The Book Smugglers, page 13
The article informed readers that the exhibit could be viewed by appointment by all interested individuals and groups. It concluded, “Whoever views it will have a rough notion of the importance and scope of the work that is quietly being performed by the men of the Einsatzstab.”
During the course of its “run” at 18 Wiwulskiego Street, the Judeo-Bolshevik exhibit was viewed by several visiting delegations. (Plans to send it on tour to cities in the German Reich were never implemented.) Kalmanovitch noticed that the German visitors avoided making eye contact with the Jewish slave laborers in the building, and he mused in his diary that eye contact might lead them to sense a common humanity with their victims and arouse feelings of compassion. The visitors found such feelings impermissible.5
A high-ranking commission from Berlin, with a staff person from Heinrich Himmler’s office, came to inspect the exhibit. They were not pleased. They considered the exhibition ideologically deficient, and one member even called it “Communist propaganda.” After their visit, Sporket ordered the inclusion of more explicitly antisemitic and anti-Bolshevik material. In its final version, the exhibit displayed falsified photographs, ostensibly showing Jewish Bolsheviks tormenting Lithuanian peasants. In fact, the photos were of Jews being tortured by Germans and Lithuanian collaborators.6
Dr. Herbert Gotthard, the Judaica expert on the ERR team, had more serious projects in mind than an exhibit, which to his mind was nothing more than a publicity stunt. “The little swine,” as Shmerke called him, had big ambitions to make the Vilna ERR into a center of Judenforschung, antisemitic Jewish studies. He decided to exploit its forced laborers as the authors of studies on Jewish topics, which he would rewrite in an antisemitic spirit and submit to the ERR’s analytic department in Berlin.
Gotthard started by giving modest research assignments to Zelig Kalmanovitch, the YIVO scholar with a doctorate from the University of Petrograd. Upon seeing the quality of his work, Gotthard put Kalmanovitch in charge of an entire group of slave-labor researchers and of an associated translation group, which rendered prewar studies into German. The researchers (Dr. Moshe Heller, Rabbi Abraham Nisan Ioffe, and others) were based in the ghetto library, where reference literature was readily available, and the translators (Dr. Jacob Gordon, Akiva Gershater, and others) were situated in the YIVO building. Kalmanovitch “floated” between both locations.
Kalmanovitch was outraged by his new job as slave-labor scholar and disgusted that his work would be exploited to spread antisemitic canards. But he kept his feelings to himself and vented them in the privacy of his diary. “They want to uncover our ‘secrets,’ to reveal our ‘hidden affairs.’ What imbeciles! Their crudeness and fraudulence rule. But I must be dumb with silence—until the danger passes.”7
On some level, Kalmanovitch must also have welcomed the challenge to engage in intellectual activity during the long workday. He probably wanted to prove to himself that he was still the scholar he had been before the war, even after nine months of incarceration in the ghetto, at the age of sixty-one.
His first major assignment was to compile a bibliography and translate studies on the Karaites, the sect that had broken away from Judaism in the ninth century. Since the early nineteenth century, Karaites in Eastern Europe and Crimea argued that they were a Turkic group, who spoke a Turkic language and practiced a distinct religion of their own that was only distantly related to Judaism. The Russian tsars accepted this argument and did not apply their restrictive laws regarding the Jews to Karaites. Nazi Germany followed the tsarist tradition and didn’t consider the group to be racial Jews. But German scholars described their religion as “Jewish” or “Judaism without the Talmud,” which made them an odd group: racial Turks with a Jewish religion.8
Once the war broke out, the on-the-ground treatment of the Karaites varied. Not everyone “got the memo” that the members of this tiny sect were not Jews, and military commanders in the field made snap decisions. In Ukraine, the swiftly moving German murder machine didn’t distinguish between Jews and Karaites, and two hundred Karaites were killed at Babi Yar, on the outskirts of Kiev, as part of the great massacre that mowed down thirty-six thousand people on September 29–30, 1941. In France, on the other hand, the Karaites were registered as Jews but were not deported to the death camps, on explicit orders from Berlin. In Crimea, the Karaites’ greatest numeric center, they enjoyed favorable, even privileged, treatment. The Germans recognized them as a Turkic people related to the Tatars and not only protected them but even cultivated a positive relationship.9
There were about two thousand Karaites in Vilna and the nearby town of Troky. Dr. Gerhard Wunder, head of the ERR’s analytic department in Berlin, ordered his subordinates in Vilna to study them. He explained the importance of the topic as follows: “There have recently been unfortunate cases in which the Karaites were mistaken for Jews. I consider it our task to offer instruction on this peculiar ethnic group. . . . Our work will prevent mistakes in the future, such as those that have taken place in the past.”10 Those “mistakes” had been fatal for hundreds of Karaites in Ukraine.
Besides compiling a bibliography and supervising the translation of studies on the Karaites from Hebrew and Yiddish, Kalmanovitch wrote a review of the scholarship in which he pointed out that there was a general consensus that the group was descended from Jews and practiced a form of Judaism. This was the very opposite of what Wunder, the head of the analytic department in Berlin, wanted to hear.11
To counteract Kalmanovitch’s opinion, Gotthard commissioned the Karaite hakham of Vilna, Seraya Szapszal, to compose a study on his community’s racial origin, religion, and culture. And he ordered Kalmanovitch to translate the manuscript from Russian into German. The two men worked in tandem; Kalmanovitch translated as Szapszal wrote. In the privacy of his diary, the Jewish scholar mocked the Karaite author and his magnum opus: “How narrow is his horizon! His genius is in delineating his Turkish-Tatar descent. But he knows more about caring for horses and handling weapons than he does about the teachings of his own religion!”12
The project led to a personal acquaintance between the two men. Szapszal visited the YIVO building on several occasions to examine its Karaite-related materials, and Kalmanovitch visited Szapszal at his home—he was taken there by German military escort—to discuss certain points in his study.
There could be no mistaking that the status of the two scholars was entirely different. The Germans referred to Szapszal as “Professor,” paid him an honorarium of one thousand reichsmark and promised to distribute his study among German government agencies. Kalmanovitch, his learned translator, had no name in ERR memos; he was just “Judenkraefte” (Jew labor). He was paid the standard slave laborer’s wages—thirty reichsmark per month. At most, he received a loaf of bread from his ERR masters to thank him for a job well done.13
The Karaite project culminated with an arranged debate between Szapszal and Kalmanovitch on the group’s descent, held in the presence of the ERR team and other officials. During the debate, Kalmanovitch reversed himself and conceded that the Karaites were racially unrelated to the Jews. He did so not out of conviction but out of compassion: to help the Karaites avoid persecution.14 Kalmanovitch’s reversal was an act of moral magnanimity. Szapszal had never helped Jews and had, in fact, assisted the Germans in capturing them.
During the first months of the German occupation, several hundred Jews lived outside the ghetto with forged papers identifying them as Karaites. Since Karaite males were circumcised, this was a plausible way for Jewish men to avoid discovery. And dark-haired, brown-eyed Jewish women also had a better chance of passing as Karaites than as Poles or Lithuanians. Szapszal reportedly provided the Germans with a list of the names and addresses of authentic Karaites in Vilna, in order to facilitate the arrest of the “frauds,” who were rounded up and sent to Ponar for execution.
Months later, after the large-scale deportations to Ponar had stopped, Szapszal wrote a letter to the Germans to inform them that he was receiving requests for certificates of Karaite ethnicity from people who were in fact Jews. He offered his services to resolve all dubious claims of Karaite descent, and the Germans gratefully accepted. The Reich Office for Genealogical Research (Reichstelle fun Sipenforschung), which was responsible for investigating cases of uncertain racial origin, used Szapszal as a consultant.15
But at the debate, Kalmanovitch did not repay Szapszal or his community in kind.
In August 1942, the ERR analytic department issued a new assignment: it ordered working groups in Ostland (Riga, Vilna, and Minsk) to submit studies on the Jewish ghettos in their regions, both in the past and in the present. Since in German the word “ghetto” could mean Jewish community, the order from Berlin was rather vague and open-ended. Almost anything about the local Jews could be submitted.
Gotthard handed the assignment over to Kalmanovitch and asked him to prepare some studies. Kalmanovitch was struck by the bitter irony—first the Germans exterminated the Jews; now they wanted to study them. “They want to know the height of the mountain that they have leveled,” he remarked sardonically in his diary.16
Kalmanovitch’s research group prepared five studies. Two of them were penned by Kalmanovitch himself: a historical overview on Lithuanian Jews since the Middle Ages and an analysis of the Jewish community in independent Lithuania between 1918 and 1940. Two other studies were on topics that were of greater interest to Kalmanovitch than to the Germans: a catalog of Vilna’s 114 synagogues by Rabbi Abraham Nisan Ioffe and an analysis of the history and art of the Zarecha Jewish cemetery, including the transcription of scores of historic tombstones. Kalmanovitch decided to take advantage of the ERR’s ambiguous order to prepare these studies on Vilna’s Jewish heritage sites, fearing they might not exist much longer. (He was right.) Fifth and last, there was a report on the contemporary Nazi-imposed Vilna ghetto written by Dr. Moshe Heller.17
For Gotthard, the ERR Judaica “expert,” the studies by Kalmanovitch and his research group were raw material that he edited, altered, or simply ignored, as best suited his purposes. Most of the time, he used their information, while interjecting antisemitic comments and observations into the text.
For instance, he brought Kalmanovitch’s statistical table on the occupational breakdown of Lithuanian Jews and then added his own interpretation: Jews didn’t work in heavy industry because they were weak bodied, lazy, and undisciplined. They preferred tailoring, shoemaking, and other crafts that allowed them to drop their work whenever an opportunity arose to make a quick profit from huckstering and brokering.18
Gotthard threw out Kalmanovitch’s survey on Jewish political movements in Vilna and wrote instead a new section with his own conclusion: Jews were Bolsheviks and enemies of the Reich. “The entire population of Wilno is of the opinion that the Jewish masses welcomed the Bolsheviks with enthusiasm. In contrast, the Christian population shunned the Soviet-Russian army. . . . The Communist Youth League was made up entirely of Jews.”19
Gotthard mastered the craft of transforming Jewish scholarship to Nazi Judenforschung and passed it on to his younger colleague Willy Schaefer. Schaefer rewrote the study on “Jewish Cemeteries and Tombstones in Vilna,” transforming it into a virulently antisemitic work. “Hardly any creative elements can be detected in Jewish tombstone art, and in Jewish visual art in general.” Synagogue art and architecture lacked any aesthetic value; they were “primitive,” “repetitive,” “impoverished,” and “devoid of style.” As for Jewish cemeteries, “when one stands before them, one can see the petrified chaos of the Jewish racial soul.”20
The combination of detailed research and antisemitic interpretation impressed ERR officials in Berlin, who singled out the Vilna team for praise. “The work provided by Dr. Gotthard is excellent. It is the most extensive and reliable. Especially his studies on the ghetto.”21
Toward the end of 1942, Kalmanovitch began working on topics from classical Jewish literature and culture: the birth of Moses in the Jewish tradition and the history of the Star of David. Schaefer, who was a doctoral student of theology at Berlin University, even proposed to his faculty in Berlin that he’d write a dissertation on the image of Moses in rabbinic legend with the assistance of “Jew labor.” But the faculty rejected his proposal and noted that “a dissertation must be the product of original research, and not be based on the work of others, all the more so the work of Jews.”22
The Germans came to realize they had a goldmine on their hands: a contingent of scholars and researchers who could produce high-quality papers on demand, about virtually anything, free of charge. By early 1943, the ERR team was using the research group to prepare studies on non-Jewish topics as well: “Masonic Lodges in Lithuania” and “Portraits of Cultural Institutions in Vilna (museums, theaters, fortresses, churches).” Kruk took on the latter assignment, because researching Vilna’s cultural institutions gave him a new pretext to make “excursions” outside the ghetto. He met with Catholic priests and museum curators to collect information for his study, and some of them agreed to provide hiding places for smuggled books and papers.23
For Kalmanovitch, working as a slave-labor scholar was deeply offensive. It violated all his youthful hopes and ideals. As a young man, he had studied in Germany, at the universities of Berlin and Königsberg, to master the methods of critical scholarship. But now, the Germans had betrayed and perverted the ideal of Wissenschaft (science) to advance a barbaric racial theory and justify mass murder. Before, as a leader of YIVO, he had believed that modern scholarship would elevate and strengthen the Jewish people. But now, the Nazis exploited his very own scholarship in order to justify the extermination of the Jews.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
From the Ghetto to the Forest
IN MID-JULY 1943, the Germans learned of the existence of the ghetto’s United Partisan Organization (FPO) from a captured Polish Communist who cracked under torture. They knew that Itzik Vitenberg was the organization’s commander and demanded that Jacob Gens, the ghetto chief, hand him over. Vitenberg went into hiding, and Gens gave a speech to inmates warning that if he wasn’t captured, the Germans would exterminate the entire ghetto. It was one life or twenty thousand lives. After a desperate manhunt by agitated ghetto inmates, Vitenberg surrendered himself to the Germans and died in Gestapo custody on July 17, apparently by suicide.
Shmerke Kaczerginski, the bard of the ghetto, memorialized those fateful events in a ballad, which concluded with a soliloquy by the martyred hero and a call to arms:
Then spoke up our Itsik
With words like lightning
“I must heed this edict, that’s clear.
I’ll not forfeit your lives,
To the tyrants’ cruel knives.”
To death he goes without fear.
Again, somewhere the enemy
Lurks like a beast;
My Mauser is alert in my hand
Now, my dear Mauser,
Be you my liberator
I’ll follow your every command!1
The song’s bravado notwithstanding, the situation was bleak. Now that the Germans had discovered the FPO, they would either launch a military attack to crush the resistance organization or liquidate the Vilna ghetto altogether and deport its inhabitants. In either case, the ghetto’s days were numbered.
On July 19, two days after Vitenberg’s death, Albert Sporket instructed Herman Kruk to write a final report on his work for the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), covering the entire one-and-a-half-year period of his slave labor. This was a sign to the members of the paper brigade that their employment, and probably their lives, was approaching the end.2
The premonition was confirmed by their work assignment. Ten members of the brigade were sent to Uniwersytecka Street, to “finish the job” with the Strashun Library. The group, which included Shmerke, Sutzkever, and Rachela Krinsky, performed their final “selection” of books and bid a sad farewell to the legendary library collection. Shmerke smuggled a few last items into the ghetto.3
Then the group returned to YIVO for a final cleanup. Sutzkever rummaged through the building one last time, looking for treasures that he could whisk off to the attic. He came across YIVO’s leather-bound guest book, signed with dedications by prominent personalities: writers, scholars, politicians, and communal leaders. As he and his friends turned its pages, memories of prewar YIVO rushed through their minds: classes with Max Weinreich, research in the library, conversations with staff and graduate students.
The group decided to add their own dedications on the guest book’s final page and to hide the album in the attic. Perhaps someone would find it after the war, when they would no longer be alive, and it would serve as a monument to their activities. Sutzkever inscribed the last stanza of his poem “A Prayer to the Miracle” (“A tfile tsum nes”), an insistent petition for rescue:
Death is rushing, riding on a bullet head,
To tear apart in me my brightest dream.
One more second—and I’ll be lead,
If you don’t catch up, be a rein.
Catch up! If not, you will regret.
A miracle must also have a moral sense.
Rachela Krinsky’s inscription was much gloomier: “Morituri vos salutant” (“Those who are about to die greet you”). It was the phrase used by the ancient gladiators when they addressed the emperor before entering the arena.4
Back in the tense and nervous ghetto, Zelig Kalmanovitch called on inmates to keep their hope and faith. At a meeting of the Association of Ghetto Writers, the man they called “the prophet of the ghetto” took out a copy of a Hasidic book smuggled from the YIVO worksite and recited a passage to the assembled: “A person must not fall into sadness, because sadness is the nullification of existence.” Kalmanovitch interpreted the passage as a Hasidic rebbe who held forth at a festive meal: “Sadness is the nullification of existence, and that is what the Germans want to achieve. They not only want to kill us; they want to nullify our existence before they kill us. To spite the Germans, and no matter how hard it may be, let us remember not to fall into sadness!”5
During the course of its “run” at 18 Wiwulskiego Street, the Judeo-Bolshevik exhibit was viewed by several visiting delegations. (Plans to send it on tour to cities in the German Reich were never implemented.) Kalmanovitch noticed that the German visitors avoided making eye contact with the Jewish slave laborers in the building, and he mused in his diary that eye contact might lead them to sense a common humanity with their victims and arouse feelings of compassion. The visitors found such feelings impermissible.5
A high-ranking commission from Berlin, with a staff person from Heinrich Himmler’s office, came to inspect the exhibit. They were not pleased. They considered the exhibition ideologically deficient, and one member even called it “Communist propaganda.” After their visit, Sporket ordered the inclusion of more explicitly antisemitic and anti-Bolshevik material. In its final version, the exhibit displayed falsified photographs, ostensibly showing Jewish Bolsheviks tormenting Lithuanian peasants. In fact, the photos were of Jews being tortured by Germans and Lithuanian collaborators.6
Dr. Herbert Gotthard, the Judaica expert on the ERR team, had more serious projects in mind than an exhibit, which to his mind was nothing more than a publicity stunt. “The little swine,” as Shmerke called him, had big ambitions to make the Vilna ERR into a center of Judenforschung, antisemitic Jewish studies. He decided to exploit its forced laborers as the authors of studies on Jewish topics, which he would rewrite in an antisemitic spirit and submit to the ERR’s analytic department in Berlin.
Gotthard started by giving modest research assignments to Zelig Kalmanovitch, the YIVO scholar with a doctorate from the University of Petrograd. Upon seeing the quality of his work, Gotthard put Kalmanovitch in charge of an entire group of slave-labor researchers and of an associated translation group, which rendered prewar studies into German. The researchers (Dr. Moshe Heller, Rabbi Abraham Nisan Ioffe, and others) were based in the ghetto library, where reference literature was readily available, and the translators (Dr. Jacob Gordon, Akiva Gershater, and others) were situated in the YIVO building. Kalmanovitch “floated” between both locations.
Kalmanovitch was outraged by his new job as slave-labor scholar and disgusted that his work would be exploited to spread antisemitic canards. But he kept his feelings to himself and vented them in the privacy of his diary. “They want to uncover our ‘secrets,’ to reveal our ‘hidden affairs.’ What imbeciles! Their crudeness and fraudulence rule. But I must be dumb with silence—until the danger passes.”7
On some level, Kalmanovitch must also have welcomed the challenge to engage in intellectual activity during the long workday. He probably wanted to prove to himself that he was still the scholar he had been before the war, even after nine months of incarceration in the ghetto, at the age of sixty-one.
His first major assignment was to compile a bibliography and translate studies on the Karaites, the sect that had broken away from Judaism in the ninth century. Since the early nineteenth century, Karaites in Eastern Europe and Crimea argued that they were a Turkic group, who spoke a Turkic language and practiced a distinct religion of their own that was only distantly related to Judaism. The Russian tsars accepted this argument and did not apply their restrictive laws regarding the Jews to Karaites. Nazi Germany followed the tsarist tradition and didn’t consider the group to be racial Jews. But German scholars described their religion as “Jewish” or “Judaism without the Talmud,” which made them an odd group: racial Turks with a Jewish religion.8
Once the war broke out, the on-the-ground treatment of the Karaites varied. Not everyone “got the memo” that the members of this tiny sect were not Jews, and military commanders in the field made snap decisions. In Ukraine, the swiftly moving German murder machine didn’t distinguish between Jews and Karaites, and two hundred Karaites were killed at Babi Yar, on the outskirts of Kiev, as part of the great massacre that mowed down thirty-six thousand people on September 29–30, 1941. In France, on the other hand, the Karaites were registered as Jews but were not deported to the death camps, on explicit orders from Berlin. In Crimea, the Karaites’ greatest numeric center, they enjoyed favorable, even privileged, treatment. The Germans recognized them as a Turkic people related to the Tatars and not only protected them but even cultivated a positive relationship.9
There were about two thousand Karaites in Vilna and the nearby town of Troky. Dr. Gerhard Wunder, head of the ERR’s analytic department in Berlin, ordered his subordinates in Vilna to study them. He explained the importance of the topic as follows: “There have recently been unfortunate cases in which the Karaites were mistaken for Jews. I consider it our task to offer instruction on this peculiar ethnic group. . . . Our work will prevent mistakes in the future, such as those that have taken place in the past.”10 Those “mistakes” had been fatal for hundreds of Karaites in Ukraine.
Besides compiling a bibliography and supervising the translation of studies on the Karaites from Hebrew and Yiddish, Kalmanovitch wrote a review of the scholarship in which he pointed out that there was a general consensus that the group was descended from Jews and practiced a form of Judaism. This was the very opposite of what Wunder, the head of the analytic department in Berlin, wanted to hear.11
To counteract Kalmanovitch’s opinion, Gotthard commissioned the Karaite hakham of Vilna, Seraya Szapszal, to compose a study on his community’s racial origin, religion, and culture. And he ordered Kalmanovitch to translate the manuscript from Russian into German. The two men worked in tandem; Kalmanovitch translated as Szapszal wrote. In the privacy of his diary, the Jewish scholar mocked the Karaite author and his magnum opus: “How narrow is his horizon! His genius is in delineating his Turkish-Tatar descent. But he knows more about caring for horses and handling weapons than he does about the teachings of his own religion!”12
The project led to a personal acquaintance between the two men. Szapszal visited the YIVO building on several occasions to examine its Karaite-related materials, and Kalmanovitch visited Szapszal at his home—he was taken there by German military escort—to discuss certain points in his study.
There could be no mistaking that the status of the two scholars was entirely different. The Germans referred to Szapszal as “Professor,” paid him an honorarium of one thousand reichsmark and promised to distribute his study among German government agencies. Kalmanovitch, his learned translator, had no name in ERR memos; he was just “Judenkraefte” (Jew labor). He was paid the standard slave laborer’s wages—thirty reichsmark per month. At most, he received a loaf of bread from his ERR masters to thank him for a job well done.13
The Karaite project culminated with an arranged debate between Szapszal and Kalmanovitch on the group’s descent, held in the presence of the ERR team and other officials. During the debate, Kalmanovitch reversed himself and conceded that the Karaites were racially unrelated to the Jews. He did so not out of conviction but out of compassion: to help the Karaites avoid persecution.14 Kalmanovitch’s reversal was an act of moral magnanimity. Szapszal had never helped Jews and had, in fact, assisted the Germans in capturing them.
During the first months of the German occupation, several hundred Jews lived outside the ghetto with forged papers identifying them as Karaites. Since Karaite males were circumcised, this was a plausible way for Jewish men to avoid discovery. And dark-haired, brown-eyed Jewish women also had a better chance of passing as Karaites than as Poles or Lithuanians. Szapszal reportedly provided the Germans with a list of the names and addresses of authentic Karaites in Vilna, in order to facilitate the arrest of the “frauds,” who were rounded up and sent to Ponar for execution.
Months later, after the large-scale deportations to Ponar had stopped, Szapszal wrote a letter to the Germans to inform them that he was receiving requests for certificates of Karaite ethnicity from people who were in fact Jews. He offered his services to resolve all dubious claims of Karaite descent, and the Germans gratefully accepted. The Reich Office for Genealogical Research (Reichstelle fun Sipenforschung), which was responsible for investigating cases of uncertain racial origin, used Szapszal as a consultant.15
But at the debate, Kalmanovitch did not repay Szapszal or his community in kind.
In August 1942, the ERR analytic department issued a new assignment: it ordered working groups in Ostland (Riga, Vilna, and Minsk) to submit studies on the Jewish ghettos in their regions, both in the past and in the present. Since in German the word “ghetto” could mean Jewish community, the order from Berlin was rather vague and open-ended. Almost anything about the local Jews could be submitted.
Gotthard handed the assignment over to Kalmanovitch and asked him to prepare some studies. Kalmanovitch was struck by the bitter irony—first the Germans exterminated the Jews; now they wanted to study them. “They want to know the height of the mountain that they have leveled,” he remarked sardonically in his diary.16
Kalmanovitch’s research group prepared five studies. Two of them were penned by Kalmanovitch himself: a historical overview on Lithuanian Jews since the Middle Ages and an analysis of the Jewish community in independent Lithuania between 1918 and 1940. Two other studies were on topics that were of greater interest to Kalmanovitch than to the Germans: a catalog of Vilna’s 114 synagogues by Rabbi Abraham Nisan Ioffe and an analysis of the history and art of the Zarecha Jewish cemetery, including the transcription of scores of historic tombstones. Kalmanovitch decided to take advantage of the ERR’s ambiguous order to prepare these studies on Vilna’s Jewish heritage sites, fearing they might not exist much longer. (He was right.) Fifth and last, there was a report on the contemporary Nazi-imposed Vilna ghetto written by Dr. Moshe Heller.17
For Gotthard, the ERR Judaica “expert,” the studies by Kalmanovitch and his research group were raw material that he edited, altered, or simply ignored, as best suited his purposes. Most of the time, he used their information, while interjecting antisemitic comments and observations into the text.
For instance, he brought Kalmanovitch’s statistical table on the occupational breakdown of Lithuanian Jews and then added his own interpretation: Jews didn’t work in heavy industry because they were weak bodied, lazy, and undisciplined. They preferred tailoring, shoemaking, and other crafts that allowed them to drop their work whenever an opportunity arose to make a quick profit from huckstering and brokering.18
Gotthard threw out Kalmanovitch’s survey on Jewish political movements in Vilna and wrote instead a new section with his own conclusion: Jews were Bolsheviks and enemies of the Reich. “The entire population of Wilno is of the opinion that the Jewish masses welcomed the Bolsheviks with enthusiasm. In contrast, the Christian population shunned the Soviet-Russian army. . . . The Communist Youth League was made up entirely of Jews.”19
Gotthard mastered the craft of transforming Jewish scholarship to Nazi Judenforschung and passed it on to his younger colleague Willy Schaefer. Schaefer rewrote the study on “Jewish Cemeteries and Tombstones in Vilna,” transforming it into a virulently antisemitic work. “Hardly any creative elements can be detected in Jewish tombstone art, and in Jewish visual art in general.” Synagogue art and architecture lacked any aesthetic value; they were “primitive,” “repetitive,” “impoverished,” and “devoid of style.” As for Jewish cemeteries, “when one stands before them, one can see the petrified chaos of the Jewish racial soul.”20
The combination of detailed research and antisemitic interpretation impressed ERR officials in Berlin, who singled out the Vilna team for praise. “The work provided by Dr. Gotthard is excellent. It is the most extensive and reliable. Especially his studies on the ghetto.”21
Toward the end of 1942, Kalmanovitch began working on topics from classical Jewish literature and culture: the birth of Moses in the Jewish tradition and the history of the Star of David. Schaefer, who was a doctoral student of theology at Berlin University, even proposed to his faculty in Berlin that he’d write a dissertation on the image of Moses in rabbinic legend with the assistance of “Jew labor.” But the faculty rejected his proposal and noted that “a dissertation must be the product of original research, and not be based on the work of others, all the more so the work of Jews.”22
The Germans came to realize they had a goldmine on their hands: a contingent of scholars and researchers who could produce high-quality papers on demand, about virtually anything, free of charge. By early 1943, the ERR team was using the research group to prepare studies on non-Jewish topics as well: “Masonic Lodges in Lithuania” and “Portraits of Cultural Institutions in Vilna (museums, theaters, fortresses, churches).” Kruk took on the latter assignment, because researching Vilna’s cultural institutions gave him a new pretext to make “excursions” outside the ghetto. He met with Catholic priests and museum curators to collect information for his study, and some of them agreed to provide hiding places for smuggled books and papers.23
For Kalmanovitch, working as a slave-labor scholar was deeply offensive. It violated all his youthful hopes and ideals. As a young man, he had studied in Germany, at the universities of Berlin and Königsberg, to master the methods of critical scholarship. But now, the Germans had betrayed and perverted the ideal of Wissenschaft (science) to advance a barbaric racial theory and justify mass murder. Before, as a leader of YIVO, he had believed that modern scholarship would elevate and strengthen the Jewish people. But now, the Nazis exploited his very own scholarship in order to justify the extermination of the Jews.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
From the Ghetto to the Forest
IN MID-JULY 1943, the Germans learned of the existence of the ghetto’s United Partisan Organization (FPO) from a captured Polish Communist who cracked under torture. They knew that Itzik Vitenberg was the organization’s commander and demanded that Jacob Gens, the ghetto chief, hand him over. Vitenberg went into hiding, and Gens gave a speech to inmates warning that if he wasn’t captured, the Germans would exterminate the entire ghetto. It was one life or twenty thousand lives. After a desperate manhunt by agitated ghetto inmates, Vitenberg surrendered himself to the Germans and died in Gestapo custody on July 17, apparently by suicide.
Shmerke Kaczerginski, the bard of the ghetto, memorialized those fateful events in a ballad, which concluded with a soliloquy by the martyred hero and a call to arms:
Then spoke up our Itsik
With words like lightning
“I must heed this edict, that’s clear.
I’ll not forfeit your lives,
To the tyrants’ cruel knives.”
To death he goes without fear.
Again, somewhere the enemy
Lurks like a beast;
My Mauser is alert in my hand
Now, my dear Mauser,
Be you my liberator
I’ll follow your every command!1
The song’s bravado notwithstanding, the situation was bleak. Now that the Germans had discovered the FPO, they would either launch a military attack to crush the resistance organization or liquidate the Vilna ghetto altogether and deport its inhabitants. In either case, the ghetto’s days were numbered.
On July 19, two days after Vitenberg’s death, Albert Sporket instructed Herman Kruk to write a final report on his work for the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), covering the entire one-and-a-half-year period of his slave labor. This was a sign to the members of the paper brigade that their employment, and probably their lives, was approaching the end.2
The premonition was confirmed by their work assignment. Ten members of the brigade were sent to Uniwersytecka Street, to “finish the job” with the Strashun Library. The group, which included Shmerke, Sutzkever, and Rachela Krinsky, performed their final “selection” of books and bid a sad farewell to the legendary library collection. Shmerke smuggled a few last items into the ghetto.3
Then the group returned to YIVO for a final cleanup. Sutzkever rummaged through the building one last time, looking for treasures that he could whisk off to the attic. He came across YIVO’s leather-bound guest book, signed with dedications by prominent personalities: writers, scholars, politicians, and communal leaders. As he and his friends turned its pages, memories of prewar YIVO rushed through their minds: classes with Max Weinreich, research in the library, conversations with staff and graduate students.
The group decided to add their own dedications on the guest book’s final page and to hide the album in the attic. Perhaps someone would find it after the war, when they would no longer be alive, and it would serve as a monument to their activities. Sutzkever inscribed the last stanza of his poem “A Prayer to the Miracle” (“A tfile tsum nes”), an insistent petition for rescue:
Death is rushing, riding on a bullet head,
To tear apart in me my brightest dream.
One more second—and I’ll be lead,
If you don’t catch up, be a rein.
Catch up! If not, you will regret.
A miracle must also have a moral sense.
Rachela Krinsky’s inscription was much gloomier: “Morituri vos salutant” (“Those who are about to die greet you”). It was the phrase used by the ancient gladiators when they addressed the emperor before entering the arena.4
Back in the tense and nervous ghetto, Zelig Kalmanovitch called on inmates to keep their hope and faith. At a meeting of the Association of Ghetto Writers, the man they called “the prophet of the ghetto” took out a copy of a Hasidic book smuggled from the YIVO worksite and recited a passage to the assembled: “A person must not fall into sadness, because sadness is the nullification of existence.” Kalmanovitch interpreted the passage as a Hasidic rebbe who held forth at a festive meal: “Sadness is the nullification of existence, and that is what the Germans want to achieve. They not only want to kill us; they want to nullify our existence before they kill us. To spite the Germans, and no matter how hard it may be, let us remember not to fall into sadness!”5
