The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis
- ISBN-10
- 1512601268
- ISBN-13
- 9781512601268
- Category
- History
- Pages
- 312
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2017-10-03
- Publisher
- University Press of New England
- Author
- David E. Fishman
Description
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.
Get the book
Similar books
-
Pages & Co.: The Book Smugglers
By Anna James"Mr. Lemoncello would love to go bookwandering at Pages and Co. If you love books, you're going to LOVE this book!
-
Half Bad
By Sally greenIn modern-day England, where witches live alongside humans, Nathan, son of a White witch and the most powerful Black witch, must escape captivity before his seventeenth birthday and receive the gifts that will determine his future.
-
The Smugglers
By Iain LawrenceReaders will relish this companion to the highly acclaimed adventure, The Wreckers: Young John is charmed by the Dragon, the schooner he is planning to sail to London and use for the honest wool trade.
-
The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu: The Quest for This Storied City and the Race to Save Its Treasures
By Charlie EnglishTwo tales of a city: The historical race to reach one of the world's most mythologized places, and the story of how a contemporary band of archivists and librarians, fighting to save its ancient manuscripts from destruction at the hands of ...
-
The Book Smuggler
By Omaima Al-Khamis"'I am Majid al-Hanafi of Najd, I was not an honorable man.' So goes this epic tale, written in the vein of the great Arab explorers and travel writers.
-
The Smugglers' World: Illicit Trade and Atlantic Communities in Eighteenth-Century Venezuela
By Jesse CromwellThe Smugglers' World examines a critical part of Atlantic trade for a neglected corner of the Spanish Empire.
-
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
By Shirley JacksonTHE STORY: The home of the Blackwoods near a Vermont village is a lonely, ominous abode, and Constance, the young mistress of the place, can't go out of the house without being insulted and stoned by the villagers.
-
Star Wars: Smuggler's Guide: (Star Wars Jedi Path Book Series, Star Wars Book for Kids and Adults)
By Daniel WallaceRecovered from a strongbox on the Millennium Falcon, this guide started as a simple logbook with a piece of valuable information.
-
Ancillary Justice
By Ann LeckieAncillary Justice is Ann Leckie's stunning debut -- the only novel to ever win the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke awards -- about a ship's AI who becomes trapped in a human body and her quest for revenge.
-
The Giant Smugglers
By Chris Pauls, Matt SolomonAfter summer, Charlie Lawson expects to go back to the boredom of middle school, but he stumbles on an abandoned warehouse, where he befriends a twenty-foot-tall teenage giant.