{"product_id":"the-book-smugglers-partisans-poets-and-the-race-to-save-jewish-treasures-from-the-nazis","title":"The Book Smugglers: Partisans  Poets  and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44946697388085,"sku":"ByrdShop_1512600490","price":31.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9781512600490_2e2e9356-d693-47c8-b93c-e2da81ee5b9c.jpg?v=1770148840","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-book-smugglers-partisans-poets-and-the-race-to-save-jewish-treasures-from-the-nazis","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}