>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington D.C. [ Silence ] >> Mary Jane Deeb: Good
afternoon and welcome to the African Middle East Division. I'm Mary Jane Deeb, I am chief of
the division and I am delighted to see you all here to attend
this very exciting program. I will start with something that
many of you have heard me say before but I always say a little
thing about our division, and our division is made up of
three sections; the African section that covers the whole continent
of Africa, Sub Saharan Africa and then the Near East section
that spreads out into Central Asia to Afghanistan of course
includes the Middle East and then the Hebraic section that includes actually
collections from the entire world. And we collect, we serve these
materials here in our reading room and we also organize conferences
around specific topics, we have exhibits and we had a big
exhibit on the Hebrew book three, four years ago which was an
enormous hit, we highlighted some of our treasures here at the
library, and we digitize materials to make them more accessible. Our own staff in each section
are made up of scholars who write and publish and digitize and scan and do all kinds of
wonderful things. And throughout the year we invite
scholars to come and to talk about their books and the
research they've carried out and the discoveries they've made and
in this way they inform our patrons, they inform our researchers about
the state of research in their field but also about the countries. We are responsible for 78 countries in this division and
so they let us know. They're the scholars who bring to
us the knowledge from these books that we collect and they we serve,
so we're always very very grateful to have scholars come
and talk to us. And today is a case in point. We have Mark Glickman here with us
and he's just published a new book which is absolutely
wonderful and it sounded as we were talking a bit earlier
not only like a great scholarly book but also there is a bit of a
thriller in it as you will see when we presents it himself. Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of
Jewish Books is his newest book and we really are very excited
to have him come and share with us his research
and his insights. And before I go any further, I would like to introduce
our own Sharon Horowitz, a pillar of this division
and someone who always brings the
most exciting people to the division to have them speak. So a reference librarian, senior reference librarian,
Sharon Horowitz. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Sharon Horowitz:
Thank you Mary Jane. My name is Sharon Horowitz. I'm reference librarian in the
Hebraic section and I too want to welcome you to the African
and Middle Eastern reading room. Thank you all for coming. Our speaker today is Mark Glickman. Currently Rabbi Glickman
is the interim rabbi at congregation Beth Shalom in
Baton Rouge, he's a graduate of Washington University
in St. Louis and he received his
rabbinical ordination from Hebrew Union College
in Cincinnati. He has lectured frequently,
has taught in institutions of higher learning,
and has published in the print media on Jewish topics. His first book published in 2011 was
Sacred Treasure The Cairo Genizah. Today we will hear about his
newest book, Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books. This book relates the odyssey
of Jewish books in the wake of the Holocaust, why the
Nazis gathered these books as one reviewer stated,
Glickman tells of this often overlooked
aspect of the Holocaust, how the written word can be abused
for the sake of cultural genocide and finally about the struggle to establish restitution
protocols after the war. The Hebraic section has a connection
to these books originally stolen by the Nazis from their victims. Between 1949 and 1952 the
library of congress received more than five thousand books, pamphlets,
periodicals and newspaper issues from the Jewish Cultural
Reconstruction a New York based umbrella organization that
has served as a trusteeship for the Jewish people
in the aftermath of the Holocaust by agreement. The JCR received these heirless
and unidentifiable books from the United States
military government in Germany which had taken exhaustive steps to
identify and restitute items seized by the Nazi regime from their
original owners to return them sorry to return them to their
original owners or to their countries of origin. The JCR subsequently distributed
most of these orphaned books sorry to scholarly institutions in
the United States, Israel, Europe, and Latin America. Items that the Library
of Congress received from JCR bear a unique bookplate
marking their special provenance. In addition, the Library
of Congress also received about 150 Hebraic volumes
bearing the stamp of anti Nazi, anti Semitic Nazi organizations that
are also likely to have been seized by the Nazis from Jewish victims. In recognition of the special
provenance of these books, the Library of Congress has created
a virtual library aggregating both collections in its online catalog under the Holocaust Era
Judaic Heritage Library. The full bibliographic record for each work includes a provenance
note indicating the specific acquisition source and
accession date for each title. And now please join me in welcoming
today's speaker, Mark Glickman. [ Applause ] >> Rabbi Mark Glickman: Thank you,
Sharon and thank you to Mary Jane. Thank you to the Library of Congress for this wonderful opportunity
to be here this morning. I hope everybody can hear me. I ordinarily like to move around
and get closer but I'm told that I'm anchored here to the podium because of the requirements
of the filming. I appreciate especially
your coming out today because it really gives
me an opportunity to speak about the story. The story of the looted literary
treasures and the looted books of the Holocaust that comprises
such an important and as we said, as Sharon said, largely unknown
chapter of Holocaust history. There are many ways we
could tell the story of the looted books
of the Holocaust. We could start the story
in many different places. I like to start it in a snowy day
in February in late February 1946, almost exactly 70 years
ago in Hamburg in Germany. It was evidently a snowy
and blizzardy day that day and at the airport arrived
a young man by the name of let me see how I can make this
work here Captain Seymour Pomrenze. Seymour Pomrenze was
a fascinating man. An Orthodox Jewish archivist who
had been doing some work in Germany on some of the material
that had been discovered, and he had been summoned to
Frankfurt, and he was picked up at the airport by a man named
Lieutenant Lesley Post [phonetic] who began to drive him across
the Main River towards a suburb of Frankfurt called Offenbach. And on the way he explained there
was some material that the allies, that the allied forces had
discovered as the war was ending that he had been assigned
to sort through and Lieutenant Post evidently
was out of his league in sorting through this stuff. He was, he went on to be
an accomplished scholar but at this point he was very young and he was having trouble
just dealing with what he had to deal with. They drove across the Main River
and they went to they soon arrived at a warehouse that had
belonged before the war to the IG Farben chemical company. This was a company that among
other things manufactured some of the component elements to
Zyklon B gas, the gas that was used in the gas chambers in Nazi
Europe, and now it's being used to house some recovered
Jewish material. Pomrenze walks into this building,
the what would soon be known as the Offenbach Archival Depot
and he couldn't believe what he saw because there in front
of him was an ocean of books, an ocean of material. It reminds me do you remember that
final scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark that scene where
he's in the warehouse and just row after row after row of
boxed up, well here you had that except it's not so
neatly stored as it was there. You had this chaos of material. He took one look at it and
realized that he was looking at the literary ruins of a lost
civilization, of a civilization that had just been destroyed. He was astounded and he said
he almost felt like crying. He didn't know how he was
going to possibly deal with all of this material. Well, he soon got to work and he
created what was officially known as I said a moment ago as
the Offenbach Archival Depot. He hired a staff of a couple hundred
German citizens as well as a few of his military advisors and they
began sorting through this material. They divided it into
three categories; first was the identifiable material, that material whose ownership
before the war was readily evident and where they could they restituted
the books to their original owners. He was kind of limited because
there was this principle, there's a legal principle
known as escheat which says that he can only restitute war booty to governments and
not to individuals. So they would send huge shipments
out to Holland to other countries where they knew that their national
libraries had been the original owners of this material. There was also the semi
identifiable material, material that might have a mark
on it that seemed to indicate where it was from but there
was no definitive proof or perhaps there was
a person's name on it but they didn't know what
happened to that person. And then there was a
great deal of the material that was completely unidentifiable. So they began going through
this material and as they did, Captain Pomrenze took note of what
he was dealing with and started to ask himself how
all this happened. He knew along with the rest
of the world that Nazis early in the war had another
way of dealing with their looted literary
material which was what? >> Burning. >> Rabbi Mark Glickman:
Burning them. And he had heard the reports
from May 1933 of this huge rash of Jewish book burnings
but what he didn't realize, what I certainly didn't realize at
the beginning of this research was that while the Nazis did
burn books at the beginning of the war they only
did so for a short time. The book burnings only lasted for the most part during a
three week period in May 1933. They were a way for Hitler to
sort of establish his toehold in the German cultural imagination because these book burnings
were great spectacles and there were fire chants,
and there were incantations, and there were fiery speeches and
then they had these big bonfires. What many people didn't realize and
certainly has been forgotten now is that those book burnings
they didn't work really well. First of all, it's
hard to burn a book. Books, physically it's
hard to burn a book. Books burn far more like logs
than they do like kindling, so if you throw a book into if you
try to touch a match or something to a book, it's not going
to catch fire very easily. We have accounts of people
whose books were thrown into these bonfires one night,
going out there the next morning, picking the books up and brushing
the ashes off and taking them home. And it's also figuratively
speaking, it's hard to burn a book because in the age of printing of
course if you burn one copy or even if you burn a hundred copies
of a book there are going to be other copies
around in other places. Helen Keller was one of the
authors whose books were burned and she said you are fools if
you think you can destroy ideas. So sometimes you can destroy
a few copies of a bound book but you can't destroy
the book itself because the book itself
is going to survive. Aside from that, the book burnings
brought the Nazis really bad press. They were seen in the international
media as thugs and oafs for having done this if you
can believe such a thing. They, the books many
of them were chosen because there had been a black
list of prohibited authors that had been published
before the book burnings so they could have some guidelines
as to what material to confiscate and there were authors
around the world who were complaining
of being white listed. They were complaining that
they weren't on the list and the worldwide press
really just excoriated Germany for doing this thing. And of course they
were looking forward in 33 they were already
looking forward to a big event that was going to happen in
Germany in 1936 which was what? >> The Olympics. >> Rabbi Mark Glickman:
The Olympics, and they knew that if they
were still doing such things when the Olympics came to town that it would not look
good on the world stage. So quickly the book
burnings stopped. They flared up again if you will a
couple years later a few years later in Kristallnacht at the end of 1938, but for the most part this was
just a brief spade of book burnings that the happened in 1933. In the late 1930s Hitler
was approached by one of his main ideologues one
of the main intellectuals in the Nazi regime, a Nazi
soldier, a Nazi official with the unlikely name
of Alfred Rosenberg. Rosenberg was an intellectual
if you could call him that. It was probably more like
a pseudo intellectual. He wrote a book of the Myth
of the Twentieth Century which was the second best
selling book in all Germany. Second of course only to Mein
Kampf and it was this 800 page, 7 or 800 page tome with thousands
of footnotes and apparently if you were the kind of
person who would fail to see the emperor's new
clothes, you would have admitted that this was an impossible
piece of work to read. It was kind of like remember
the book A Brief History of Time by Steven Hawking? Everybody had this book on
their shelves when it came out, nobody I think ever understood a
word of what he was saying in there but it looked great on the shelf. And so too did the far
more voluminous Myth of the Twentieth Century. Rosenberg was a rising
star in the Nazi regime. He was not in Hitler's inner circle
but he was trying to get there. He was eventually put in
charge of the territories, the conquered territories
in the east, but he was also an intellectual and
we went up to Hitler and he knew that Hitler had long dreamed of
opening Hauptschule an institute for higher learning that
would really be a testament to the great intellectual
achievement of German civilization. And he went to Hitler and he said
my Fuhrer, why don't you allow me to start to build these
institutions? And how about a part of it is an
institute for Jewish research? Let's open in fact a series of
institutes for Jewish research after the war to study
this extinct Jewish people? The Jewish people of course will
soon be extinct and it's going to be important for the world
to know just like we know about other extinct civilizations,
it will be important for the world to know what this civilization
was about and who to teach them who can teach the world about
this extinct civilization if not the great Nazi, Nazi regime. And so Hitler gave him permission to
build these institutes and Rosenberg and of course if we're going to
have these institutes we're going to need some libraries, and if we're
going to have libraries we're going to need to put books in the library. So Hitler gave Rosenberg
permission to gather books from the conquered
territories of the Nazi regime. When the Nazis would take over a new
territory, he would be able to go and take and confiscate
some Jewish books. But of course in the late 1930s
there weren't many conquered territories, but in 1940 in May
of 1940 Germany invaded and took over France and it was like
a treasure chest opened up before Alfred Rosenberg's eyes because of course throughout
France particularly in Paris but elsewhere there were all
kinds of Jewish libraries, private libraries, institutional
libraries that had been abandoned by Jews who were fleeing
Nazi oppression. And it was very easy for
Rosenberg to go in and to take over the material that
was in that library. He created what was called the
Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the Rosenberg task force
otherwise known as the ERR. When you study this especially if you don't know German
it's a challenge to return these multisyllabic
German words. He created the ERR which went
out and went to these libraries and confiscated the material
and originally it was all sent to Frankfurt, it was
stored elsewhere as well as the war went on. And he established a routine
where the Nazis would go in and they would take over a
town and this was especially so as the Nazis went into Poland
and Russia and other places in Eastern Europe and the routine
was a simple if not tragic one. The Nazis would go into a town, they
would empty that town of its Jews, the Jews would be taken out to
the outskirts of town sometimes and shot right there or loaded
up into cattle cars and taken off for execution in one
of the death camps. And shortly after that the ERR guys
would go in and they would load up the Jewish books from the
homes, from the libraries, from the synagogues, from the
schools and they would take them off to a collecting point
somewhere nearby. We'll get to those
collecting points in a while. And soon the library, the
Nazi Jewish library grew. Rosenberg was not the
only one collecting books under the leadership of another man
named Reinhard Heydrich even more books were collected. These were collected from
within Germany itself. Rosenberg was collecting
them outside Germany, Heydrich was collecting them
from within the territories from within the lands of
the Third Reich itself. He was able to unify all of the
various German police forces, security forces into
one single organization. In my book by the way I compare
the Nazi organizational chart to a Jackson Pollock painting
with a German language overlay to understand the way
the Nazi regime was setup and to understand these various
agencies and what they did and who they reported
to is a gargantuan task, but what Heydrich was able
to do was to take many of these security institutions
with overlapping responsibilities and unify them now to talk
about multisyllabic German words into the Reichssicherheitshauptamt. And if you knew how long it took me
to learn how to pronounce that word. The Reich Security Main Office,
the RSHA and he too started to collect books in a similar
way to the way Rosenberg did. There were other Nazi organizations
that were doing the same thing, and so again they would go into
towns and once that were emptied of their Jews, they
would collect the books. They sent them to collecting points and often these collecting points
were in monasteries and in castles and in warehouses throughout
the territories that the Nazis had taken over. So there were books stored
in the Von Pless Castle, there were books stored
here in the Tworkow Castle, dozens of places these
books were stored. They were even stored in the
famous Neuschwanstein Castle. Most of the material that was stored in Neuschwanstein was
the looted artwork but there were books
stored there as well. As the war went on it became more
and more difficult to keep them in some of these storage places because the storage places
themselves were taken over as the size of the Reich's
land holdings began to shrink. And so slowly there began to
consolidate the collections and in Eastern Europe most
of the material was sent to a town called Rotibor or
there's a way to pronounce that in modern Polish that I'm not
going to even try to pronounce. Here use see is a stockpile
in Rotibor and then in Germany they were sent to a town
called Hungen and they were stored in the castle and in
other places there. These two towns were, you
know, typically when you think of a storage facility
you think of a warehouse or a building of some sort. These were entire towns as the
volume of the material grew, these became entire towns
whose every public building for the most part was devoted
to storing this material. So the bank building would
have material, the church, the community center
would all be filled with these materials
in these two towns. There were storage places elsewhere
too but the two largest ones were in Hungen and in Rotibor as well. We're going to come back to
Schloss Hungen in a little while. So to look at the contrast between
1933 and 1943 is astounding. In 1933 as you've seen we had this. These orgies of book burning but
by 1943 it had moved to this. To Nazi soldiers and officials
going through this material, sorting it out, trying
to organize it and again the amount was just huge. They were only able to
organize a small amount of it but they did what they
did what they could. Now not all the books
went by the way we have until one o'clock including
Q and A, is that correct? Including Q and okay. So not the books went readily
to their into Nazi hands, and one story that is important
to tell are the books of Vilna. Vilna which was now
Vilnius the capital of Lithuania was a teeming
Jewish community before the war. Tens of thousands of
Jews lived there and there were Jewish
theaters, and Jewish newspapers, and schools of all kinds,
and even in its area around Vilna there was an
active and vibrant Jewish life. When the Nazis took Vilna over,
they went into Vilna itself and all the towns around Vilna and again they collected
the Jewish books. And originally they sent them to
the university to be sorted through and processed but eventually they
realized that that didn't make sense because outside of the Vilna
Ghetto there is a library, there was a building
that had belonged to YIVO the Jewish scientific
institute, an organization that before the war had
been documenting the history of Eastern European Jewry. They had a huge library there
already and so it made sense to send all the books to this one
library to get sorted through. The man in charge of the effort
was a man named Johannes Pohl and here we should step back
and take note of the fact that there was a cadre, there
was a phenomenon during the war of Nazi Judaic scholars. This is also an untold story
largely of World War II was that the Nazi regime was
able to boast of many people who were trained experts in Judaica
who knew Hebrew, who knew Talmud, who knew Jewish history and they
used that knowledge in a variety of ways in order to further the anti
Semitic aims of the Nazi regime. So here you have this
man Johannes Pohl who before the war had studied
Jewish studies for a couple of years at the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem and now he's put in charge of processing this
material in Vilna. So what he did was he conscripted
a few dozen Jewish literati from the Vilna Ghetto. These were poets, these were
historians, these were writers of different kinds and
every day this group of people would be marched out of
the Vilna Ghetto to the YIVO Library where they would be
assigned the task of sorting through this material. Since there was so much of it they
were told that they should sort through it and only keep the
most valuable 20 to 30 percent of what they saw and the rest of it
was going to go to the pulp mill. And it's a very interesting
story, therefore, I have these books being
gathered, being collected in a central gathering place,
being marched past an official for a cursory examination,
some books go one way, some books go the other way and
depending on which way they go, that will determine whether they
have a chance of surviving the war. And in that sense of course
the story of the books of the Holocaust is eerily
parallel to that of the people of the Holocaust although
of course far less tragic. So these scholars, these people
who love books who used to study in the YIVO Library before the war
and now were being brought there and with every book that was put
in their hands they had an option. Either destroy it or
give it to the Nazis. And often they were able with great
difficulty and with having gone and with great pain they were
able to make that decision but sometimes they couldn't
stomach either of those decisions. So what they started to do
was when they came across some of the really valuable
material, they would put it aside and at the end of the day they
would hide it in their clothing and bring it back with them into
the ghetto for safe keeping. It is to me ironic that inside
the ghetto itself was seen as the safest place
for these books to be. That's where they could keep their
eyes on them, and so you would see at the end of the day if you look
closely all of these scholars and poets and writers walking out
of the YIVO Library with puffed up clothes because there were
these books inside trying to sneak them back into the ghetto. At one point somebody
said, are you crazy? Are you nuts? They're books, you're
risking your lives for books. And one of the members
of this group said, well, books you know they
don't just grow on trees. The group called itself the Paper
Brigade and soon they realized that this process was going far
too slowly, that they needed to speed things up if they were
going to save anything close to the number of books
that they hoped to save. And they realized that the guard at the YIVO facility the Polish
guard was an untrained almost deaf guy who felt badly about the fact
that he was an uneducated guy and so out of the kindness of their
hearts a couple members of the Paper Brigade volunteered to
tutor him at lunchtime every day, and while they did
so, the other members of the Paper Brigade busied
themselves taking as many books as they could and hiding them above
the ceiling and behind the walls of the YIVO building hoping that they would last
there until after the war. One of the main members of this,
one of the most well known members of the Paper Brigade was a poet
by the name of Avraham Sutzkever. He and Shmerke Kaczerginski they
were both the only two people who survived until after the war. Sometimes at lunchtime or on breaks in their work Avraham
Sutzkever would sit down and write poetry reflecting on his
life and reflecting on his world when he was working in the
YIVO facility and in one of the poems he wrote he used an
image that Ann Brener is Ann here? Ann there's Ann was able to
help me unpack a little bit. Apparently in medieval poetry,
and Ann you'll correct me if I'm wrong I hope, they
use the image was often used of the word as black pearls. The words were seen as black
pearls on the page and in a poem that he wrote, Sutzkever
used that image. He riffed only that image and
he talked about the written word as a burnt pearl on the body of on the charred remains
of a woman's body. We don't have the owner of the
pearls left and all that remains of her are the burnt pearls that she
once wore, and he used that image as a way of looking at
the words around him that the owner's bodies themselves
were being charred and all that is remaining now are
the burnt pearls, the books, the written words themselves. One other story, a couple
of these stories of how some of the books survived
are fascinating. There is a book a very famous book
called the Sarajevo Haggadah a beautiful Passover Haggadah that
was made originally in Spain and spirited out we think when the
Jews were expelled in Spain in 1492 and eventually made its
way to Sarajevo in Bosnia and it's a beautiful
illuminated book. Here you see a picture of a
facsimile edition of the book that I have in my own library. When the Nazis took over
Sarajevo early on they went one of the Nazi officials went to the
Bosnian national museum in order to get the Sarajevo Haggadah
and he walked in and he asked to see the library director and
he was introduced to the director. The director didn't speak
any German so they called on a man named Dervis Korkut
to serve as an interpreter. Dervis Korkut was a young Muslim
scholar who had done research in a variety of different
fields and he was able to help because he knew German and he
knew the local language as well and was able to help translate, and
the Nazi official said I've come to get the Sarajevo
Haggadah, and the director of the museum said, I'm sorry sir. One of your colleagues came
this morning, I give it to him. He said who was my colleague
who came this morning? He said I didn't think it was
appropriate for me to ask his name. He said so you don't have
the Sarajevo Haggadah here? No, it left this morning. And so this German soldier
as I picture him he kind of clicked his heels and with an
upset look on his face he kind of turned and walked crisply
out of the room not realizing that during the entire conversation
the famous Sarajevo Haggadah had been hidden in Dervis
Korkut's pants. He had put it in the waistband of
his pants to hide it from the Nazi and he and the head of the museum
had colluded right before this talk in order to make sure that
they saved his Haggadah. And they were able to save it
for the duration of the war and it still exists now in Sarajevo. What is important to note as well is that the Sarajevo Haggadah
was not the only book that Dervis Korkut was
not the only thing rather that Dervis Korkut saved from
Nazi hands during the war. He was also able to help rescue
a young Jewish woman who showed up bedraggled and in great need
of safe haven at his doorstep and at great risk to his
life and to that of his wife, the couple was able to shelter her until she could get somewhere
safer during the war. So this was really a heroic man. We can also tell the story of
a young couple Hans Augusto and Margaret Reyersbach, a
young couple that had met in Brazil, German Jewish couple. He was in advertising and she
was an artist and they started to on the side make children's
books originally in Brazil. They took their honeymoon in the
late 30s to Paris and they fell in love with and were enchanted by
the city and like many people who go to Paris they found
themselves stuck. They couldn't leave
they loved it so much. And while they were there they
made some children's books. They started to create
this character named Fifi. Fifi was this mischievous monkey who
would get into all kinds of trouble. Right before the Nazis
invaded Paris, they realized that they
needed to get out of town, so they cobbled together
a couple of bicycles, they took the Fifi drawings and
a few other personal belongings, put them on the back of their
bicycles because they knew that the Nazis this was
artwork, this was a book that was in the making, they knew
that the Nazis were going to take this if they
weren't careful. And on their cobbled together
bicycles they road out of Paris and they eventually got on trains
and they went through Spain and Portugal and then they
eventually went back to Brazil and after that they came
to the United States where they changed their names
from Hans Augusto Reyersbach and Margaret Reyersbach
to H.A. and Margaret Rey and Fifi they changed
Fifi's name as well. Does anybody know what
Fifi's name became? >> Curious George. >> Fifi became Curious George, so
Curious George was among the books that slipped through Nazi
hands during the war. When the war ended, the
allied forces went in and found this material and so when we see Schloss Hungen
again there was a young soldier by the name of Robert Schaumburg
[assumed spelling] who had grown up in Vienna and was an attorney
there but had to flee and on his way out he said that he wasn't ever
going to come back to Europe again. And when he came to the United
States and his draft board found out that he was fluent
in six languages, before he could say Anschluss he
was back on boat back to Europe. And he was assigned a detail of
soldiers one day in 1945 or 1946 and he was sent to check out some
reclaimed material at Schloss Hungen at the Hungen Castle which was
remember Hungen was one of the towns where all this material was sent. And he went up to the castle
and I think it was dark and as I picture it it was a
dark and dreary day that day with bats flying around the
castle, and he knocked on the door and it turns out that the owner of the castle Princess
Schloss Braunfels, Princess Solms Braunfels rather,
was no longer living in the castle. She had to flee earlier in the
war because it was discovered that she had been trying
to help some Jews. However, her husband, her octogenarian husband was still
allowed to live in the castle. His name was James Pitcairn Knowles. He was a Scottish portrait painter and he lived there all
alone in the castle. It was just him and
Alfred the butler. And Alfred the butler, and
I'm not making this up, Alfred the butler was also an
octogenarian doddering old man. He had been involved in the
service industry for a long time and several decades earlier,
he had been a ship steward who was assigned the task of
knocking on the door of the Astors and the Guggenheims telling them
it was time to get to the deck of the Titanic immediately because
the ship was about to go down. He was that guy, and now he's
the butler in Schloss Hungen. So Schoenfeld [phonetic] goes
up and knocks on the door, Alfred the butler opens the
door and kind of says well, we've been expecting
you, come on in. And they walk in and were
astounded at what they saw because throughout this entire
castle and we're only seeing part of the castle here in this picture,
floor to ceiling were bookshelves. Here the books were
perfectly organized and the whole castle was filled
with them, millions of books that had made their way there. And Alfred said, you may want
to see what's in the basement. And he took out a skeleton key,
opened the door to the basement and they walked down and there they
found huge boxes with the library of Le Corps Rabbinique the
rabbinical academy in Paris with priceless old books and
other manuscripts of all kinds. And then Alfred said, you might
want to see what's over here and he beckoned them over
to a cabinet and he takes out another skeleton
key, opens it up. It was the Rothchild's library in
there some of the great treasures from the Rothchild collection. Incunables, some of the earliest
printed Jewish books that existed and there were manuscripts
and all kinds of other priceless Jewish material. This happened place
after place after place as this material was collected. As we said it was originally
sent to Offenbach where the American army
had to figure out what to do with this material. They restituted what material they
could but even as the war was coming to an end, they had hundreds and
hundreds and hundreds of thousands of remaining volumes not
sure what to do with it. And the issue quickly became a
political one even amongst Jews it became political, if
you can imagine that. So the Jews in the soon to be
born state of Israel were saying, you know, we are the capital
of the Jewish people here. This material should come to the
Hebrew University in Jerusalem, we'll take care of it like
nobody else can or will. And Jews in the United States were
saying our community is now the largest Jewish community
in the world. The books should come here. They should come to places like
the Library of Congress and some of the fine universities
we have here. We can take care of them
like nobody else can. And the survivors who were
staying in Europe were saying, no the books should stay here. The books should stay at home, and
can you imagine what you would do if you were in the American army
and you found that some books came from a town library, you knew
exactly where they came from but that town that Jewish
community was no longer there. Or if only or if there
were a huge library and only ten people
from that town survived. Or what do you do with the books if
a large number had survived but half of the people had gone to Israel and
half had come to the United States? What do you do with it then? So there were all kinds of decisions and it was becoming this
very heated political issue and the poor American army is
caught in the cross fire between all of these groups of bickering Jews. To their great fortune, eventually
1949 the occupation of Germany came to an effective conclusion
and as Sharon said earlier, the books were then turned over
to a team of Jewish historians and other intellectuals
called Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Incorporated. This was an American based
organization that became the trustee of the Jewish people to
deal with this material. The director was a prominent
historian named Salo Baron at Columbia University and for a
time the on the ground director in Europe was none other than the
famous Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt. She spent a few years in Germany
dealing with this material and even in the most prominent
biographies that have been written, Hannah Arendt barely merits a blip in the biographies
that are told of her. But this was a major part of
her life and what she did. They too had to figure out
what to do with this material and eventually they
came up with a formula. It was their 40, 40, 20 formula. Forty percent of the books that they
couldn't identify whose owners they couldn't identify whose provenance
was unclear, they sent to libraries in Israel, 40 percent they sent
to libraries in the United States, and 20 percent they sent elsewhere,
and the elsewhere was places like South Africa and Australia
and Argentina and libraries there. They sent many of the books to DP
camps early on so that the people in those camps could use them
but eventually then they had to decide what to do with them
after the DP camps closed. Jewish Cultural Reconstruction
existed at least on paper until 1977 and there was through the into
the early 1950s there was a lot of material that they had to deal
with and there was just a trickle that they had to deal
with afterwards but it finally closed its
doors in the late 1970s. Now, keeping my eye on the
time, it's easy to get lost in the big numbers here and I found
that it's helpful to tell the story of one book that was part of the
story to see how it really panned out in terms of that one book. And I thought we would take
a book called Hilchot Alfasi, it was written by a man named Rabbi
Isaac Alfasi whose name literally means Isaac the guy from Fes. He was from Fes, Morocco home of the
tasseled kind of dorky looking hat, and he in the 11th
century he and some of his colleagues were becoming
concerned because Islam was starting to shimmer pretty brightly. Islam was becoming a
temptation for Jews because it was this brilliant very
rich thriving intellectual corpus of material and it was hard
for rabbis to prevent people from converting to Islam
because at the time in order to study Judaism there were only
really for the most part two books that you could offer people who
wanted to learn about Judaism. Those two books were what? The Torah and the Talmud, and aside from that I mean there were some
other rabbinic works but the Torah and the Talmud were
about it in terms of practically available material that students of Judaism
could study. And the Talmud is a very
difficult book to study. It's in Aramaic for one thing,
it's in very terse language, it's governed by a lot of arcane
principles, and so it was very hard for rabbis like Alfasi and his
colleagues to say you should stay with Judaism and here's this great
rich literary heritage we have to offer you. So what he did, what Alfasi did
was he went to through the Talmud and he took out and kept
just the stuff that was of practical use for
Jews those days. There's a lot of stuff in the Talmud
about sacrifices in the temple, doesn't even exist anymore. He took all that stuff out. He took out all the material
about the back and forth between the arguing and
bickering rabbis of the Talmud, all that was left out, and he
kept just the stuff that was of practical use, and he took
the 20 volume Talmud and he sort of condensed it into a three
volume Reader's Digest version of the Talmud if you will. And Hilchot Alfasi the laws
of Rabbi Alfasi was one of the very first printed
books ever. It was printed in Spain
in the late 1400s and there was a version printed
in Constantinople not long after that there were several
versions printed in Italy. The tenth time a printing house
got around to printing it it was in the town of Sulzbach in
Germany and that was in the 1760s. There was one volume that came out in 1763 another in
64 and another in 65. So we can picture say
the second volume of this book rolling
off the presses in 1764. Most of the people who studied
these books back then lived in Eastern Europe but they were hard
to print because a page of Talmud and a page of all these
books has different fonts and there's different text blocks and it's very difficult
to layout the printing. And in Eastern Europe for the most
part they didn't have the resources to do this kind of printing and so
these books were typically printed in Western Europe but
read in Eastern Europe. So we can picture this
book second volume of Alfasi coming off the press
and being loaded by a bunch of big brawny guys out to the
back of a truck or a wagon rather. That wagon heading eastward and
we can picture it then arriving in some small town in Poland, being
taken off the truck and purchased by a book distributor who the
next day starts to make his rounds and he goes to a little town and
he shows up at the Beth Midrash, the adult study house in that
town where he's warmly greeted by the rabbi, he walks in
carrying a big pile of books, he comes out with a far shorter
pile because he just sold our copy of the second volume
of Hilchot Alfasi, the Laws of Rabbi Alfasi
to this Beth Midrash. The following day a group of
students, young students come in and they break up into pairs which
is the way they would study back in the yeshiva in the Beth Midrash
and one pair of students came across a question and
they decided they wanted to consult the Laws of Rabbi Alfasi. So they go to the shelf and they
pull this book off, they open it up, they study it, they put it back. The next day the same thing
happens except a different group of students takes the book
off the shelf, opens it up, studies it and puts it back. This happens day after day, month
after month, year after year for almost two centuries it sits
on the shelf of that Beth Midrash until one day the students
don't come in because of course the students early
that morning had been rounded up and taken outside to the outskirts
of town and they were all shot. And the day after that the
doors do open and instead of eager young students the
darkness comes in and a group of Nazi soldiers enters the building
and takes our copy of Alfasi and all the other books they find
and throws it in the back of a truck where it's taken to a castle where it's stored somewhere
until after the war. Discovered after the war, sent
to Offenbach, they open it up and they find that the stamp of that Beth Midrash while it
was still there it had faded away so much they couldn't tell
where it was originally from. So they kept it and
eventually the army turned it over to Jewish Cultural
Reconstruction who at the end of the war put it into their 40,
40, 20 formula and sent it to Israel where it was purchased by the
library of the chief [inaudible] of Israel and it sat on the
self there for several decades until they needed to clear some
space in their library and they, what librarians call
deacquisitioned the book. They sold it off to an antiquarian
book dealer who purchased it and put it up online where it
was purchased by a customer in Washington State and here it is. So this is a book that I purchased. I purchased it the way most rabbis
purchase books these days on eBay, and when I got the book I
opened it up and I found on the inside was a
bookplate Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Incorporated. At the time I had no idea what
Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Incorporated was so I did
what most rabbis do when faced with such conundra [phonetic],
Googled it, and that sent me on to this whole story that
where wrote the book about. If only of course we had the
people who owned this but we don't. And among the only
physical relics we have of them are the books
that they left behind. It reminds me of the words of
Abraham Sutzkever who died in 2010 and he wrote, it is not
just because my words quiver like broken hands grasping for aid
or that they sharpen themselves like teeth on the prowl
in the darkness, that you my written words
substitute for my world flare up the coals of my anger. It is because your sounds glint
like burnt pearls discovered in an extinguished pyre and
no one not even I shredded by time can recognize the
woman drenched in flame for all that remains of her now are those
gray pearls smoldering in the ash. All that remains of them
now are these gray pearls. But it is what we have and God
willing we can open the books again and let the pearls shine forth
for us all to see in the future. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] We have just a few
minutes left for questions. Does anybody have any? Oh, we can go a little
bit over, okay, we have more than a few
minutes left of course. Way in the back. >> I have a question about
talking about the Nazi [inaudible]. >> Rabbi Mark Glickman: Yes. >> Would somebody like
that eventually be indicted for war crimes? >> Rabbi Mark Glickman: Yeah. I'll repeat the question. The question is were these
Nazi Judaic scholars indicted for war crimes? And the answer is some of them were
kind of a little bit, but not much. Johannes Pohl lived out his
life I think he got captured for a little while but
released shortly afterwards and he lived out his life. I think, something is
telling me he moved to Canada after the war but I'm not sure. Alfred Rosenberg who was the
head of all these scholars, he was tried at Nuremberg
in the first you know wave of Nuremberg trials
and he was executed. Most of the others were
punished hardly at all. Hardly at and that's one of the
great tragedies if you will is that these guys you know they had
a lot of these guys after the war, they knew where a lot of these
guys were but there was no effort to really make them accountable
for what they had done. Yes, ma'am. [ Inaudible ] You know what? I think the broader question
is why did they bother holding onto this stuff? Yes. So why did they bother and
that's of course the question and I've got a great book I
can suggest to read about that which is available in
the back of the room by the way, and available on audio. But there are a few
answers to that question. First, the Nazis were
trying to show themselves to be cultured and
enlightened people. They were very proud and
Germany had long been a culture that prided itself on its books,
and so you know this was great poets and novelists and writers
had all come from Germany and so they were working very
hard to show themselves to be, to be an enlightened people, a
scholarly intellectual people. This was the intellectual veneer
that was put over the ugliness of Nazi Germany, that's
one reason they did it. The other reason or among the other
reasons, there are a lot of reasons, part of it was just triumphalism. Look at how we have become victors over this vanquished
Jewish civilization. I think that's what they
were trying to do as well. One of the other phenomena in play was what one scholar
called working towards the fuhrer. Hitler it turns out
was a very good orator. He was not a very good administer. He would come in late in the day, he
would when his underlings would get in fights and conflicts with
one another, he didn't want to be bothered with that at all. He kind of enjoyed letting
them, watching them fight it out amongst themselves and it made for a very chaotic administrative
structure within the Nazi regime. I touched on that in my talk
and they were all competing, they were all trying to
get Hitler's attention, and so if your agency could
get more books more material than the other Nazi agency,
if Rosenberg's ERR could out do the RSHA in their looting
efforts, then that would be a badge of pride that they
could wear as they went and appeared before the fuhrer. So they were trying to
impress Hitler as well. So there were a lot of reasons that
they did this and it all culminated in this largest campaign in
history of literary pillage. So that's a partial
answer to your question. I'm not sure I have a full answer
but I hope that's a partial answer. Other questions. Yes, ma'am. >> You mentioned the
history of YIVO. >> Rabbi Mark Glickman: Yes. >> And I feel like I should
know the answer already but I don't have it quite in mind,
I know that YIVO is now in New York. >> Rabbi Mark Glickman: Right. >> And I believe that some of the
people got out and were able to come to New York [inaudible],
but in terms of the books. >> Rabbi Mark Glickman:
In terms of the books. >> Did they survive? >> Rabbi Mark Glickman: Yes
I should have said that. Thank you. Some of the books were, they were
able to get out early in the war and those went to New York and now
as you said YIVO is at the Center For Jewish History in
New York city so many of the books got out
early in the war. The ones that the Paper
Brigade tried to save, the majority of them were hit in
bombing raids especially the ones that were hid in the YIVO facility. That was hit by allied
bombs and not all of them but the majority of
them were destroyed. Some of them survived and they
were able to get out a good number of them and bring them
to New York after the war but the majority sadly
did not survive the war. [ Inaudible ] Yeah. The short answer to your question is the question
is did they organize these books at all and if so how? The answer is no, they didn't
because there were just so many of them they weren't able to. There were a few small efforts to do
so like the books in Schloss Hungen. They started to categorize them
but they were just such a huge mass of material and they
were all different kinds of books that were looted. There were you know priceless
manuscripts as well as trashy novels and children's activity books
and everything in between so there was just so much material that they simply didn't
have time to organize it. That was I think that was the
idea that they would get to it after the war once
that collected it. Yes, sir. [ Inaudible ] We, and it perversely we have the
Nazis to thank for preserving some of the Jewish books
from before the war. Because they collected them and
because they brought them into what at least for a time were secure
places, they saved what may have in many cases been books that
would have been destroyed, certainly whole titles and many
times priceless manuscripts, they saved them in many cases. So we do have Nazis to thank for
that in a perverse kind of a way. Yes. Was that your question? Yes. Other questions. This looks like it's going to be
our final question so make it good. [ Inaudible ] No, I think that the question
is what happened to the books that went into the DP camps? And I think they eventually they
were eventually don't quote me on this but I think they were
eventually sent back into JCR, the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction
and then went back into the system. Yeah. Well thank you very
much for this opportunity. It was a delight to speak to you. >> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov
