Courtesy of Moreshet Archive, Anielevich Memorial Holocaust Study and Research Center
The Book Smugglers: Sorting Books
Mikhal Kovner, member of the Paper Brigade, sorting documents at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Some resist oppression with words, others with guns. The men and women honored in the new exhibition at Jewish Museum Milwaukee resisted by saving books from the bonfires.
“The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis” focuses on the “Paper Brigade,” a band of writers, scholars and librarians in Vilna, Lithuania. After overrunning Lithuania in June 1941, the Germans seized all Jewish institutions, including libraries, synagogues, schools and a museum. The Nazis tasked the Paper Brigade with sorting through the looted books, archives, artworks and artifacts. Some items were set aside for transport to an institute in Germany dedicated to antisemitism. The rest were to be destroyed. The Paper Brigade risked their lives saving what they could.
Vilna had long been a Jewish cultural center in Eastern Europe, “the Jerusalem of Lithuania,” home to venerable Talmudic scholars. During the 1930s Jews formed 30% of the city’s population; their children attended Jewish schools and the community supported five Yiddish newspapers as well as publishing houses and theaters. A writers’ group called Young Vilna published magazines and gathered for poetry readings.
The members of the Paper Brigade were inspired by “the fundamental role played by culture, writing, music and theater,” says Molly Dubin, the Jewish Museum’s curator. Jewish and all cultural life had already been severely restricted when the Soviet Union annexed Lithuania in June 1940. Worse came one year later when the Nazis replaced the Soviets as the country’s occupiers.
Hiding Places
Courtesy of Yad Vashem, Israel
The Book Smugglers: Offenbach Archival Depot
The Offenbach Archival Depot in the American zone of occupied Germany.
“The Book Smugglers” is arranged in several of the museum’s galleries and entered through a recreation of the gate to the Vilna Ghetto where the city’s Jews were confined. Returning at night from their work under Nazi overseers, the Paper Brigade smuggled books under their coats into the Ghetto, past SS guards who occasionally shot Jews for sport. Once inside, they found hiding places for the books and artifacts behind walls and in cellars.
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Given that books are the main theme, the exhibition’s panels—though illustrated with photographs and visuals and accompanied by videos—are text heavy with historical background and descriptions of precarious Ghetto life. One panel explains that the Nazis classified the Paper Brigade as “valuable specialists,” giving them a longer lease on life than fellow inmates of the Ghetto. Within months of the Nazi occupation, one-third of Vilna’s Jews were massacred, many of them taken to nearby Ponar Forest and shot. The Brigade’s members knew they were working against time to save as much of their heritage as possible. Only eight of the Paper Brigade’s 40 members survived.
“The Book Smugglers” also touches on the larger struggle of Jews in occupied Lithuania, including a partisan group that resisted the Nazis with force, and the fate of the books saved by the Paper Brigade. Some found their way to an institute in New York. The books that fell into Soviet hands after the war were locked up in restricted archives.
Courtesy of the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum
The Book Smugglers: Strashun Library
Strashun Library
Although the Holocaust that engulfed Vilna’s Jews was worse than anything that came before, the community had always been subject to restrictions and outbursts of persecution. “Jewish culture was their source of solace and joy,” Dubin says. “The role of culture is central to the existence of any population. Cultural destruction goes hand in hand with mass murder.”
In keeping with the Jewish Museum’s mission to link the past with the present, the exhibit includes a Banned Book Nook featuring books that have been recently banned from libraries in the U.S. Among them, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.
Based on David E. Fishman’s book, “The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis” runs Jan. 19-May 19 at Jewish Museum Milwaukee, 1360 N. Prospect Ave. For more information, visit jewishmuseummilwaukee.org.
