Paper Brigade
The Paper Brigade was the name given to a group of residents of the Vilna Ghetto who hid a large cache of Jewish cultural items from YIVO (the Yiddish Scientific Institute), saving them from destruction or theft by Nazi Germany. Established in 1942 and led by Abraham Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski, the group smuggled books, paintings and sculptures past Nazi guards and hid them in various locations in and around the Ghetto. After the Ghetto's liquidation, surviving members of the group fled to join the Jewish partisans, eventually returning to Vilna following its liberation by Soviet forces. Recovered works were used to establish the Vilna Jewish Museum and then smuggled to the United States, where YIVO had re-established itself during the 1940s. Caches of hidden material continued to be discovered in Vilna into the early 1990s. Despite losses during both the Nazi and Soviet eras, 30–40 percent of the YIVO archive was preserved, which now represents "the largest collection of material about Jewish life in Eastern Europe that exists in the world".[1]
YIVO and the Brigade
Prior to the
Shortly thereafter Dr. Johannes Pohl, a representative of the
The concept of destroying the YIVO archives and associated material was profoundly traumatising to the labourers; in his diaries,
Cache recovery
After
Although the Museum was theoretically supported by Lithuanian and Soviet authorities, they provided few resources, assigning the organisers no budget and only giving them a burnt out former Ghetto building as a headquarters. Following the end of the war in 1945, it became clear that the volunteers' work was incompatible with the priorities of Soviet authorities, who burnt 30 tons of YIVO materials and, having demanded that any publicly displayed books be reviewed by a censor, simply refused to return any submitted works.[11] Accordingly, Kaczerginski and the others prepared to smuggle the collection yet again—this time to the United States, where YIVO had established a new headquarters.[14] Volunteers took the books across the border to Poland, enlisting the help of Bricha contacts to move them into non-Soviet Europe. From there much of the material went to New York; Sutzkever held on to some of it, which was later given to the National Library of Israel.[15]
The Museum was finally shut down by the
See also
References
- ^ a b Dolsten 2017.
- ^ Kuznitz 2014, p. 139.
- ^ Kuznitz 2014, p. 112.
- ^ Kuznitz 2014, p. 181.
- ^ a b c d Kuznitz 2014, p. 182.
- ^ Collins & Rothfeder 1983, p. 30.
- ^ a b Fishman 2016, p. 165.
- ^ Glickman 2016, p. 159.
- ISBN 9780735221222.
- ^ Shavit 1997, p. 98.
- ^ a b Fishman 1996.
- ^ Fishman 2016, p. 164.
- ^ a b Fishman 2016, pp. 166–167.
- ^ Kuznitz 2014, p. 183.
- ^ a b Fishman 2016, p. 171.
- ^ Weeks 2008, p. 528.
- ^ a b Biga 2007.
- ^ Evelyn 2002.
Bibliography
- Biga, Leo (2007). "Blumkin Resident's Son: Collector of Collectors of Jewish Artifacts at Yivo". The Jewish Press. OCLC 926110851.
- Collins, Donald E.; Rothfeder, Herbert P. (1983). "The Einsatzstab Reichleiter Rosenberg and the Looting of Jewish and Masonic Libraries During World War II". The Journal of Library History. 18 (1): 21–36. JSTOR 25541351.
- Dolsten, Josefin (15 November 2017). "5 amazing discoveries from a trove of documents hidden during the Holocaust". Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Archived from the original on 12 February 2018.
- Evelyn, Adunka (2002). The Nazi looting of books in Austria and their partial restitution. Czemin. ISBN 9783707601381.
- Fishman, David (1996). "Those Daring Escapades of Vilna's 'Papir Brigade': How a Yiddish Poet and His Crew Rescued Judaica". Forward.[date missing]
- Fishman, David E. (2016). "The Last "Zamlers": Avrom Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski in Vilna, 1944-1945". In Veidlinger, Jeffrey (ed.). Going to the People: Jews and the Ethnographic Impulse. Indiana University Press. ISBN 9780253019080.
- Glickman, Mark (2016). Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books. University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0827612082.
- Kuznitz, Cecile Esther (2014). YIVO and the making of modern Jewish culture: scholarship for the Yiddish nation. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107014206.
- Rydell, Anders (2017). The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance. New York: Viking. ISBN 9780735221222.
- Shavit, David (1997). Hunger for the Printed Word: Books and Libraries in the Jewish Ghettos of Nazi-Occupied Europe. McFarland & Co. ISBN 0786402032.
- Weeks, Theodore R. (2008). "Remembering and Forgetting: Creating a Soviet Lithuanian Capital". Journal of Baltic Studies. 39 (4). S2CID 144016094.
External links
- The Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Collections Project to digitize the archives preserved by the Paper Brigade