The Book Smugglers

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 manuscriptsfirst from the Nazis and then from the Sovietsby 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 devotionincluding the readiness to risk ones lifeto literature and art. And it is entirely true. Based on Jewish, German, and Soviet documents, including diaries, letters, memoirs, and the authors interviews with several of the storys 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 citys 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 groups worksite, the former building of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, to purchase arms for the ghettos 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 savedonly 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 Ghettoa writer of exceptional daring, style, and reachThe Book Smugglers is an epic story of human heroism, a little-known tale from the blackest days of the war.