The Book Smugglers, page 12
As the ties between the paper brigade and the FPO grew, the leaders of the underground decided to extend their support to the book-smuggling operation. How? The FPO had “moles” in the ghetto police, and some of the guards at the gate were “their” people. On days when the paper brigade planned to smuggle in particularly precious treasures, they notified the FPO, which arranged for guards belonging to the organization to be on duty and “inspect” them at the gate. There were no guarantees, because the guard details were mixed (FPO and non-FPO), and no one knew when Germans would show up. But from that point on, smuggling through the gate became less perilous.5
The FPO also shared its best storage facility with the paper brigade: the bunker at 6 Shavel Street. The cavern descended more than sixty feet underground. One entered through the sewage system and climbed down ladders two levels, to a facility that had its own ventilation system, electricity drawn from wires outside the ghetto, and a tunnel leading to a well on the Aryan side. The bunker was built by a young construction engineer named Gershon Abramovitsh in order to store arms caches for the FPO, and also as a hiding place for his paralyzed mother. Beginning in the spring of 1943, crates of books lay alongside the crates of arms.6
In appreciation of the FPO’s assistance to the paper brigade, Herman Kruk, the librarian, extended help to the resistance organization. He created a hiding place for arms inside the ghetto library. With weapons kept in a central public location, the organization would be able to mobilize much more quickly in case of an emergency. Behind a bookshelf with copies of Josephus’s Jewish Wars (which described the rebellion by the Maccabees against the Greek Empire), there was a secret compartment that stored Degtyarev machine guns. In the dead of night, FPO members entered the room one by one and, after pulling down the shades, an instructor gave them lessons on how to handle the weapon, while the shelves full of library books looked down at them. Once the lesson was over, the group of aspiring modern Maccabees returned the weapons to their place and dreamed of the next Jewish war.7
Helping store arms was a good thing, but procuring them was even more important. Since the ERR worksite was poorly supervised by the Germans, it was an ideal location for meeting Poles and Lithuanians to purchase arms. The conduit for those purchases was none other than Shmerke Kaczerginski.
In May 1943, FPO commander in chief Itzik Vitenberg summoned Shmerke for a face-to-face meeting, in total violation of the organization’s conspiratorial protocol, which stated that there be no direct contact between its rank-and-file members and the commander in chief. Until then, Shmerke only knew the commander’s code name, Leon. After being escorted through a maze of hiding places, he was stunned to meet the commander, who was none other than his old friend Itzik Vitenberg. They had worked together in the Communist Party.
Once Shmerke rebounded from his discovery, Vitenberg stunned him again with an order to obtain arms for the organization through his Lithuanian friend Julian Jankauskas. Jankauskas had hidden Shmerke’s wife in the desperate days of September and October 1941, and was a frequent visitor in the front yard of the YIVO building, during lunchtime.
At their next lunchtime meeting, Shmerke told Jankauskas about the FPO and its plan for armed resistance. The rest of the conversation went as follows:
Shmerke: We have arms, but we need more. And you need to help us. If you’ll need money, we’ll get the money.
Jankauskas: I can’t say anything now. I need to think about it. I’ll bring you an answer tomorrow.
Shmerke: Your answer should be in the form of the first pistol.
Jankauskas: Maybe it will be.
The next day, Jankauskas arrived during the lunch hour, his face flaming red and his eyes sparkling. Shmerke went out to meet him amid the bushes and trees in front of the building.
Shmerke: I hope your answer will come not from your mouth but from your pocket.
Jankauskas: And if it comes from between my pants, you won’t accept it?
With those words, Jankauskas pulled a six-shot revolver out of his pants. Shmerke jumped for joy, embraced Jankauskas’s neck, and affectionately bit him on the cheek. Shmerke went back into the YIVO building and buried the pistol underneath a pile of newspapers in the basement.
That night, he reported his acquisition to Abrasha Chwoinik, the Bundist member of the FPO command who was in charge of arms purchases. Chwoinik was pleased but spoke with playful disappointment. A six-shot revolver was a good present for your girlfriend, and was a nice weapon for a duel, if you didn’t want to kill your opponent. But the organization was short on arms and would accept the piece. He informed Shmerke, “Tomorrow afternoon, shortly before you leave work, a ghetto policeman will come calling for you at the YIVO building. When he says the code phrase ‘Berl is waiting for you,’ give him the gun.”
The next day, the handoff went smoothly. Ghetto police sergeant Moshe Brause used the code phrase, Shmerke retrieved the pistol from its hiding pace, and Brause left with the weapon, wishing him, “May it be a good beginning!” It was.8
From then on, the meetings became a routine. Every second or third day, Jankauskas brought arms during the lunch hour—a handgun, grenades, and bullets—and Brause came at the end of the day to pick up the weapon and deliver money for payment. Ruzhka Korczak and Mikhal Kovner were in on the scheme and checked the incoming weapons to make sure they were operational, and evaluated their worth. In a month’s time, Shmerke acquired an arsenal of fifteen handguns, each of which cost between 1,500 and 1,800 German marks.
It was crucial that the handoffs of arms and money be performed quickly, without drawing the attention of coworkers who were not members of the FPO. Many in the paper brigade worried that one of their work colleagues was an informer.9
Besides Sergeant Brause of the ghetto police, the paper brigade also used a second channel to smuggle the weapons into the ghetto. Mendl Borenshtein, a carpenter who belonged to the “physical brigade,” carried ammunition and small weapons in the false bottom of his toolkit.10
The paper brigade also helped pay for weapons with its own inventory. Among the items that poured into 18 Wiwulskiego Street from the An-ski Museum, there were dozens of silver kiddush cups, Torah pointers, and other ritual objects made of gold and silver. Kovner, Ruzhka, and others smuggled these items into the ghetto and handed them over to the FPO, which melted them down. The organization then sold the gold and silver on the black market and used the money to purchase their much-needed arms.11
The smelting operation inspired Sutzkever to write one of his most famous ghetto poems, “The Lead Plates of the Romm Printers.” In it, he imagined Jewish fighters melting down the lead plates used by the Vilna Romm Press to print the Talmud, in order to make bullets to fight the Germans. As letter after letter dripped into liquid, Sutzkever sensed that he and his fellow fighters were like the priests in the ancient temple, filling the menorah with oil. The Jewish genius, that had for centuries expressed itself in religious study and worship, now needed to express itself in armed combat.
Liquid lead brightly shining in bullets so fine,
Ancient thoughts—in the letters that melted hot.
A line from Babylonia, from Poland a line,
Boiled, flooded together in the foundry pot.
Jewish valor, hidden in word and in sign,
Must know explode the whole world with a shot!12
Sutzkever’s poem was a powerful metaphor, and an inspiring dream. In fact, it was the Germans who seized the lead plates of the Romm Press and melted them down. But the poem was based on a different real-life FPO melting operation: one that boiled down metallic kiddush cups and Torah pointers to purchase arms.
One day, Chwoinik of the FPO command asked to meet with Shmerke. “You’re doing excellent work. The merchandise is good. But we won’t be able to fight only with handguns. You need to get us rifles, and most important of all, machine guns.” Shmerke let out a nervous chuckle. When he regained his composure and military discipline, he replied obediently, “Yes, sir!”
The next day, when Shmerke met Jankauskas, he raised the subject of machine guns, and to his utter amazement, his friend wasn’t surprised. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Jankauskas didn’t show up for their next scheduled meeting. He disappeared for several days, and Shmerke was worried he’d been arrested. If so, the Germans would come looking for him, for Shmerke, next. So he slept at different ghetto addresses for the next few nights.
Then, on a rainy day, toward the end of the lunch break, when the Germans were soon expected back, Jankauskas opened the gate to the YIVO grounds carrying a viola case. Shmerke rushed down to meet him.
Shmerke: What happened? You’ve taken up viola playing?
Jankauskas: It’s a viola that shoots. Take it.
Shmerke grabbed the heavy case and lugged it down to the basement. He informed Mikhal Kovner, Ruzhka, and Sutzkever about the acquisition. They decided to dismantle the machine gun immediately and conceal its parts in different rooms, just in case a curious laborer, who had seen the viola case through a window, decided to come down and take a look at the musical instrument.13
As soon as they dismantled the machine gun and hid its parts, the Germans arrived—not in one vehicle but in two. They had guests. Willy Schaefer walked into the building with high-ranking visitors in uniform. The FPO members’ hearts beat loudly, as Schaefer decided to give the visitors a tour of the worksite, room by room, showing off its treasures. The Germans entered the art room where the barrel of the machine gun lay underneath three paintings and began examining different pieces of art: Chagall, Minkowsky, and others. Sutzkever, who was in charge of the art department, and who was working in the adjacent room with Rachela Krinsky, was beside himself. Schaefer picked up one painting and then another; he was just one painting away from discovering the barrel of the gun. Sutzkever’s face turned white as chalk, and he ran out to tell Shmerke that catastrophe was imminent.
Rachela Krinsky detected her friends’ agitation and sensed that something was seriously wrong. She wasn’t a member of the FPO and wasn’t “in the loop” about the arms-smuggling operation, but she had figured out a long time ago that Jankauskas was giving Shmerke more than just bread during his lunch-time visits. Without a second to lose, she decided to create a diversion. She went over to the doorway from the connecting room and called out to Schaefer, “Mr. Chief, Mr. Chief, I’ve found an important manuscript.” The Germans turned to her and came over to look at the item she held in her hands: a document from the Polish uprising of 1830. After examining it, they left the room.14 The diversion succeeded, and the catastrophe was averted.
Shmerke took equal pride in his activities as book smuggler and FPO fighter. He saw them as complementary forms of resistance. In his memoirs, he recounted a folktale: When the Lord created the first Jew, the biblical patriarch Abraham, the Almighty gave him two presents for his life journey—a book, which Abraham held in one hand, and a sword, which he held in the other. But the patriarch became so fascinated reading the book that he didn’t notice how the sword slipped out of his hand. Ever since that moment, the Jews have been the people of the book. It was left to the ghetto fighters and partisans to discover the lost sword and pick it up.15
CHAPTER TWELVE
Slave-Labor Curators and Scholars
IN EARLY JULY 1942, Albert Sporket, the ERR team’s brutish chief, gave the paper brigade an unexpected assignment: to prepare an exhibit on Jews and Bolsheviks, using materials located at the worksite. He envisioned the exhibit as a vehicle for the political education of German troops, to instill in them hostility toward the two greatest enemies of the Reich. Sporket wanted to showcase the ERR’s work in Vilna to higher-ups in the German command, to show just how important its looting was for Nazi “science.”
There was just one catch: Sporket and his colleagues were totally ignorant of Jewish affairs, and his Judaica expert Herbert Gotthard wasn’t interested in curating an exhibit. So Sporket left the exhibit preparation to the Jewish slave laborers themselves, on the assumption that anything they put together would constitute an “exposé” of the vile and degenerate nature of Jewry and Communism. What emerged in the end was an odd hybrid of a sympathetic, objective, and antisemitic presentation.
The exhibit, which was put on display in the YIVO exhibition hall (where the Yiddish institute had once mounted its exhibition on I. L. Peretz, the father of modern Yiddish literature) was divided into two parts: the Jewish section on the right-hand side and a Soviet section, fittingly, on the left. Portraits of the Vilna Gaon, Matityahu Strashun, and other rabbis were on one wall, and photographs of Stalin, the members of the Soviet politburo, and Marshal Voroshilov hung opposite them. The two groups of dignitaries stared across the room at each other.
The Jewish section consisted of items from the An-ski Museum, whose entire collection was hastily transferred to the YIVO building for sorting. On display were sculptures and paintings by various Jewish artists, old rare books (including a tiny pocket siddur from the seventeenth century), and manuscripts. There was a glass case with the illustrated title pages of modern Hebrew and Yiddish books. A Torah scroll was situated in the center, surrounded by silver ritual objects, and a Hasidic satin caftan (Yiddish: kapote) hung on a makeshift mannequin.1
The caftan became the subject of a crisis, when it disappeared one night, apparently lifted by a chimney sweep. (Chimney sweeps had total freedom of movement from one rooftop to another in the city and engaged in smuggling and theft. Some of them helped smuggle arms for the FPO.) Sporket’s deputy, Willy Schaefer, accused the members of the paper brigade of stealing the caftan, a valued exhibit item, and threatened to inform the Gestapo unless they returned it the next day. The slave laborers’ protests that they knew nothing about the whereabouts of the stolen item only infuriated Schaefer even more. The group decided they would need to find a substitute kapote in the ghetto after work that evening, but they couldn’t find a single Hasidic caftan in the ghetto of Vilna, which was historically a non-Hasidic and anti-Hasidic community. So they replaced the original with a “forgery”: Shmerke’s black raincoat with the lining let down. Luckily, Schaefer didn’t notice the difference and was placated.
The exhibit’s Soviet section, decorated with red ribbons, included editions of Lenin’s works in numerous languages and sample volumes of writings by Stalin. In a corner, there was a display case entitled “Incitement” with publications against Nazi Germany in Russian, Yiddish, and other languages. The exhibit culminated with a glass display case of Nazi literature—brochures, newspapers, and magazines, and several issues of the Stürmer—that revealed “the truth” about Jews and Bolsheviks.
In the middle of the room, between the Jewish and Soviet sections, there was a bookcase marked “Karaitica,” dedicated to the sect that split off from Judaism in the ninth century. It displayed Karaite books, photographs of individuals and groups, and a large portrait of the Karaite cleric of Vilna, Seraya Szapszal. Inclusion of the sect in the Judeo-Bolshevik exhibit was probably Zelig Kalmanovitch’s idea, since he was convinced that the Karaites were of Jewish origin and was researching their history at the time.2
Herman Kruk was quite pleased with the outcome of his colleagues’ work as slave-labor curators: “The exhibition is designed so that everything Jewish is really Jewish and none of us needs to be ashamed of it. Everything Bolshevik is a fine Bolshevik corner, with no tones of anti-Bolshevism. And the Germans think that the Jewish workers are helping them with everything as much as possible. The wolf is satisfied and the lamb is whole.” Kalmanovitch was even more effusive: “The exhibit testifies to the cultural strength of the Jewish people. It is like the biblical Balaam, who intended to curse, and against his will ended up blessing.”3
In advance of the exhibit’s official opening, the YIVO building was cleaned up and looked, in Kruk’s words, like “a small town Jewish philanthropic institution on the eve of a visit by the American ‘Joint Distribution Committee.’ ” Several of the workrooms were filled with crates, and signs were hung up with the word “transport”—all to make an impression that this was a very busy shipping dock. Gebietskommissar Hans Hingst and numerous German and Lithuanian officials attended the exhibit’s opening reception.
A few days later, a rave “review” of the exhibit appeared in Wilnaer Zeitung, the local organ of the German authorities. The article heaped praise on the ERR: “The political-military struggle against Jewry and Bolshevism is now being followed up by something else: struggle on the level of scientific research. We must not only fight our opponents, we must know their essence, their intentions and objectives. . . . The men of the Einsatzstab are the shock troops of science. . . . These men have made numerous discoveries that are of importance for the understanding of Jewry and Bolshevism—some of which are of direct practical political importance.”4 The article pointed out Vilna’s position as the historic “headquarters of Jewry” and the Jews’ “second Jerusalem.” “Vilna offers a truly enormous selection of important and interesting documents on World Enemies no. 1 and no. 2—the Jews and the Bolsheviks.”
The correspondent for Wilnaer Zeitung hailed the exhibit as an important educational achievement: “It displays the cunning, cruel faces of Jewish ‘greats’ from the nineteenth century, the stuttering attempts of modern Jewish artists. . . . On the other side, there is a special collection of photos from the ‘Soviet Paradise’ that speak more than any words can of the wretchedness and backwardness of Soviet Man.”
