Elisabeth Gallas - A Mortuary of Books: The Goldstein-Goren Series in American Jewish History

THE GOLDSTEIN-GOREN SERIES IN AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY

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Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Womens Liberation Movement

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A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust

Elisabeth Gallas

Elisabeth Gallas

Translated from the German by Alex Skinner

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

www.nyupress.org

2019 by New York University

Translated from German by Alex Skinner

All rights reserved

Originally published as Das Leichenhaus der Bcher: Kulturrestitution und jdisches Geschichtsdenken nach 1945, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Gttingen, 2013.

The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften InternationalTranslation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Brsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gallas, Elisabeth, author.

Title: A mortuary of books : the rescue of Jewish culture after the Holocaust / Elisabeth Gallas.

Description: New York : New York University Press, [2019] | Series: The Goldstein-Goren series in American Jewish History | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018047263 | ISBN 9781479833955 (cl : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Holocaust, Jewish (19391945). | JewsHistory20th century. | JewsCivilization. | Cultural propertyDestruction and pillageEurope. | Cultural propertyRepatriationEurope. | World War, 19391945Destruction and pillageEurope. | Jewish propertyEuropeHistory20th century.

Classification: LCC D804.3 .G3535 2019 | DDC 305.892/4009045dc23

In memory of my mother, Olivia Gallas

On the morning of February 27, 1946, the sixty-ninth day of the proceedings, Yiddish-speaking poet and partisan Abraham Sutzkever was called to the witness stand at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. Lev Smirnov, deputy prosecutor for the Soviet Union, asked Sutzkever, one of only three Jewish witnesses to testify at the tribunal, to give an account of Jewish life in Vilna (Vilnius) under German occupation, the atrocious living conditions in the ghetto, and the Germans persecution and murder of Vilna Jewry.

Sutzkevers diary from the time of occupation meticulously documents both sides of the Nazis destructive frenzy: The Germans were to wipe from the face of the earth five centuries of Jewish culture in Vilna. Yet his hopes soon faded again. Together with the few other survivors he encountered there, Sutzkever aimed to establish a museum of Jewish art and culture with the remaining material. This plan faltered due to Soviet resistance, and once again they had to prevent material from being dispersed and confiscated. They decided to send it west. Sutzkever and his comrade Shmerke Kaczerginski single-handedly transported partial collections in suitcases via Poland to Paris, where they were sent on to the YIVO in New York, their home ever since.

By other routes, the portion of the Vilna holdings stolen by Rosenbergs task force made it to the United States as well. After their incorporation into the Nazi Institute for Research on the Jewish Question (Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage) in Frankfurt am Main, the precious collections had been evacuated to the Hesse town of Hungen in 1944 due to increasingly severe bombing raids. American soldiers of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Unit (MFA&A), tasked with protecting the European cultural heritage, discovered these books and other objects while advancing into German territory. All of them were placed under the stewardship of the American military government, which initiated a large-scale cultural restitution campaign to return millions of books, archival documents, artworks, and ritual objects to their former owners, states of origin, or official trustee organizations representing the Nazis victims. Among the restored collections were more than four hundred boxes of books and other objects from Vilna; after negotiations, which will be discussed in the following chapter, these were handed over to the YIVO in New York, the official successor to the destroyed institute in the Lithuanian capital. YIVO soon developed into the most important commemorative and research center for Eastern European Yiddish culture worldwide, the material fragments saved from Vilna playing an important part in its attempts to create a sense of continuity between past and present.