Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books by Mark Glickman

Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books by Mark Glickman

Author:Mark Glickman [Glickman, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: HIS043000 History / Holocaust
ISBN: 9780827612778
Publisher: The Jewish Publication Society
Published: 2016-01-31T16:00:00+00:00


Sutzkever concealed some of the material in the walls and floors of his own apartment, and he found other such hiding places as well. In one of the great ironies of this convoluted story, Kruk was able to hide some of the material in the Strashun Library, thus bringing the books for safekeeping to the very place from which many of them were originally stolen. Still, for all of the Paper Brigade’s efforts, its work was going far too slowly. With the deluge of books flooding into YIVO and the other collecting points every day, the small handful of them that they were able to smuggle back into the ghetto amounted to barely a trickle.

Soon another option presented itself. If the Paper Brigade couldn’t smuggle the books out of YIVO to the relative safety of the ghetto, maybe the books could be rescued inside the walls of YIVO itself. Sutzkever noticed that the architecture of the YIVO building afforded the Paper Brigade ample room for a book stash beneath the beams and girders in the attic. All he and his cohorts would need to do would be to distract the guard who kept watch over them as they did their work—a deaf, uneducated Pole named Virbilis.

To the Paper Brigade’s great fortune, Virbilis didn’t like being uneducated, and when Drs. Gordon and Feinstein offered to tutor him in math during his lunch breaks, the guard readily took them up on their offer. Each day at noontime Virbilis’s lessons commenced. As they did, so too did the work of the Paper Brigade. Quietly, furtively, while Gordon and Feinstein kept Virbilis distracted, the other members of the Paper Brigade moved as many books as they could from the YIVO sorting rooms to the attic hiding places above. They conducted their work at a frenzied pace, for none of them knew how long they would be able to continue. What they did know was that abandoning their efforts would almost certainly lead to the destruction of the precious literary treasures that paraded into YIVO each day.

Packing books wasn’t all that the Paper Brigade did during the times when they could escape Virbilis’s gaze. Often, when the German overseers left the building, the Jewish workers stopped sorting the books, and the readings began. Usually it was Sutzkever, reading from his favorite Yiddish poets. The poetry was easily available of course; one of the world’s greatest Jewish libraries lay in piles on the tables before them. These moments “brought solace and forgetfulness for a time,” wrote Rokhl Pupko-Krinsky in a postwar memoir.10 To the writers, scholars, and other Jewish literati enduring the misery of their forced labor, such moments of solace and forgetfulness were a ray of sunshine.

Virbilis, deaf to what was really going on, never complained. Every day the workers were careful to tidy up before they left. If for some reason they never returned to the YIVO building, they wanted to be sure that the Germans would remain oblivious to what they had been doing.



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