many years by the Jewish community to preserve their cultural and language heritage so that succeeding generations of the Jewish community of Eastern Europe would know of their past and of themselves. And these partisans and poets risked their lives to save their heritage almost as a sacred duty for those who would survive – the light of hope within the rapidly descending darkness and destruction of the expanding Third Reich.
And this hope, though perhaps not carefully articulated, was a hope that many – or some, at least – would survive, and survive with their heritage, language, and past battered and bruised but not obliterated, so that the survivors may again live as a people, and not be reduced and remembered merely as numbers on military action reports – be that number three or one, or a family of eight, or twelve, or a village of two thousand, or six million taken from among us.
For all that was the stacked within the libraries was created so that they, and we, all might remember and know the hands, and minds, and eyes, behind the books and documents upon the shelves, as persons, as human beings created in the image and likeness of God. For it is not the numbers, the statistics, that touch and nourish our souls with deep significance, but rather it is the voices and the lives of others which strengthen and teach and enrich us with their lives, thoughts and sufferings, triumphs and joys – as the story this book has told has touched and deeply nourished me.
For these papers, pages, and images rescued and hidden – with the ultimate success of their efforts and risks always just a dim possibility – were not made to be lonely footprints upon a sandy and windswept shore, designed soon to vanish, washed away by the inevitable waves of an incoming tide, no, but rather they were created as the tangible expressions of the intangible embodiment of their minds, and heart, and soul, through which the journey of the individual, and the sojourns of the community, people and nation, are left to us, that we might understand and know and honor them for our good.
And within the overwhelmingly larger story behind the events of this book – the Holocaust – these treasures are simultaneously truly foundation stones and also the keys to the future, and keys able to be turned two ways. For if a people as a people, are to survive and again flourish, these expressions of their past, and mind, and soul, must also survive. But if a people are targeted for destruction, then these same expressions of their history and identity must also be collected and eradicated to ensure their complete annihilation – encompassing then their physical bodies, expressions of their mind and soul, their history, and all memory of their existence – the definition of Shoah – the plan and goal pursued as an all-encompassing evil towards the Jews as a people by the Nazis, and as recorded within this book, towards the Jews of Vilna and the gathered treasures of their language, culture, and past.
“The Book Smugglers” records the dangerous efforts that a group of Jewish scholars, librarians, and Hebrew and Yiddish linguists undertook to save the greatest of the treasures around them. This group, realizing the planned destruction of the libraries’ contents, eventually organized a smuggling routine, and risking their lives almost daily, they managed to secretly remove and hide books and papers from out of the libraries and Jewish institutions to selected hiding places in and outside the Jewish ghetto in Vilna, sometimes literally under the noses or over the heads of the Nazi looters and agents of destruction.
The process of saving as much as possible of these materials started in June 1941, and continued even after the defeat of the Nazis, and was still ongoing under the anti-Semitic Soviet regime all the way through to 1995, when a first shipment of thirty-five crates of materials once housed before the war at the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) in Vilna, arrived in Newark, New Jersey after decades of negotiations, which were then originally stored in the warehouse of the Manischewitz Matzo Company, eventually coming to rest at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York – the successor to the YIVO in Vilna which had been eventually extinguished and then destroyed.
This book, and the account of the zeal and sacrifices including several deaths, of those who dedicated the life they felt remained to them to rescue the written treasures of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, touched me deeply because of the importance and value and even sacredness they attached to saving and protecting this heritage of their culture and history. For I have always loved books – I remember the astounding event when I was four when I received books for the first time – in one of the bags or boxes of groceries we received from a charity for Thanksgiving when my dad couldn’t work because the Teamsters were on strike – Little Golden Books of Bible stories but marred by crayon scribblings of the child who had the books before me. Now, my mother had already taught me, it seems, as a child to revere and take care of books, and I was actually shocked to see scribbles in the books I found, but…they were books I now had, and I took care of them from that day forward, but they never became my favorite books, only just my first.
“The Book Smugglers” told me a story about others savings something – books – that in my life, I have always treasured. When I started first grade at our local Catholic parish school, I learned to read, even though at first I thought it was just too hard. I found I loved school. I acquired a love of reading and my mom soon took us all to the library every two weeks where I would check out ten books at a time to read. I was young when I received my own library card. I loved smelling books when I was young. Secretly, I still, at times, smell some of my special old books.
In the chapter titled, “From the Ghetto to the Forest”, as a group of book smugglers fled from the ghetto in Vilna to escape its final liquidation and their deaths, the author described their journey of 40 kilometers to reach the relative safety of joining the partisans in the forest, “They drank muddy swamp water and ate whatever grew in the forests. When they were lucky, they stole a few vegetables from the edge of a field or garden”. After reading this, I told a friend that through my writing, I hope I am planting at least a few vegetables along the edge of the garden, from which those also now journeying along the paths they are on – perhaps paths with troubles and concerns, perhaps just new ones – that by partaking of the thoughts and words from this book that deeply nourished me, they then may pause and partake from my writings to refresh and nourish themselves along their way. And may they encounter a rest which will encourage them to enter the entire garden of thought and wisdom and encouragement this book, “The Book Smugglers” offers to those who love and cherish books, and who honor and enshrine knowledge and truth within their souls.
Postscript
In the earlier part of 2023, when I was in New York, I visited the Center for Jewish History where the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research resides along with four other Jewish history and scholarship organizations. I took the tour of the Center as I came primarily to see for myself the resting place of all the materials saved in Vilna from Nazi destruction, and below is a photo I took of the Reading Room.
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Books Read, Thoughts Upon Them – Writing In The Shade Of Trees
I did not realize this existed nor the stories behind it. Thank you for sharing this incredible brave, inspiring and thought provoking piece!