The Book Thieves by Anders Rydell

Author:Anders Rydell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-04T11:49:51+00:00

[ 11 ]

THE MASS GRAVE IS A PAPER MILL

Vilnius

With a printed-out map in my hand I have found my way to the address, Vivulskio gatvé 18, in Vilnius, Lithuania. I don’t know what I was expecting to see. Maybe it has always been the same thing that attracts people to places of historical importance. A meadow where once an important battle was fought, or a café where an important novel was allegedly written. The pull of such places is that they offer us a way of getting closer to historical events and the people who figured in them. In our imagination, at least, they seem to offer a way of bridging the gulf of time that separates us.

At Vivulskio gatvé 18, a newly built nine-story block of apartments rises up, modern and black with glass windows reaching from floor to ceiling. A symbol of the new, young Vilnius with its hipsters, minimalist fusion restaurants, and nightclubs. But to those who know about it, this address is associated with something quite different. It played an important part in the most traumatic chapter in Vilnius’s history.

In those times, the street name was spelled differently—it was known as Wiwulskiego when Vilnius was a part of Poland. It was the location of the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (Scientific Institute of Yiddish), abbreviated as YIVO. The institute was in a stone house, and the first thing that met visitors in the spacious entrance vestibule was a world map, on which the institute and its branch organizations were marked. When the ERR took over the house in 1942, it had been a barrack for German soldiers. Hanging over the world map was a flag with the German eagle and the swastika.1 In the rooms, the ERR found books and newspapers flattened into the floor. But in the cellar it found what it was really looking for: tens of thousands of books and periodicals that had been flung down there when the soldiers moved in.

Thrown into that cellar was one of the most important Jewish libraries in Eastern Europe, a library that was the product of an ambitious project to save the literary, cultural, and historical heritage of the Ashkenazi Jews. It was a project, or rather a movement, that had its origins in the late 1800s.

Unlike in Western Europe, where Jews were given citizen’s rights in the 1800s, most Jews in Eastern Europe were still at the turn of the century living under conditions that had not changed significantly since medieval times. Of the many restrictions imposed on Jews, perhaps the most debilitating was their exclusion from higher education. At least that was how Simon Dubnov saw it.

He was born in 1860 in the small Russian community of Mszislau, in the Jewish Pale of Settlement. Like other Ashkenazi Jews, his mother tongue was Yiddish, the Germanic language first spoken by Jews in Germany during the medieval era, based on German as then spoken, with additional influences from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic languages. Dubnov had gone to a

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