The Book Smugglers, page 8
THE TWO CENTRAL players in the unfolding drama surrounding the books returned to Vilna in April 1942: Dr. Johannes Pohl and Shmerke Kaczerginski.
For Pohl, it was his first time in the city since his original looting spree in July 1941. He was fresh off the heels of a major operation in Salonika, where he had looted the library and archive of that centuries-old Jewish community, which was called the “Jerusalem of the Balkans.” Now he was charged with organizing the expansion of the ERR operation in the Jerusalem of Lithuania. As soon as he entered the YIVO building, it was clear to Herman Kruk that Pohl was the man in charge.
The “Hebraist” has come. He is a military man in a party uniform. A tall man with a Jewish appearance. He actually looks as if he’s descended from Jews.
His name is Pohl. He’s a Doktor. He studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem for two years. Published several works on the Talmud, etc. His behavior is courteous, even gregarious. But you can’t get anything out of him. What will happen with his work in YIVO? We can’t even guess. The issue is hanging in the air. No one knows what the “Hebraist” wants, or what his plans are.1
Pohl’s Institute for Investigation of the Jewish Question had a slogan: “Judenforschung Ohne Juden,” study of the Jews without Jews. But this slogan notwithstanding, Pohl knew from experience that the job of cataloging and sorting the mass of Hebrew and Yiddish material in Vilna could not be done by Germans alone. It would require Jews. One of the ERR staff members, Dr. Alexander Himpel, estimated that if the collections were shipped in their entirety to Germany and cataloged there, the job would take ten years—after the war was over. There just weren’t enough qualified Judaica bibliographers and archivists in Germany.2 Whether he liked it or not, Pohl needed to have a large group of Jewish intellectuals to sort through the material and catalog it.
Pohl instructed the head of the local team, Dr. Hans Muller, to increase the scholarly staff of the work group from three people (Kruk, Zelig Kalmanovitch, and Chaikl Lunski) to twenty and to increase the size of the total work brigade, including transport workers and technical staff, to forty people. Kruk did the hiring for the “intellectual brigade” (as the scholars were called), and the Judenrat’s Labor Department provided the workers for the “physical brigade.”3 One of Kruk’s very first hires was poet Abraham Sutzkever.4
The “intellectual brigade” segregated books based on their genre and century of publication. Pohl had a special interest in classical religious literature from his studies in Rome and Jerusalem, so he ordered the slave-labor scholars to make separate piles for Hebrew Bible, Mishna (the second-century code of Jewish law), Talmud (Judaism’s magnum opus, edited in the sixth century), Maimonides (twelfth century), the Shulhan Arukh (the authoritative code of Jewish law composed in the sixteenth century), and prayer books. All other volumes were sorted into very broad categories: books printed between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, nineteenth-century imprints, twentieth-century imprints, periodicals, newspapers, and so forth. Each category of books had two piles: for shipment to Germany and for eventual transfer to Vilnius University.
Pohl’s second-highest priority (after religious classics) was at the opposite end of the chronological and ideological spectrum: Soviet literature. The Bolsheviks were the greatest enemies of the Reich, alongside the Jews, and Jewish Bolshevism was a Nazi obsession. So he ordered that Soviet books in Yiddish, Russian, and other languages be sorted separately, apart from the other twentieth-century imprints.
The organization of nonbook material was rudimentary: newspapers and periodicals were arranged by title and year; manuscripts, by author; and archival collections, by provenance.5
In his reports to his superiors in Berlin, Pohl proudly surveyed his little “empire” in Vilna. In April 1942, when he came to organize the operation, he estimated that the ERR was in control of one hundred thousand Jewish books: forty thousand from Strashun, forty thousand from YIVO, ten thousand from synagogues and private collections, and ten thousand from the Lubavitch yeshiva and the Vilna Gaon’s kloyz. Two months later, his estimate of the total number increased to 160,000 volumes.6
For “the Hebraist” (as Kruk called him), Vilna was a bibliographic gem, but it was still just one city among many. He was responsible for the looting of Judaica across all of eastern and southern Europe. His organizational visit in April 1942 lasted only a week, before he was off to his next destination. But he did find the time to examine piles of books and select 1,762 old imprints (from Altona, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Lublin, Slawuta, Vilna, and other centers of Hebrew printing) for shipment to the Institute for Investigation of the Jewish Question. He estimated their value as half a million dollars.7
Pohl would return to Vilna frequently, to supervise the work at the YIVO worksite, usually en route to or from Belorussia and Ukraine.8
At about the same time as Pohl’s first visit, Shmerke Kaczerginski smuggled himself into the Vilna ghetto, after seven exhausting months of traveling the countryside disguised as a Polish deaf-mute. The ghetto was now in its “period of stability.” The mass Aktionen and deportations to Ponar were over, and Shmerke decided it was safe to return. He’d be freer in the sealed ghetto than in the open countryside. He wouldn’t have to hide his face from every passerby who might detect his Jewish features. In the Vilna ghetto, he would be home, among familiar people and places, and he’d be able to open his mouth and talk. Shmerke’s friends were glad he was alive and welcomed him warmly, although they couldn’t quite understand why he was so happy to become a ghetto inmate.9
Shmerke moved in with Sutzkever, his wife Freydke, and several other intellectuals, in a crowded apartment at 29 Niemiecka Street. Kruk hired him to work alongside Sutzkever in the ERR work brigade. The two poets became like brothers, bound together not only by friendship, poetry, work, and home but also by the knowledge that they were the only members of “Young Vilna” who were alive—and in the Vilna ghetto. Most of their friends and colleagues had perished. A few, such as Chaim Grade, had managed to flee before the Germans arrived.10
The stability of ghetto life compared to life on the run meant that Shmerke could write again, after a seven-month hiatus. And his stifled muse burst forth. Sutzkever had already established himself in the intervening months as the Vilna ghetto’s poet laureate; Shmerke became its bard. Sutzkever’s verses inspired the ghetto intelligentsia. Shmerke’s poems were set to music and were performed at concerts in the ghetto theater. Everybody sang them, not the least Shmerke himself.
Shmerke’s poems vacillated between defiant optimism and lyrical mourning. His anthem for the ghetto youth club alluded to the mortal peril that young inmates faced, but it foresaw a brighter future for all of mankind:
Our song is filled with grieving.
Bold our step, we march along,
Though the foe the gateway’s watching,
Youth comes storming with their song.
Anyone who wants to can be young,
Years don’t mean a thing.
Old folks can also, also be children,
In a new, free spring.
His somber lullaby “Quiet, Quiet” began on a note of deep despondence:
Quiet, quiet, let’s be silent.
Dead are growing here.
They were planted by the tyrant.
See their bloom appear.
All the roads lead to Ponar now,
There are no roads back.
Father too has vanished,
And with him our luck.
But even this dark song ended with a hopeful vision of a better day:
Let your wellspring flow calmly,
Be silent and hope . . .
Father will return with freedom.
Sleep, my child, oh sleep.
The Wilia River—liberated
The trees renewed in green
Freedom’s light will shine
Upon your face, upon your face.11
Shmerke and Sutzkever were the only poets in the ERR work brigade. Its other members were a cross-section of Vilna’s surviving Jewish intelligentsia: Israel Lubotsky, instructor of Hebrew at the Tarbut Hebrew High School; Dr. Daniel Feinshtein, an anthropologist and social scientist (the one who spoke about reading as an oasis in the desert of ghetto existence); Dr. Jacob Gordon, a scholar of modern Western philosophy from Spinoza to Bergson; Dr. Dina (Nadezhda) Jaffe, a historian of Jewish radicalism; Dr. Leon Bernstein, a mathematician who had studied in German universities; Uma Olkenicka, a graphic artist who had been curator of YIVO’s theater museum; the educators Rachela Pupko-Krinsky, David Markeles, Ilia Zunser, Tzemach Zavelson, and Nadia Mats; and Akiva Gershater, a photographer and Vilna’s foremost Esperantist.12
The “intellectual brigade” also included a number of bright young people whose university studies had been interrupted or obstructed by the war: Ruzhka Korczak and Mikhal Kovner, who were activists in the socialist Zionist “Young Guard” (Shomer Ha-Tza’ir); Avrom Zeleznikow, a young Bundist who was Kruk’s protégé; and Noime Markeles, a Bundist turned Communist. (Noime and her father, the educator David Markeles, both worked in the brigade.)
The brigadier, who was responsible for all technical arrangements regarding both the “intellectual brigade” and the “physical brigade,” was Tzemach Zavelson.13
Shmerke and Sutzkever’s one close friend in the group was thirty-two-year-old Rachela Pupko-Krinsky. Before the war, she belonged to Shmerke’s vast gang of friends and was an avid reader of Young Vilna’s poetry and prose. She worked as a high school teacher of history in the Yiddish Real Gymnasium.
Rachela had the skills Kruk was looking for in a member of the “intellectual brigade.” She had a master’s degree in history from Vilna’s Stefan Batory University, having written a dissertation on the diplomatic history of Poland-Lithuania in the early eighteenth century. She could read documents in Latin, German, Russian, and Polish with ease and was an aficionado of Yiddish literature.
An attractive woman, with an inviting smile and deep-set brown eyes, Rachela had a gaggle of young men around her in her youth. But she didn’t show much interest in any of them. Instead, she had a two-year-long affair with a married man, the wealthy young businessman Joseph Krinsky. Krinsky ended up divorcing his wife and marrying Rachela, in a scandal that shocked many of her friends. He was a “parlor Communist,” a man of means who supported the underground Communist party, and a donor to YIVO and other cultural causes.
The years between Rachela’s wedding in 1936 and the German invasion in 1941 were happy ones: she taught in the best Yiddish school in town and was popular with students, parents, and colleagues. She lived in affluent comfort, enjoying the pleasures of fine clothing and custom-made furniture. And she gave birth to a daughter, Sarah, in November 1939. Because her husband had supported the Communist Party during difficult times, he was not arrested by the Soviets when they marched into Vilna at the outset of the war.
Her life fell apart quickly in 1941, in the course of two months. A Lithuanian “special squad” loyal to the Germans seized her husband at home on July 12, in one of the very first roundups of Jews. They ordered him to take along nothing but soap and a towel, and took him away to Lukishki Prison. He was shot at Ponar a few days later. In late August, Gestapo men walked into Rachela’s house and summarily threw her out of her home. She left with Sarah in one arm and a single suitcase in the other, and moved in with relatives. Then on September 6, she, along with the Jews of Vilna, was ordered to march into the ghetto.
Rachela and her nanny Wictoria (Wikcia) Rodziewicz hastily decided that little Sarah, not even two years old at the time, should stay with Wikcia on the Aryan side. Her life would be safer and better. Wikcia moved to another part of the city and told everyone that the toddler was her daughter. The little girl, now called Irena, went to church every Sunday. Rachela went into the ghetto alone.14
Widowed from her husband, and bereft of her daughter, Rachela tried to find strength and solace in her friendships with Shmerke, Sutzkever, and surviving colleagues from the Real Gymnasium. Kruk kept a paternal eye out for her.
Everyone was now in place: the new ERR team headed by Pohl and Muller, and the expanded “intellectual brigade” of slave laborers led by Kruk and Kalmanovitch. The question was whether the Jewish intellectuals would be accomplices in carrying out the Germans’ designs or the saviors of their threatened cultural treasures.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ponar for Books
AS SOON AS the YIVO worksite began operation, disagreements arose between Herman Kruk and Zelig Kalmanovitch on what they should do. Kruk was an enthusiastic advocate of book smuggling. Kalmanovitch, his deputy, was not.
For Kruk it was easy. He had an “ironclad pass” that allowed him to enter the ghetto without a body search, and he had connections in the ghetto administration that facilitated his smuggling. The Judenrat organized large-scale smuggling of food products into the ghetto on vehicles that entered its territory with the Germans’ authorization—to bring in the meager official rations of food and lumber, or to take out trash and remove snow. Kruk piggybacked off of the food-smuggling operations to bring in books.
He came up with clever schemes. The Germans once granted him permission to transport excess office furniture from the YIVO building to the ghetto library by truck—desks, file cabinets, and so on. He stuffed books and papers inside the furniture: textbooks, which he delivered to the ghetto schools, and rare imprints, manuscripts, and paintings that he took to his hiding place. After unloading the treasures, he diverted most of the furniture not to the ghetto library but to the ghetto administration for distribution as it saw fit. The library already had all the furniture it needed. The entire transport was a ruse to bring in books.1
Zelig Kalmanovitch couldn’t employ such schemes, and he was by nature more cautious. While he harbored a ferocious hatred of the Germans, he thought that Hans Muller and Johannes Pohl were actually right about one thing: the cultural treasures would be safer in an institute in Germany than in war-torn Vilna. The allies would eventually win the war and find the treasures, wherever they would be. So he argued that the slave laborers should send as many books and papers as possible to Germany. Whether this was a rationalization of his fear of being caught smuggling or prophetic foresight is debatable and was in fact hotly debated by his coworkers. But he was painfully consistent. When Kalmanovitch discovered an extremely rare eighteenth-century Yiddish booklet—an enlightenment manifesto and medical manual called The Book of Remedies (Seyfer Refues)—he didn’t hide it or hand it over to Kruk. Instead, he showed the discovery to Pohl, who put it in a pile of items designated for Germany. Shmerke, Sutzkever, and other members of the work brigade were furious. Kruk was more forgiving.2
The stakes were raised and calculations changed in May 1942, when Muller and his team left for Kiev to set up Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) operations there. A new team, headed by Albert Sporket, replaced them. The fifty-two-year-old Sporket was no intellectual. He was a livestock businessman who owned and operated a leather factory in Berlin. He was also a hard-core Nazi who had joined the party in 1931, before Hitler’s assumption of power. (Muller, on the other hand, had joined the party in 1937.) Albert Sporket was fluent in Polish and Russian, having conducted business in Poland before the war, but he knew nothing about Judaica. His deputy, Willy Schaefer, was a former Lutheran minister who was studying for his doctorate in the theological faculty of Berlin University. But he had only a sprinkling of biblical Hebrew. Another team member, Gerhard Spinkler, had excellent command of Russian but none of Hebrew or Yiddish.
Last but not least, there was Dr. Herbert Gotthard, who was the team’s Judaica expert. A docent in Semitic languages at the University of Berlin, with a doctorate from Heidelberg, Gotthard was also the team’s veteran. He had visited Vilna with Pohl to conduct the ERR’s first looting spree back in July 1941. Now, he divided his time between Vilna and Riga, where he was the religion expert for the ERR’s Main Working Group for Ostland. Gotthard was short and stout with a squeaky voice, leading Shmerke to nickname him “the little swine.”3
Above all of these men, on the ERR’s bureaucratic totem pole, stood Pohl. Everyone deferred to him—when he was in town.
The new ERR team treated its Jewish slave laborers much more harshly. Sporket was known for abusing and beating his workers. Rachela Krinsky recalled, “His yelling shook the YIVO building, and we were terrified of him. We tried to stay out of his sight as much as we could. But he used to go from room to room, and place himself next to each one of us. In such moments, everything would fall out of our hands.” Kalmanovitch recorded in his ghetto diary, “The old man [his nickname for Sporket] beat a young worker today, when he discovered him smoking.”4
Sporket and the ERR team members enjoyed wielding their power as Aryan “masters of the universe,” acting on every whim and venting their frustration however they pleased. Sporket once ordered the wooden floors of the Wilno University Library torn open, on the suspicion that there were Jewish books hidden underneath. Nothing was found. Gotthard, “the little swine,” was convinced that there was gold hidden somewhere in the YIVO building, and when he came across a safe, he ordered a locksmith to crack it open. Upon discovering nothing inside except for manuscripts and documents, he exploded, threw the papers on the ground, stomped on them, and left the room in a huff of anger.5 Pohl set the tone. During an inspection, he smashed sculptures by the nineteenth-century Russian-Jewish master Mark Antokolsky, calling them “horrible.” The Muller team had acted like gentlemen. The Sporket team acted like savage brutes.
But even more serious than the changed work atmosphere was the new policy to destroy “excess” books. The ERR headquarters in Berlin delineated the policy on April 27, 1942, in a memo to its field offices on the eastern front. The agency’s first task was “the collection of material”; its second task was “the destruction of material.” “One must take care that those spiritual weapons of our philosophic enemies which are not needed for the sake of the ‘collection of material’ be destroyed. In many cases, the destruction will need to be performed by other agencies, but the Einsatzstab must be involved in stimulating and guiding. This pertains to the detoxification of libraries, antiquarian book dealers, archives, art collections, and so forth, from those books, documents, manuscripts, pictures, placards, and films that may be used in the service of our philosophic enemies.”6
