Beginning November 23, we will read The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis, by David E. Fishman. (Available on Kindle, and also from used book sellers Abebooks.com and Alibris.com)
The Nazis had the goal of sending the most valuable Jewish manuscripts from Vilna, Lithuania, to Berlin…and burning the rest. Jews who were forced to do the sorting smuggled books and manuscripts into the Vilna ghetto, where they were stored in an underground bunker. Once Vilna was “liberated” by the Soviets, the Jews realized they had to smuggle the books out of the Soviet Union.