The Book Smugglers, page 6
With the onset of the period of stability, cultural and social activity burst forth: a first concert was held on January 18, 1942; an Association of Ghetto Writers and Artists was founded the same month. A social aid committee was formed, as were a youth club, a lectorium, and various professional associations (of attorneys, musicians, and so on).4 For all these groups, the library served as an invaluable resource.
The calm was broken by intermittent atrocities. On February 5, 1942, the Germans issued a ban on Jewish women giving birth, effective immediately. Many women were pregnant from before the ghetto. The lucky ones delivered their babies secretly in the ghetto hospital, whose medical staff predated the newborn babies’ birth certificates. But most of the infants born after February 5 were murdered by the Germans, usually by means of poisoning. One of them was Sutzkever’s infant son. His poem to his murdered baby exemplified his ability to write exquisite poetry in the midst of excruciating pain.
I wanted to swallow you, child,
when I felt your tiny body
Cool in my fingers.
Like a glass
Of warm tea. . . .
I wanted to swallow you, child
to taste
the future waiting for me.
Maybe you will blossom again in my veins.
I am not worthy of you, though.
I can’t be your grave.
I leave you
To the summoning snow.
This first respite.
You’ll descend now like a splinter of dusk
Into the stillness
Bringing greetings from me
To the slim shoots
Under the cold.5
A few months later, On July 17, the Germans turned their murder machine against another vulnerable group: the elderly. Eighty-six aged ghetto inmates were rounded up and sent to a sanitarium, raising hopes that they would be cared for there. Ten days later they were all murdered.6 And individuals and small groups were sent to Ponar to be executed for the slightest offense—such as breaking curfew or smuggling in foodstuffs.
But on most days, life was a grim struggle for survival, for dignity and hope, by a traumatized, frightened, and malnourished inmate population. The library was central to that struggle, and Kruk was its visionary.
Who were the readers, what did they read, and why did they read? In a report written in October 1942, after more than a year of operation, the sober and level-headed Kruk presented statistics and analysis. The library had 2,500 registered readers, more than twice as many as its prewar predecessor, the Enlightenment Society library. The readership was young: 26.7 percent of its borrowers were under age fifteen, and 36.7 percent were between fifteen and thirty years old. The ghetto inmates took out mainly novels: 78.3 percent of the books borrowed were fiction, 17.7 percent were children’s literature, and only 4 percent were nonfiction.7
Dina Abramowicz, one of the ghetto librarians, recalled the different types of readers that passed through the circulation desk during the course of the day. In the morning, the “society ladies” came—women whose husbands had better work arrangements in the city and who were well-off by ghetto standards. With free time on their hands, these women wanted to read Russian sentimental novels. In the afternoon, children came straight from the ghetto’s schools, in search of fantasy literature, such as Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days and Capitan Grande’s Children. In the late afternoons and on Sundays, laborers who worked outside the ghetto arrived. They were mainly interested in reading world literature in Polish translation.8
As to the psychology of reading, Kruk reported that readers’ prime motivation was a desire to escape, to forget their immediate reality: “The ghetto has barely seventy centimeters of living space per person. [In the living quarters], everything is on the floor. There are no tables or chairs. Rooms are giant bundles. People are lying rolled upon their packages. . . . The book carries them over the ghetto walls to the wide world. Readers can at least in this way extricate themselves from their oppressive loneliness and connect themselves in their thoughts to life, to their lost freedom.”9
Kruk noted with a mixture of dismay and forgiveness that the books in highest demand were crime stories and cheap novels. He explained that given the draining, distracting living conditions, most readers could not make the mental exertion to read challenging or demanding literature. He enumerated a long list of Polish and Russian works of pulp fiction that were popular among the ghetto inmates. As to Western literature, the most sought-after items were Edgar Wallace’s crime novels, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, and Vicki Baum’s German romances. He lamented that there was no demand whatsoever for Flaubert and Gorky, and almost none for Dostoyevsky and Romain Rolland.
Reading, Kruk observed, was a narcotic, a form of intoxication, a device by which to avoid thinking. “It often seems to the ghetto librarian that he is a drug pusher. The aspect of, I wouldn’t even call it reading, but self-intoxication, is so prevalent. There are people who on the most difficult days read incessantly but only cheap crime novels. Some intelligent readers won’t pick up anything else.” One ghetto inmate described her reading habits in similar terms: “I read crime novels until my head is numb. Now, when it’s hard to get a cigarette, the little books are my narcotic. After reading three crime novels, my head is so stuffed that I forget about the world around me. I tried to read serious books, but I couldn’t gather my thoughts.”10
Children were among the most avid readers, ordering more items per capita than any other age group. Their reading needs were so intense that a few children broke into the library’s closed stacks to steal books. The librarians had to call the ghetto police, who arrested the “thieves” and sent them home.11
But there was also a stubborn minority of “socially mature readers,” who wanted to read books that shed light on their predicament. Such readers borrowed war literature. Tolstoy’s War and Peace was borrowed eighty-six times in the first year of the ghetto library’s existence, while in prewar times, it was borrowed an average of 14.8 times per year. Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front was also in high demand. But by far the most popular European novel among the socially mature readers was Franz Werfel’s Forty Days of Musa Dagh, based on the events in a town in Turkey at the outset of the Armenian genocide. Readers sensed that they were facing the same fate as had befallen the Armenians.
As for Jewish literature, sophisticated readers devoured Graetz’s and Dubnow’s volumes on medieval Jewish history that dealt with suffering during the Crusades and the Inquisition. The most popular work of Yiddish fiction was Scholem Asch’s Kiddush Ha-shem (Martyrdom), a fictionalized account of the Khmelnytsky massacres in Ukraine in 1648–49.12
Besides the lending library, there was also the reading room, whose visitors had a more elite profile. Many of them were scholars and educators, for whom the library was their workplace—where they conducted research, prepared lectures, and wrote. Forty percent of the books given out in the reading room were nonfiction. It was one of the few places in the ghetto where you could read or write while sitting on a normal chair in front of a table.
The reading room was a place of refuge for people who were in need of quiet, repose, and dignity. Some of the visitors turned the pages of prewar newspapers and magazines, as they rested from a difficult workday and “pretended to read” (in Kruk’s words). Library etiquette was enforced (Hush, no talking!), and the floors were washed daily. Schoolchildren were allowed into the reading room only during daytime hours and could not do their homework there.13
The ghetto library cultivated a culture of reading and an attitude of respect toward books. In the circulation area, near the card catalogs, there hung two notices:
Books are our only comfort in the ghetto!
Books help you forget your sad reality.
Books can transport you to worlds far away from the ghetto.
Books can still your hunger when you have nothing to eat.
Books have remained true to you, be true to the books.
Preserve our spiritual treasures—books!
Next to it, the library administration posted more prosaic instructions:
Keep the books clean and intact; do not read while eating. Do not write in books; do not dampen them; do not fold pages or break bindings. If a reader has been ill with a contagious disease, he must notify the librarian upon returning the book.14
As the instructions indicate, one of the library’s main problems was the physical deterioration of its inventory, due to heavy usage. Under ghetto conditions, most of the volumes could not be replaced with duplicates. Kruk established a bindery on the premises, to repair damaged items.
The rules on borrowing were strictly enforced: Books were due three days after they were withdrawn, and there were fines for late returns. If a reader failed to return items after repeated reminders, his or her name was forwarded to the ghetto administration, and deadbeat readers were sentenced to a one-day suspended prison term plus a stiff financial penalty.15
The library at 6 Strashun Street wasn’t the only place where ghetto inhabitants could read. Kruk established branch libraries in the ghetto’s schools, at the youth club, and at a residential work bloc outside the ghetto called “Kailis.” There was even a branch library in the ghetto prison, where inmates were sent by the Jewish ghetto police for offenses ranging from violating curfew to theft. The prison library had a collection of one hundred volumes of fiction. Kruk recorded that the prison inmates read an average of twenty volumes per month.16
On December 13, 1942, after fifteen months of operation, the library held a program in honor of having lent out its one hundred thousandth book. (The number included the use of books in the reading room.) At the event, Dr. Daniel Feinshtein, an anthropologist and popular lecturer, offered greetings in which he interpreted the outpouring of reading in the Vilna ghetto: Reading was a tool in the struggle for survival. It calmed one’s strained nerves and served as a psychological safety valve that prevented mental and physical breakdown. By reading novels, and identifying with their fictional heroes, one remained psychologically alert and emotionally alive.
Feinshtein used an image from Arabian literature as a metaphor: “We are physically cut off, like a man walking through the desert. The atmosphere is burning hot. We are yearning for a drink of life and freedom. And behold, our souls find what they are looking for in the artistic daydreams on the pages of the books. We feel refreshed, our vital energy and our lust for life grow. Our hope increases that we will survive this journey amid the desert sands and reach the oasis of freedom.”17
In order to augment the collection at 6 Strashun Street, Kruk collected books from wherever they could be found. He arranged for the books of Vilna’s premier Jewish high school, the Real Gymnasium on Rudnicki Street, to be transferred to the ghetto library, after the Judenrat took over the school building for use as its headquarters. Zelig Kalmanovitch, his deputy, discovered the warehouse of the Rosenkrantz and Shriftzetser Hebrew publishers and took control of its inventory. The ghetto library also issued an appeal to inmates to bring in whatever books they found. The hardest acquisitions job, from an emotional perspective, was collecting the books belonging to inmates who had been sent to Ponar and executed.18
The work of collecting, cataloging, lending, and reading inspired the ghetto’s intelligentsia. The library became a symbol of the hope that Jewish culture would outlive this dark time, even if most inmates would not. Kruk recorded in his diary, “People come to me and say: ‘I’m going crazy. I have nowhere to go. Give me work. I’m not asking for any money. Let me assist in your fine, painstaking effort.’ Twenty volunteers are already working for me. New ones come and old ones often go away. Writers, journalists, doctors, and professionals work here. People bring books: ‘Where should I dispose of them? Let them stay with you. With you, at any rate, they won’t be burned. Maybe some of them will survive.’ ”19
Zamlen, collecting books and documents, became a passionate avocation in the ghetto library, as it had been before the war at YIVO. But now the activity had a more desperate feel to it, as if to say: something must remain after all this death and destruction; let it be the books.
From the outset, Kruk and Kalmanovitch knew that Vilna’s cultural treasures were in peril. Johannes Pohl had stolen thousands of items back in July 1941. Kruk couldn’t visit the buildings of YIVO and the An-ski Museum, since they were outside the ghetto, and he had no reliable information about the state of their collections. The Great Synagogue and Strashun Library were inside ghetto no. 2, but after that ghetto’s liquidation at the end of October, and the deportation of all of its inhabitants to Ponar for execution, Kruk had no contact with the Strashun Library, even though it was just a few blocks away from the remaining ghetto no. 1.
As a first step to stop the cultural hemorrhaging, Kruk and Kalmanovitch prevailed upon the Judenrat to issue a decree ordering inmates to preserve “the remaining cultural treasures of our ghetto, works of art, paintings, sculptures, manuscripts and ritual objects.” Inmates were obligated to report their existence and location to the ghetto library’s administration.20
Next, Kruk and Kalmanovitch obtained authorization from the Judenrat to make an “expedition” to the building of the Strashun Library, located in the former ghetto no. 2, to retrieve as many volumes as they could put onto a hand wagon. Kruk visited the Strashun Library a second time, at his own personal initiative, in January 1942, when he was granted an extraordinary two-day travel pass to leave the ghetto. Instead of doing business in town, and stocking up on food, fur, leather, or gold, he spent his time selecting books from the Strashun collection. While in the eerily empty synagogue courtyard, he paid a visit to the kloyz of the Vilna Gaon, and retrieved its 180-year-old record book.21
Kruk also secured authorization to lead a small group of staff and volunteers on an excursion to the Great Synagogue, in search of ritual objects. One participant described the eerie scene upon entering the abandoned sanctuary: “It was steeped in darkness and melancholy. . . . Ruination was looking out of every corner. Only the marble pillars still stood proudly. Almost all the curtains to the Holy Arks were torn off their hinges and taken away. . . . The old wood-carved Holy Ark and the other arks stood half open and badly damaged. The most beautiful religious objects were desecrated.”
The excursion yielded meager results. The sanctuary had already been ransacked and almost everything of value taken away. “Someone else had ruled in this place before we arrived and had made our task ‘easier.’ I took one last glance at the Great Synagogue: an abandoned, neglected ruin. Its grey walls looked mysteriously at us. There was thick dust and cobwebs. We left the synagogue with pain in our hearts and pushed our wagon. Who knows if we will ever return here again?”22
Thanks to all these efforts, Kruk amassed an extraordinary collection of cultural treasures. On January 7, 1942, he totaled up the new acquisitions in his possession. They included 126 Torah scrolls; 170 scrolls of the Prophets and Hagiographa (including scrolls of the book of Esther); twenty-six shofars; thirteen Chanukah menorahs; twelve candlesticks, made of silver, brass, and copper; seven memorial plaques with inscriptions from synagogue walls; twelve charity boxes; four Torah crowns (two silver, one tin, and one broken); twenty-one covers to the Holy Ark; 110 Torah covers; seventeen drawings; and two oil paintings. He had 2,464 books from the Strashun Library, twenty manuscripts, and eleven pinkasim (record books) of religious associations and synagogues.23
Some of the items that Kruk acquired leave us dumbfounded. How on earth did he remove and transport the inner walls of the Holy Ark from the Great Synagogue (which were 187 centimeters, or 6′2″ long), the historic memorial plaque over the Vilna Gaon’s seat in his kloyz (173 by 69 centimeters, or 5′7″ by 2′3″), and the eight clocks that hung in the synagogue courtyard, indicating the times of prayer and candle lighting?24 Kruk received assistance from the ghetto administration to arrange their smuggling into the ghetto by truck.
As the acquisitions piled up, the ghetto library ceased being the repository for a middling collection of fiction and textbooks. It became the figurative and literal heir to the Strashun Library.
Kruk enhanced the library’s public visibility and prestige by setting up several auxiliary institutions under its auspices: a bookstore that sold volumes of which there were multiple copies (mainly from the warehouses of publishers); an archive, charged with preserving copies of memos, minutes, and correspondence produced by the ghetto administration; a statistical bureau that generated reports on current trends in the ghetto in the areas of housing, employment, nutrition, health, and crime; and an address bureau that facilitated the reunification of families and friends. There were also plans to create a ghetto museum, but the project was never completed.
Collectively, the library and its auxiliary institutions were referred to as “the agencies located at 6 Strashun Street,” and the building was nicknamed the Culture House. It had a staff of eighteen employees.25
One of the ghetto’s most popular institutions was located, by chance, just outside the library—the sports field. The ghetto administration decided to clear away the bombed-out building located next door and used the vacant space for gymnastics and team sports. The outer wall of the library building was covered with chalk-written slogans: “In a healthy body—a healthy spirit,” and “a sporting person will find the hardest work easy.” Just above the slogans were the images of people swimming and exercising.26 The sports field was the only open space in the ghetto and served as a rendezvous spot for young people, especially young couples. Together, the sports field and library were a cry for life in the midst of mass murder.
