>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. ^M00:00:04 [ Silence ] ^M00:00:21 >> MaryJane Deeb: Good afternoon and welcome to the African Middle East Division. I'm MaryJane 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, SubSaharan 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. ^M00:03:55 [ Applause ] ^M00:03:59 >> Sharon Horowitz: Thank you MaryJane. 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. ^M00:06:23 In addition, the Library of Congress also received about 150 Hebraic volumes bearing the stamp of antiNazi, antiSemitic 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. ^M00:07:07 [ Applause ] ^M00:07:12 >> Rabbi Mark Glickman: Thank you, Sharon and thank you to MaryJane. 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 semiidentifiable 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. ^M00:17:18 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 antiSemitic 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. ^M00:27:03 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. ^M00:36:44 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 SolmsBraunfels 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 PitcairnKnowles. 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 ontheground 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. ^M00:47:19 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. ^M00:52:28 [ Applause ] ^M00:52:33 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. ^M00:53:51 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:54:14 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. ^M00:57:58 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:58:13 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. ^M00:59:04 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:59:27 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. ^M01:00:12 [ Inaudible ] ^M01:00:29 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