The Book Smugglers, page 1
ForeEdge
An imprint of University Press of New England
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© 2017 David E. Fishman
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For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fishman, David E., 1957– author.
Title: The book smugglers: partisans, poets, and the race to save Jewish treasures from the Nazis.
Description: Lebanon, NH : ForeEdge, an imprint of University Press of New England, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017018923 (print) | LCCN 2017025877 (ebook) | ISBN 9781512601268 (epub, mobi, & pdf) | ISBN 9781512600490 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Holocaust, Jewish (1939 – 1945)—Europe. | Cultural property—Protection—Europe. | Cultural property Europe—Destruction and pillage. | Jewish libraries—Destruction and pillage—Europe. | Art thefts—Europe.
Classification: LCC D804.3 (ebook) | LCC D804.3 .F585 2017 (print) | DCC 940.53/18132—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017018923
עליסאַן
"קום אַרויס צו מיר
מייַן טייַער זיס לעבן . . .
קום זשע אַרויס
כ'וויל מיט דיר צוזאַמען זייַן"
CONTENTS
Author’s Note
Dramatis Personae
Introduction
PART ONE. BEFORE THE WAR
1 Shmerke—The Life of the Party
2 The City of the Book
PART TWO. UNDER GERMAN OCCUPATION
3 The First Assault
4 Intellectuals in Hell
5 A Haven for Books and People
A Rescued Gem: The Record Book of the Vilna Gaon’s Synagogue
6 Accomplices or Saviors?
7 The Nazi, the Bard, and the Teacher
8 Ponar for Books
9 The Paper Brigade
10 The Art of Book Smuggling
A Rescued Gem: Herzl’s Diary
11 The Book and the Sword
12 Slave-Labor Curators and Scholars
13 From the Ghetto to the Forest
14 Death in Estonia
15 Miracle from Moscow
PART THREE. AFTER THE WAR
16 From under the Ground
17 A Museum Like No Other
A Rescued Gem: Sholem Aleichem’s Letters
18 Struggling under the Soviets
19 Tears in New York
20 The Decision to Leave
21 The Art of Book Smuggling—Again
22 Rachela’s Choice
23 The German Discovery
24 Parting Duties
A Rescued Gem: The Bust of Tolstoy and Other Russians
25 Wanderings: Poland and Prague
26 Paris
27 Return from Offenbach, or Kalmanovitch’s Prophecy
PART FOUR. FROM LIQUIDATION TO REDEMPTION
28 The Path to Liquidation
29 Later Lives
30 Forty Years in the Wilderness
31 Grains of Wheat
Acknowledgments
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Most of us are aware of the Holocaust as the greatest genocide in history. We’ve seen the images of concentration camps and piles of dead bodies. But few of us think of the Holocaust as an act of cultural plunder and destruction. The Nazis sought not only to murder the Jews but also to obliterate their culture. They sent millions of Jewish books, manuscripts, and works of art to incinerators and garbage dumps. And they transported hundreds of thousands of cultural treasures to specialized libraries and institutes in Germany, in order to study the race they hoped to exterminate.
This book tells the story of a group of ghetto inmates that resisted, that would not let their culture be trampled upon and incinerated. It chronicles the dangerous operation carried out by poets turned partisans and scholars turned smugglers in Vilna, the “Jerusalem of Lithuania.” The rescuers were pitted against Dr. Johannes Pohl, a Nazi “expert” on the Jews, who was dispatched by the German looting agency Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg to organize the destruction and deportation of Vilna’s great collections of Jewish books.
The Germans used forty ghetto inmates as slave laborers to sort, select, pack, and transport the materials. In a nerve-racking eighteen-month project, the members of the slave labor group, nicknamed the “paper brigade,” wrapped books around their torsos and slipped them past German guards. If they were caught, they faced death by firing squad at Ponar, the mass-murder site outside of Vilna.
After Vilna’s liberation from the Germans, the surviving members of the “paper brigade” dug up the hidden cultural treasures from bunkers and hiding places. But they soon came to a stark realization: the Soviet authorities that ruled Vilna were just as hostile toward Jewish culture as were the Nazis. They needed to rescue the treasures again and get them out of the Soviet Union. But smuggling books and papers across the Soviet-Polish border was just as fraught with life-threatening danger as the operation in the ghetto.
This book tells the story of men and women who displayed unwavering devotion to literature and art, and who were ready to risk their lives for them. It pits men and women of letters against two of the most murderous regimes in history.
I have taken the liberty of imagining the feeling and thoughts of my protagonists at various moments, but the things they did are not imagined—they are based on extensive research and documentation. I have usually called the city where the events took place “Vilna,” as Jews called it, but in certain contexts I have used the Lithuanian form “Vilnius” or the Polish one “Wilno.”
At its heart, The Book Smugglers is a personal story: a story about people. Allow me then to tell one personal story. A few years ago, I gave a talk about the Vilna ghetto and mentioned in passing the bravery of the “paper brigade.” After the program, an elderly man who moved with the assistance of a walker came over and said to me, “You know, I worked in that brigade for a few months. I slipped quite a few books and papers past the German guards myself.” I was stunned. I didn’t think any of the heroes of the “paper brigade” were alive by 2012. But as he answered my battery of questions, I could tell he was indeed a member of the group.
Ninety-three-year-old Michael Menkin now makes his home in an assisted-living facility in New Jersey. He is a soft and elegant man, a retired trader in gems and precious stones who is unpresuming about his successful business career. He enjoys the everyday pleasures that life affords him: the company of his son, daughter, six grandchildren, and many friends and admirers. Menkin is a staunch supporter of the State of Israel and remembers with pride how Menachem Begin, then the young leader of the Revisionist Zionists in Poland—and later the sixth prime minister of Israel—slept in his parents’ home in Vilna. Michael was also one of the founders of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
But back then, he was a tall and lanky eighteen-year-old inmate of the Vilna ghetto. The Germans ordered him to lug boxes of books to the loading dock—most of them destined for incinerators and “paper mills,” and some for shipment to Germany. Poet Shmerke Kaczerginski took him under his wing and taught him the art of book smuggling.
Michael’s activity rescuing books is one of the few happy memories he has from his years in the ghetto. His mother, two sisters, and a brother were executed in Ponar. “We were all certain we would soon be killed. So why not do a good thing and rescue some treasures? I don’t remember the names of the books and manuscripts I ‘stole’ from work, but I often lie in bed at night and think to myself, Who knows? Maybe I rescued something important.”
He did. He rescued his humanity and ours.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Shmerke Kaczerginski. Age in 1942: 34. Born in Vilna, the “Jerusalem of Lithuania.” Raised in an orphanage, he attended night school, worked in a printshop, and wrote poetry. Shmerke—everyone called him by his first name—joined the “Young Vilna” literary group and became its lively, upbeat heart and soul. He was a member of the underground Communist Party in Poland and the author of popular political songs. Street smart and independent, once the Germans invaded Vilna, he wandered the countryside for seven months disguised as a Polish deaf-mute. He decided to enter the Vilna ghetto in April 1942 and became its most popular bard.
Zelig Kalmanovitch. Age in 1942: 61. Born in Goldingen, Latvia. A scholar and intellectual to his bone, Kalmanovitch had a doctorate in Semitic philology from the University of Königsberg. A friend once remarked, “When Zelig walks into the room, I don’t need an encyclopedia.” A model of seriousness and integrity, he became codirector of Vilna’s Yiddish Scientific Institute (yivo) in 1928. Kalmanovitch embraced religious faith and Zionism in his midfifties, on the eve of World War II. In the Vilna ghetto, he called upon his fellow inmates to maintain their human dignity and moral stature, and was dubbed “the prophet of the ghetto.”
Rachela Krinsky. Age in 1942: 32. Born in Vilna. She was a popular high-school teacher of history, with a master’s degree from Wilno University and command of medieval Latin and German. In a scandal that shocked many of her friends, she had an affair with a wealthy married man, Joseph Krinsky, who eventua
Herman Kruk. Age in 1942: 45. Born in Plock, Poland. A professional librarian, Kruk was director of the largest Jewish lending library in Warsaw. He was a dedicated democratic socialist, who believed that books were the means through which the Jewish workers would lift themselves up. Kruk fled Warsaw in September 1939 and settled as a refugee in Vilna. He could have immigrated to the United States in 1940 but stayed, in order to track down his wife and son, who were trapped in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Once the Germans captured Vilna, in 1941, he became director of the ghetto library. A refined gentleman, he always polished his shoes and filed his fingernails—even in the ghetto.
Abraham Sutzkever. Age in 1942: 29. Born in Smorgon, Belorussia. Sutzkever spent his childhood during the Great War as a refugee in Siberia, a place he experienced as a snowy winter wonderland. The grandson of a rabbi, he was an apolitical aesthete who believed only in poetry. With his dreamy eyes and wavy hair, he was the poet laureate of the “Young Vilna” literary group. After the Germans invaded, he eluded death dozens of times, once hiding inside a casket at a mortuary. Sutzkever harbored a mystical belief that as long as he fulfilled his mission, and wrote exquisite poetry, he would survive.
Johannes Pohl. Age in 1942: 41. Born in Cologne, Germany. An ordained Catholic priest turned Nazi book looter. Pohl pursued advanced biblical studies at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Jerusalem, where he mastered biblical and modern Hebrew. Upon returning to Germany in 1934, he resigned from the priesthood and took a position as Hebraica librarian in the Prussian State Library. Diligent and aggressively obedient by nature, he became a loyal servant of Nazism and began publishing antisemitic articles on Judaism and the Talmud. In 1940, he joined Nazi Germany’s agency for looting cultural treasures, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, as its Judaica expert. He arrived in Vilna in July 1941.
The Germans shipped most of the books and cultural treasures that they looted in Vilna (Vilnius) to the Institute for Investigation of the Jewish Question in Frankfurt. After the war, Shmerke and Sutzkever dug up the material they hid from the Germans and smuggled part of it across the border to Lodz and Warsaw, Poland.
INTRODUCTION
Vilna, Nazi-occupied Poland. July 1943.
THE POET Shmerke Kaczerginski (pronounced Catcher-ginsky) leaves work to return to the ghetto. A slave laborer, his brigade sorts books, manuscripts, and art. Some will be shipped to Germany. The rest ends up in incinerators and paper mills. He works in the Auschwitz of Jewish culture, responsible for selecting the books that will be deported—and the ones that will be destroyed.
Compared to the work other slave laborers are doing across Nazi-occupied Europe, he is not digging fortifications to stave off the Red Army, clearing landmines with his body, or dragging corpses from gas chambers for incineration. Still, it’s been a hard day, toiling away in the Vilna University Library’s gray hall, stuffed to the ceiling with books. The brigade’s brutish German master, Albert Sporket from the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, had caught Shmerke and a few other workers reading a poem from one of the books that morning. Sporket, a cattle merchant by profession, burst into a shouting fit. The veins on his neck throbbed. He waved his fist at the workers and then flung the book across the room.
“You cheating thieves, you call this work? This isn’t a lounge!” He warned them that if it ever happened again the consequences would be grave. The door slammed behind him.
The workers worked nervously all that afternoon. The cattle merchant treated them and the books like livestock—he would exploit them until it was time for their slaughter. If Sporket reported them to the Gestapo, their lives were over.
Shmerke’s coworker and lover, Rachela Krinsky, a tall high school teacher with deep brown eyes, walked over to him.
“Are you still going to carry stuff today?”
Shmerke replied with his typical buoyant enthusiasm. “Of course. That madman might suddenly decide to send everything away. Or dump it all as wastepaper. These treasures are for our future. Maybe not for us, but for those who will survive us.”
Shmerke wrapped an old embroidered Torah cover around his torso. Once it was snug, he stuck four little books inside his new girdle—old rarities published in Venice, Salonika, Amsterdam, and Krakow. Another tiny Torah cover swaddled him like a diaper. He buckled his belt and put on his shirt and jacket. He was ready to leave for the ghetto gate.
Shmerke had done it many times before, always with a mixture of determination, excitement, and fear. He knew the risks. If caught, he would likely face summary execution—like his friend, the singer Liuba Levitsky, who was found carrying a bag of beans on her person. At the very least, an SS man would give him twenty-five blows with a club or whip. As Shmerke tucked in his shirt, the irony didn’t escape him. A member of the Communist Party and longtime committed atheist who hadn’t gone to synagogue since childhood, he was about to risk his life for these mostly religious artifacts. He could smell the dust of past generations on his skin.
The line of returning workers was unusually long, twisting and turning for two city blocks before the ghetto gate. Word came back from the front of the line. SS Oberscharführer Bruno Kittel was personally inspecting people at the gate. Kittel—young, tall, dark, and handsome—was a trained musician and a natural, cool-headed murderer. He sometimes entered the ghetto to shoot inmates for sport. He’d stop someone on the street, offer the person a cigarette, and ask, “Do you want fire?” When the person nodded, he’d take out his pistol and shoot him in the head.
With Kittel present, the Lithuanian guards and Jewish ghetto police were more thorough than usual. From a block away, you could hear the shrieks of inmates being beaten for hiding food. The workers around Shmerke reached into their clothing. Potatoes, bread, vegetables, and pieces of firewood rolled into the street. They hissed at Shmerke, his puffed-up body obvious. In a landscape peopled with hungry, enslaved bodies, his inexplicably sturdy-looking torso could not have stood out more as he moved toward the inspection point.
“Dump it. Dump it!”
But Shmerke wouldn’t unload. He knew it wouldn’t save him. Even if he left the Hebrew books and Torah covers lying on the street, the Germans would trace them back to his team. Unlike potatoes, books had ex libris. Kittel might decide to execute the entire work brigade—including Rachela and Shmerke’s closest friend, fellow poet Abraham Sutzkever. So Shmerke took his chances and tried to prepare himself for the blows that would follow.
Everyone else in line double-checked his or her pockets for coins or papers that might arouse Kittel’s wrath. Shmerke began to tremble. As the line grew, it blocked traffic on Zawalna Street, one of Vilna’s main commercial thoroughfares. Trolleys honked their horns. Non-Jewish pedestrians gathered across the street to watch the spectacle, some helping themselves to the discarded contraband.
Suddenly, voices called back into the crowd.
“He went inside the ghetto!”
“Let’s go. Faster!”
Kittel, apparently tired of supervising the repetitious body searches, had decided to take a stroll through his fiefdom. The line surged forward. The guards, startled and relieved by Kittel’s departure, turned to see where he was headed, making no effort to stop the rushing crowd. As Shmerke passed through the gate, the books pressed tightly against him, he heard jealous voices call out in his direction.
“Some people have all the luck!”
“And I left my potatoes on the street!”
They had no idea that he wasn’t carrying food.
As his boots clanged against the cobblestones of the ghetto’s Rudnicka Street, Shmerke started singing a song he had written for the ghetto youth club:
Anyone who wants to can be young,
