The Book Smugglers

Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis

David E. Fishman

• Editorial: ForeEdge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781512601268
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: World History

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.

	PART ONE
	Before the War

	CHAPTER ONE Shmerke—The Life of the Party

FAMILY AND FRIENDS never dreamed that Shmerke Kaczerginski would grow up to be a writer. They expected him to become a porter, like his father, or some other kind of manual laborer. He was raised on one of Vilna’s poorest streets, and when his parents both died of starvation in 1915, during the difficult first year of World War I, it looked as if the seven-year-old boy’s fate was sealed. A porter. Perhaps a pickpocket or smuggler.

Shmerke did eventually become a smuggler but of a very different sort. As an inmate of the Vilna ghetto, he stole books from the repository where the Nazis held looted cultural treasures, in order to prevent them from being incinerated or shipped to Germany. He became so adept at book smuggling that he continued to practice this trade under the Soviets. But before he risked his life for books, Shmerke became a reader and then a writer, editor, and publisher.¹

As a boy, the orphaned Shmerke (an affectionate Yiddish diminutive of his Hebrew name Shemaryahu) and his younger brother Jacob lived with assorted relatives, mainly with their paternal grandfather. But they spent most of their time on the streets. At age ten, he was admitted into the Vilna Jewish orphanage and moved into a dormitory that housed 150 children like him, who had lost their parents during the Great War. He was short, cross-eyed, and malnourished, with signs of rickets—a bloated stomach and a swollen head. During the daytime, he attended the Talmud Torah, the community-sponsored elementary school for orphans and indigent children, where he recovered from his illnesses and became a good student. Toward the end of his six years in the Talmud Torah school, he was reading works by the Yiddish essayist and philosopher Chaim Zhitlowsky.

But Shmerke’s greatest skill wasn’t scholastic. It was his ability to make friends and keep them. He had a winning smile, with boundless warmth and energy, and enjoyed giving to others the support and attention he hadn’t received as a child. Shmerke loved to sing folksongs at parties and gatherings, and tell stories in hushed tones. Fellow students were drawn to him like bees to honey, and teachers spent extra time tutoring and mentoring him.²

In 1924, at age sixteen, Shmerke began working as an apprentice for Eisenshtat’s lithography shop and moved out of the orphanage for a rented room. At night, he attended the I. L. Peretz Evening School, which offered a middle school education to working-class youths. The school was run by activists from the Jewish Workers’ Bund, the main Jewish socialist party in Poland, and while there, Shmerke became involved in radical politics and the labor movement.³ He wrote his first hit song at age eighteen, a political ditty called “Barricades” that imagined the workers’ revolution as a happy family affair:

Fathers, mothers, little kids, are building barricades,

And workers are patrolling the streets in combat-brigades;

The kids all know—daddy isn’t coming home,

He’s busy in the street carrying his gun;

Chana tells her gang of kids there won’t be dinner tonight,

Then she leaves the house to go help daddy fight;

The children build a barricade, there’s no one in the house,

The kids are outdoors throwing stones at the police.

The song had a catchy tune and spread like wildfire to socialist meetings, demonstrations, and youth groups across Poland. While everyone sang it, most people didn’t know its author’s name.

Based on that poem, a few other pieces of verse, and a couple of articles, Shmerke joined a group of emerging Yiddish writers called Young Vilna in 1928. His main contribution to their gatherings, held around kitchen tables, was to sing folksongs and draw the members into lively group singing. One of the writers later remarked that Young Vilna didn’t feel young until Shmerke appeared on the scene.⁴

His friend, the poet and novelist Chaim Grade, recalled, “He’d only nibble at a dish of food, but he’d belt out a song with all its melodic nuances, adding hand gestures and facial expressions. He’d repeat the song several times, until the group grew tired of the tune. Then he’d put the palm of his right hand to his ear, as if a tuning fork was vibrating inside, and wink his eyes: He’s got it—and a different song would resonate. Everyone around him would happily catch the tune, as if they had been waiting for it all along.”⁵

Shmerke didn’t have any of the poses or affectations of a writer. With his short, trim frame, high forehead, and thick lips, he looked like your average worker—which he was. He wore round, black-rimmed glasses, a beret, and a disheveled jacket. And unlike most poets, he was street smart and a scrappy fighter. When a bunch of Polish teenagers attacked some friends and him one night while they were strolling down a dark alley, Shmerke eagerly joined the fight and beat up a few of the attackers. The rest ran away.⁶

The young poet was quite popular with girls. His charisma and warmth more than compensated for his short height, lazy eye, and unexceptional looks. His female friends were mostly newcomers to Vilna from surrounding small towns, whom he helped find work and a place to live. He intoxicated them with his singing and told them straight out, “Don’t fall in love, or you’ll suffer later.” Everyone knew his flaw: if a girl stayed with him for more than a few months, he got bored and dropped her. But he was unfailingly devoted to his male friends, most of whom were poor workers and struggling writers. He lifted their spirits with jokes, songs, and stories. And when a few groszy fell into his hands, he took friends out to a café for tea or vodka.⁷

On weekend evenings, Shmerke walked down the streets of Vilna surrounded by a swarm of people, smiling and joking with everyone. But he’d be the first to notice an acquaintance approaching from a block away. He’d call out “How are ya?” and shake the person’s hand with a wide motion as if he was going to slap it. They’d strike up a conversation, and the person ended up latching himself onto the gang, even if he had been rushing to an appointment.

Despite his easygoing, cheerful demeanor, Shmerke was serious about his politics. During his studies in the socialist-sponsored evening school, he joined the banned Communist Party. The twin plagues of poverty and antisemitism in Poland made the Soviet Union look, from across the border, like a haven of freedom and equality. His underground political activity—tying red banners to telegraph wires in the dead of night, printing up antigovernment proclamations and dropping them off in front of the local police station, or organizing an illegal street demonstration—led to several arrests and short prison terms.

Shmerke was under intermittent surveillance by the Polish security police and took precautions. He published his articles in New York’s Yiddish Communist daily Morning Freedom (Morgn-Frayhayt) under a pseudonym and arranged for his pieces to be mailed out either by tourists or from a fictitious address in Warsaw. And he didn’t talk to his literary friends about his political activity.⁸

But above everything, Shmerke was the heart and soul of Young Vilna, the life of the party (in both senses). He wasn’t the group’s most prolific or talented writer, but he was the guy who kept them together and soothed their competing literary egos. He was their organizer—manager, secretary, editor, and promoter—and thanks to him, the literary group became a fraternity, a fellowship of writers who helped and supported each other.⁹

His own writing was heavily political. His short story “Amnesty,” published in 1934, described the grim living conditions of political prisoners in a Polish jail, whose only hope was that the head of state would pardon them. In order to get the story past the censors, Shmerke set it in a German prison, not a Polish one, but the purported location was belied by many details in the text. (Hitler didn’t grant amnesties.) The story ended with the prisoners’ realization that “no one will free us.” They and the working masses would have to do it themselves.¹⁰

When a new poet named Abraham Sutzkever applied to join Young Vilna and submitted exquisite nature poems for the group’s judgment, Shmerke warned him, “Abrasha, these are times of steel, not of crystal.” Sutzkever’s application was rejected, and he was only admitted into the group a few years later. He went on to become the greatest Yiddish poet of the twentieth century.

Personally and poetically, Shmerke and Sutzkever were opposites. Abrasha Sutzkever was the son of a middle-class merchant and the grandson of a rabbi. He was an aesthete—apolitical, pensive, and self-absorbed. He was a strikingly handsome young man, with dreamy eyes and a head of wavy hair. Having spent his childhood years during the Great War as a refugee in Siberia amid Kyrgyzians, Sutzkever was attuned to the beauty of snow, clouds, and trees, and to the exotic sounds of language. After the war, he settled in Vilna, attended private schools, and became well read in Polish poetry. Shmerke, who had received all his education in Yiddish, was not. But once Abrasha entered Young Vilna, the two of them became the closest friends in the group.¹¹

The suppression of Communists intensified in late 1930s Poland, as the country tried to maintain good relations with its neighbor to the West, Nazi Germany. Shmerke’s political activism led the authorities to suspect that his literary group was nothing more than a revolutionary cell. They confiscated most copies of the Young Vilna literary magazine, and in late 1936, Shmerke was arrested in his capacity as editor. He stood trial for threatening the public peace. His trial consisted of lengthy courtroom deliberations about the meaning of certain poetic lines. In the end, the judge reluctantly freed him from prison and released the magazine’s latest issue from confiscation. As Young Vilna and Shmerke’s friends celebrated their victory at a local café, with jokes and group singing, Sutzkever raised a toast: “Long live Shmerkism!” Shmerkism was the ability to prevail over any challenge with determination, buoyant optimism, and a sense of humor.¹²

Paradoxically, the outburst of the Second World War brought him yet another cause for celebration. While Poland was attacked from the West by Nazi Germany on September 1, 1939, and Warsaw came under German siege, the Soviet Union seized the eastern part of Poland, under the terms of a German-Soviet nonaggression pact. The Red Army entered Vilna. For most Jews, the Soviets were the lesser evil compared to the Nazis. But for Shmerke, the arrival of the Red Army was a dream come true—Communism in his beloved hometown. He and his friends spent the next Friday night singing, drinking, and dreaming.

But Shmerke’s celebration was followed by disappointment just a few weeks later, when the Soviets decided to hand Vilna over to independent Lithuania, a capitalist and authoritarian country. He left for Bialystok, a city one hundred miles southeast of Vilna, which remained under Soviet rule, just so he could continue to live out his dream of building Communism. He lived there for close to a year, working as a teacher and soldier. When the Soviets seized Vilna a second time, and made it the capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, in June 1940, Shmerke went home, full of confidence that the workers would become the managers of their own factories and that unemployment would be eliminated.

To everyone’s surprise, Shmerke came back to Vilna a married man, with a wife who had fled from German-occupied Krakow. Barbara Kaufman was, like Shmerke, a dedicated Communist, but in other respects she was totally unlike him or his earlier girlfriends. Barbara came from a middle-class family, spoke impeccable Polish, and didn’t know Yiddish songs or literature. Shmerke’s gang didn’t like her much—they thought she was stiff and cold—and she didn’t like competing with all those friends for her new husband’s attention.¹³

But Shmerke was happy. He was back home among friends, he was in love with a refined and beautiful woman, and he was a citizen of “the most just society in the world.” Who could ask for more?¹⁴

Shmerke’s rise from orphan to author wasn’t typical—his younger brother became a locksmith and hardly read a newspaper—but his story wasn’t exceptional in Vilna, the city nicknamed “the Jerusalem of Lithuania,” where books and study were afforded the highest respect. Institutions such as the Talmud Torah and the Peretz Evening School converted many street children into avid readers. But in Shmerke’s case, the bond with books went much deeper. He realized that books had rescued him from a life of crime and despair. The least he could do was repay the favor and rescue them from destruction when the need arose.

	CHAPTER TWO The City of the Book

SHMERKE KACZERGINSKI loved to show off his city to Jewish writers and intellectuals visiting from Warsaw and New York. He’d sometimes pop up unannounced at their doorstep or hotel room, with an offer to give them a tour of the sites. Vilna had 193,000 inhabitants, 28.5 percent of whom were Jews. Numerically, it was the fourth-largest Jewish community in Poland (After Warsaw, Lodz, and Lwów), but culturally it was the capital city of East European Jewry, “the Jerusalem of Lithuania.”¹

Legend had it that Vilna acquired that lofty title back in the 1600s, when it asked to become a member of the council of Lithuanian Jewish communities. The older communities of Grodno, Brest, and Pinsk refused to grant it a seat at the table, considering it to be a young upstart, small and undistinguished. In response, the heads of the Vilna community wrote an impassioned letter, noting that they had 333 residents who knew the entire Talmud by heart. The letter writers stressed the symbolic importance of the number. In Hebrew, the letters of the alphabet have numeric value (Alef is 1, Bet is 2, etc.), and 333 was the numerical equivalent o...