The Book Smugglers, page 26
Gotthard’s cover was blown due to a simple coincidence. A resident of the Lubeck DP camp read Sutzkever’s book on the Vilna ghetto and came across the name Herbert Gotthard, which was the name of a somewhat dubious character in the camp. The reader sent off a letter to Sutzkever in Lodz, with a physical description that matched the short, stout man that Shmerke nicknamed “the little swine.”11
Sutzkever brought the matter to the attention of the Central Union of Jews in Poland, which it, in turn, submitted a deposition by Sutzkever to the War Crimes Commission of the Supreme Polish Military Court. The man in question, he wrote, was responsible for the destruction of tens of thousands of Jewish cultural treasures in Vilna and for the murder of two prominent Jewish scholars, Nojekh Prylucki and Abraham E. Goldschmidt, in August 1941. The Polish War Crimes Commission contacted the British authorities—the Lubeck camp was in the British zone of occupied Germany—and asked for Gotthard’s arrest and extradition to Poland.
Sutzkever also wrote to Weinreich in New York, who fired off a letter to the American military authorities, asking them to intervene with the British to arrest the man whom he called “the liquidator of the Vilna YIVO.”
As a result of these efforts, Gotthard was arrested in November 1946. He was held in a British internment camp in Hamburg for more than half a year and then moved to another prison facility. At first, he argued that he was the victim of mistaken identity and that the crimes must have been committed by a different Herbert Gotthard. Later, he changed his story and admitted to having worked for the ERR in Riga and Vilna but said he had been a Jewish slave laborer. He claimed that his assignment consisted solely of translating and conducting research on the Karaites and that he used his position to offer material aid to the other Jewish scholars. Gotthard denied engaging in plunder or being responsible for the murder of Nojekh Prylucki.
The British sent a photograph of Gotthard to Sutzkever, who in the meanwhile relocated to Paris, and Sutzkever confirmed the man’s identity: this was the “little swine,” the liquidator of the Vilna YIVO.12
Shmerke wrote gleefully about Gotthard’s arrest and imprisonment. He fantasized that he and the other surviving members of the paper brigade would soon confront him in a Warsaw military courtroom as witnesses. Gotthard’s jaw would drop when he would see that several members of the Jewish work brigade had survived and were now his accusers. Shmerke looked forward to the sweet revenge of extradition and justice. Meanwhile, as the bureaucratic wheels turned slowly, Gotthard sat in a British prison cell.
Once Sutzkever and Shmerke were safely in Paris, far from the USSR and the Soviet bloc, a new question arose: how should YIVO inform the public about the rescue and retrieval of the treasures from Vilna? A dramatic event of this magnitude deserved to be publicized; and its heroes, celebrated. But, as Weinreich wrote to the two, “there are weighty reasons not to speak about the matter with complete openness. . . . It is important that the matter be conveyed in a slightly disguised manner.”13
It isn’t hard to figure out Weinreich’s concerns: if the full story were publicized, the Soviet government might launch a campaign for the materials’ return to Vilnius, on the grounds that they were the stolen property of a Soviet museum. And Jewish Communists would vilify the “partners in crime,” Shmerke and Sutzkever, who had stolen the books and documents, and YIVO, the institution that was holding the stolen goods.
Jewish Communists had already begun hurling personal attacks at Sutzkever, portraying him as a thief, not a rescuer. Soon after he arrived in Paris, he heard that there were angry grumblings against his actions back in Poland. A former colleague from the paper brigade, Akiva Gershater, wrote to him from Lodz: “In certain circles, including literary ones, there’s been a total reversal of the attitude toward you. They are saying, ‘Sutzkever impoverished Vilna,’ ‘he removed the most precious treasures,’ ‘we know the whole story,’ ‘we need to deal with this.’ ” Gershater warned Sutzkever that the people who were making these accusations had no doubt shared them with their ideological comrades in Paris. He even cautioned him against keeping any museum materials in his Paris apartment, because Communists might organize a break-in.14
Angry allegations also emanated directly from Soviet Vilnius: museum staff member Shloime Beilis sent letters to the Association of Vilners in Paris, denouncing Shmerke and Sutzkever as thieves.15
Shmerke was never one to shy away from a fight and relished verbal battle with Communists. In Paris, he called them apologists for a murderous regime, and they branded him a traitor and agent of Wall Street.16 But even Shmerke wasn’t eager to wage a public polemic over his decision, as director of the Vilnius Jewish Museum, to remove its treasures and smuggle them out of the USSR. Public disclosure could lead to a clampdown against the museum and to the arrest of his childhood friend, Yankl Gutkowicz. At the very least, further removal of materials would become impossible.
So Shmerke kept silent for several years. When he eventually referred to his smuggling activity in a memoir published in 1949, Jewish Communists released their full fury. “He looted the state museum where he was the responsible custodian. While the USSR paid him a salary to guard the museum materials, he quietly started ‘rescuing’ them, without the slightest sense of honesty, ethics, and loyalty. He justified his acts by sacrilegiously identifying Sovietness with Nazism. . . . Needless to say, the dishonesty of the Kaczerginskis led the state organs to view with suspicion the potential Shmerkes that might have remained in the country, and this caused serious harm to Soviet Jews.”17
All of these considerations were behind the mutual agreement that YIVO not publicize the fact that it had received Vilna materials from Shmerke and Sutzkever.18 In the first half of 1947, yivo News only mentioned in general terms that the institute had in its possession materials from the prewar Vilna YIVO that had been rescued. It didn’t explain who had rescued them and how they had reached New York. A large number of Vilna ghetto documents were put on display in YIVO’s exhibit “The Jews in Europe 1939–1946,” mounted in New York in March–April 1947, but again without explaining how they had been obtained.19 Weinreich was especially sensitive about the ghetto documents. He knew that YIVO had no legitimate legal claim to them, since the Vilna YIVO no longer existed during the ghetto years. The only rightful owner of the ghetto materials was the Jewish Museum in Vilnius, a Soviet state institution.
By August 1947, YIVO had received the bulk of the materials that Shmerke and Sutzkever had smuggled across Europe, and the YIVO senior administration revisited the question of issuing a news release about their rescue activity.20 It decided to act cautiously and secured Sutzkever’s consent to tell part of the story—in a single sentence.
The lead article of the September 1947 issue of yivo News informed readers that the institute had acquired three extraordinary diaries: Theodor Herzl’s diary from the 1880s and the diaries of Zelig Kalmanovitch and Herman Kruk from the Vilna ghetto. The article noted, “How they arrived at YIVO—that is a separate dramatic story that we will relate in detail on another occasion.” But on an inside page of the same issue, far from the lead article, yivo News published a photograph of Sutzkever and Shmerke in the Vilna ghetto with a caption in eight-point print: “The two Yiddish poets and a group of cultural activists who worked in the Vilna YIVO under the German regime hid Jewish cultural treasures, including YIVO treasures, in the ghetto, with great risk to their lives. After the war, they dug them up.”21
The reader who put two and two together (the article on page 1 and the caption on page 7) understood that the diaries had been rescued by Sutzkever and Shmerke.
The caption did not mention the existence of the Jewish Museum, the fact that Sutzkever and Shmerke had been its directors, or that they had smuggled museum holdings (including the three extraordinary diaries) out of the USSR.
The question was so sensitive that discussions ensued on what to call the collection of documents. Naming it the Sutzkever-Kaczerginski Collection would constitute firsthand evidence that they had smuggled the materials out of the USSR. But not naming the collection after its rescuers would have denied them the most basic form of recognition. Shmerke was insistent: “I believe that Weinreich’s formulation, ‘the Sutzkever-Kaczerginski Archive in YIVO’ is the minimum for us. We must not allow ourselves to be terrorized by the Beilises.”22 In the end, the collection was named “Sutzkever-Kaczerginski” but without public fanfare.23
While most of the materials were in New York, Shmerke and Sutzkever were still in Paris awaiting their American immigration visas. As the months went by without concrete progress, Sutzkever came to doubt that the coveted visa would ever be forthcoming. Both Weinreich and Glants-Leyeles were silent of the subject, with nothing to report, and Sutzkever’s thoughts turned increasingly to Palestine. The idea of settling there had been on his mind for a while.24
After attending the World Zionist Congress in Basel in mid-December 1946 as a guest, Sutzkever began mentioning in his letters to New York that he was interested in visiting Palestine before settling in New York. He wanted to see his brother and the yishuv, the Jewish community there.25 By June, he was writing that he had decided to settle in Palestine. He had secured a certificate, with the help of Zionist leaders he met at the Congress. He explained his decision to the Yiddish poet H. Leivick as the only resolution to his personal and creative crisis: “I find myself in a condition from which only death can rescue me. To put it simply, I have lost the ground underneath my feet. I have never felt so lonely. Even worse, all of my senses have ceased functioning, even the sense of pain. Can you imagine such a person, all the more so—such a poet? It is therefore very possible that I will leave Paris, probably for the Land of Israel. I have a brother there, and life there is on fire. Perhaps there I will find my shadow.”
He gave a more prosaic explanation to Weinreich: he was tired of waiting.26
Sutzkever left France by ship on September 2, 1947. Upon arriving in Haifa port, he sent one of his first letters to Weinreich: “I am tired, but I am very happy with my journey. I hope to be able to work and study here. . . . I’ve seen very little of the country and of people. I want to spend a month with myself and gather my thoughts.” He then added, “You may be sure, my dear friend, that I will help YIVO from here as well, in any way I can. I will also send you the remaining materials.” Yes, Sutzkever still had a large amount material in his personal possession, including parts of Herman Kruk’s diary.27
Shmerke stayed on in Paris and weighed his options. He was virtually unemployed, living off the advances and sales of his books and a lecture tour of the displaced persons’ camps. He came to realize that as a former Communist, his chances of receiving an American visa were dim. He was interested in settling in Palestine, but there was a long line for certificates, and Zionist leaders weren’t eager to give preference to a new convert to their cause who had been a Communist for many years.
Shmerke also worried that the negative attitude toward Yiddish in the Hebrew-speaking yishuv meant that he would be superfluous there. He wrote to Sutzkever a few months after the latter’s arrival in the Land of Israel, to ask him for reassurance and help. “If you think that I’ll be able to live, find work, and be considered an equal, and if you will really be able to do something in this regard, then I will not only be deeply grateful to you—I will come to Eretz Israel.”28 Sutzkever responded with encouragement but made no concrete promises.
By the end of 1947, the surviving members of the paper brigade had scattered. Shmerke stayed on in Paris, Sutzkever was in Tel Aviv, and Rachela Krinsky was in New York. Other surviving members settled in Israel, Canada, and Australia.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Return from Offenbach, or Kalmanovitch’s Prophecy
MAX WEINREICH had a special place in his heart for the materials that Shmerke Kaczerginski and Abraham Sutzkever had risked their lives—twice—to rescue. But he knew that the bigger prize was the trove of books and documents in Germany, which was fifty times as large. And the thought that the materials were in Germany, land of the murderers and looters, was hard for him to bear.
But securing YIVO’s property from the American government that controlled it was proving to be infuriatingly frustrating. The bureaucratic tug of war between the State Department and the War Department was unrelenting. On May 7, 1946, the State Department notified the American Jewish Committee that it had decided to restitute YIVO’s collection to New York. And Weinreich celebrated—prematurely, as it turned out. Two and a half weeks later, on May 24, the War Department wrote to nullify that decision. “The advisability of making an exception to the general practice in the case of this collection has been questioned. . . . The policy has been to return looted property of every kind to the country from which it originated.”1
Meanwhile, the US government began to discuss the entire question of the 1.5 million Jewish books held at Offenbach with a newly formed body called the Commission for European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, chaired by Columbia University professors Salo Baron and Jerome Michael. The YIVO collection became part of a bigger issue.
The problems in the broader negotiations were complex: There were identifiable books, whose owners could be determined by ex libris and markings, and unidentifiable books, whose owners were unknown. There were books whose owner organizations resumed operation after the war and those owner organizations that no longer existed and had no heirs. There were countries with which the United States had legally binding restitution agreements and those with which it did not.
But beyond the specifics, there was an underlying question: to whom did the Jewish books belong, to their countries of origin, or to the Jewish people? If to the Jewish people, who represented it? There was no Jewish state in 1946. The Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction—a consortium that included the World Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Hebrew University, and many other major groups—claimed that representative role. It asked the US government to recognize it as the trustee, on behalf of the Jewish people, for all Jewish books discovered in the American zone of occupied Germany. The negotiations between the State Department, War Department, and the commission dragged on seemingly endlessly. (They finally reached an agreement in 1949.)2
YIVO wanted its case to be dealt with separately from the general question of the 1.5 million Jewish books at Offenbach, as a discrete and straightforward case of returning property to its owner. But the formalists at the War Department would not allow the YIVO case to move forward until the broader issue was resolved.
In one respect, the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction ended up being extremely helpful to YIVO. The commission was adamantly opposed to returning Jewish cultural treasures to Poland. It argued that it was inappropriate to send the Jewish books, manuscripts, and ritual objects to a country whose Jewish population had been decimated by 90 percent during the war, and from which surviving Jews were leaving in droves. The Polish-Jewish center was over, finished, wiped out. The cultural treasures should be sent to the major centers of postwar Jewish life: the United States and Palestine.3
The State Department took the commission’s anti-Polish position to heart, especially since the Polish government didn’t express any particular interest in claiming the Jewish material. As a result, the suggestion that YIVO’s collections be restituted to Poland was taken off the table.
But the USSR remained a live option, since Vilnius was the capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic and had been a Soviet city for the year immediately before the German invasion. The Offenbach depot cooperated with all countries whose books had been looted, including the Soviet Union, and restituted hundreds of thousands of books to the USSR. In June 1946, a Soviet restitution officer visited the facility, and the Americans authorized him to remove 760 crates—232,100 books in all—for return to their country of origin. They included books from Jewish library collections in Kiev and Odessa looted by Johannes Pohl and the ERR. The subsequent visits to Offenbach by Soviet restitution officers cost Weinreich a great deal of sleep.
Luckily for Weinreich and YIVO, the United States had an interim policy not to recognize the incorporation of Lithuania and the other Baltic states into the Soviet Union and, accordingly, not to restitute property from the Baltics to the USSR. But it was only an interim policy. The topic was under review by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.4 Meanwhile, the Offenbach depot held on to its Lithuanian books, both Jewish and non-Jewish, and gave them to no one.
The other shoe dropped in early August 1946. The Soviets informed the American authorities that they claimed the Jewish material from Vilnius as their property. Weinreich learned about this through unofficial channels, in a message from Rabbi Judah Nadich, the advisor on Jewish affairs to General Eisenhower. (Nadich telephoned his wife in New York and dictated the letter to YIVO.) Nadich tried to be reassuring. He had talked to General Lucius Clay, the US deputy military governor, about the matter, and Clay had decided to fully support YIVO’s claim to its books and papers. He intended to bring the matter to the directorate of Reparation, Deliveries, and Restitution of the Allied Control Council, the body that governed Germany on behalf of the four occupying powers. General Clay promised that if the Allied Control Council didn’t agree to return the collection to YIVO in New York, the United States would do so unilaterally.5
