David E. Fishman Boeken

Book by Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, David Fishman

The Book Smugglers is the nearly unbelievable story of ghetto residents who rescued thousands of rare books and manuscripts--first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets--by hiding them on their bodies, burying them in bunkers, and smuggling them across borders. It is a tale of heroism and resistance, of friendship and romance, and of unwavering devotion--including the readiness to risk one's life--to literature and art. And it is entirely true. Based on Jewish, German, and Soviet documents, including diaries, letters, memoirs, and the author's interviews with several of the story's participants, The Book Smugglers chronicles the daring activities of a group of poets turned partisans and scholars turned smugglers in Vilna, "The Jerusalem of Lithuania." The rescuers were pitted against Johannes Pohl, a Nazi "expert" on the Jews, who had been dispatched to Vilna by the Nazi looting agency, Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, to organize the seizure of the city's great collections of Jewish books. Pohl and his Einsatzstab staff planned to ship the most valuable materials to Germany and incinerate the rest. The Germans used forty ghetto inmates as slave-laborers to sort, select, pack, and transport the materials, either to Germany or to nearby paper mills. This group, nicknamed "the Paper Brigade," and informally led by poet Shmerke Kaczerginski, a garrulous, street-smart adventurer and master of deception, smuggled thousands of books and manuscripts past German guards. If caught, the men would have faced death by firing squad at Ponar, the mass-murder site outside of Vilna. To store the rescued manuscripts, poet Abraham Sutzkever helped build an underground book-bunker sixty feet beneath the Vilna ghetto. Kaczerginski smuggled weapons as well, using the group's worksite, the former building of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, to purchase arms for the ghetto's secret partisan organization. All the while, both men wrote poetry that was recited and sung by the fast-dwindling population of ghetto inhabitants. With the Soviet "liberation" of Vilna (now known as Vilnius), the Paper Brigade thought themselves and their precious cultural treasures saved--only to learn that their new masters were no more welcoming toward Jewish culture than the old, and the books must now be smuggled out of the USSR. Thoroughly researched by the foremost scholar of the Vilna Ghetto--a writer of exceptional daring, style, and reach--The Book Smugglers is an epic story of human heroism, a little-known tale from the blackest days of the war

Lviv (also known as Lemberg and L'vov) was the home of one of the oldest and most prominent Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. This guide provides comprehensive descriptions of 235 archival collections related to Jewish history and culture that are held in Lviv archives, libraries, and museums. Most of these rich materials have been unknown to specialists in Jewish studies and have not been examined or utilized in scholarship. The archival holdings that are described in the guide relate to a broad timeframe from the mid-14th century to the early 21st century. They shed light on the Jewish experience in Lviv, the surrounding region of Galicia, other regions of Ukraine, as well as Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, and Yugoslavia. The guide is the product of extensive work by a team of researchers, who began their work before the Russian attack on Ukraine and concluded it during the course of the war. An essential reference book for those interested in Jewish and Eastern European history.

Kniha se opírá o rozsáhlý průzkum archivních materiálů a vzpomínek pamětníků a popisuje téměř neuvěřitelnou historii čtyřicítky vězňů z vilenského ghetta, kteří zachránili tisíce vzácných židovských knih a rukopisů před nacisty a později i před sovětskou mocí. Tito lidé, členové „papírové brigády“, byli nuceni třídit uloupené knihy, přičemž nejcennější měly být přepraveny do Ústavu pro výzkum židovské otázky ve Frankfurtu a ostatní posílány jako makulatura. Navzdory hrozbě okamžitého zastřelení však propašovali řadu těch nejcennějších knih zpět do ghetta a ukryli je v podzemních úkrytech. Po osvobození Litvy se ti, kteří přežili, vrátili do Vilna a vykopali ukryté poklady. Brzy však čelili antisemitismu sovětského režimu, jehož představitelem byl Michaíl Suslov. Stali se svědky nového ničení židovských památek a zjistili, že knihy, které zachránili před Němci, je třeba chránit znovu. Tak začalo nové, nebezpečné kolo pašování knih přes hranice Sovětského svazu do Polska, kde však dorazily v době antisemitského násilí a kieleckého pogromu, při němž bylo zavražděno 37 Židů. Knihy tak musely být zachráněny ještě jednou.