Book Smugglers of Vilna

Vilna-The Jerusalem of Lithuania

The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis by David E. Fishman (2017) chronicles the activities 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.

To store the rescued manuscripts, poet Abraham Sutzkever helped build an underground book-bunker sixty feet beneath the Vilna ghetto.

With the Soviet “liberation” of Vilna (now known as Vilnius), the books had to be smuggled out of the USSR.

The Zekelman Holocaust Center has an exhibit based on the book in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day and will host a zoom lecture by David E. Fishman on January 27.