Winner of the National Jewish Book Award, Holocaust category (2017)
Runner-up for the National Jewish Book Award, history category
(2017) 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.
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