When one hears the word ‘book smuggler’, one first associates it with the period of the ban on Latin scripts in the Tsarist Russian Empire and the clandestine smuggling of books across the border into Lithuania.
However, there is another little-known dimension of book smuggling: the incredible determination of the people in the Vilnius ghetto during the Second World War to preserve the written culture of the Jewish people (and others, too) in the face of the Holocaust.
The Holocaust was not only an assault against people but also an act of cultural looting, plundering, and destruction. A ‘Paper Brigade’ was formed by the residents of the ghetto to sort through the books in Yiddish and Hebrew collected throughout Vilnius. The members of the brigade (about 40 scientific and technical staff in total) met at the YIVO (the Yiddish Scientific Institute) headquarters to decide on the fate of the books: to be dumped in the garbage or sent to an anti-Semitic research centre in Nazi Germany. Risking their lives, the ‘Paper Brigade’ heroes also sorted the books into a third category – those books that would be rescued by taking them to the ghetto area, hiding them there, and hoping for a miracle so that they would survive the war.
