The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis. David E. Fishman. ForeEdge. 2017.
Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked The Lives to Defy the Nazis. Jeffrey H. Jackson. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 2020.
The Dressmakers of Auschwitz. Lucy Adlington. Harper. 2021.
These days, America is at war with itself, with each side believing fiercely that its responsibility is to save us from the other side.
To be clear, there is no equivalence. On the one hand are the progressives, ranging from barely right of center to full-throated leftists (although most stop short of advocating anarchy). On the other hand are the conservatives, ranging from the right-fringe-by-god-we-love-autocrats-and-we’re-taking-over-this-country to the right-of-center-what-just-happened-here. The progressives are mostly armed with ideas, policy proposals and dreams of what might be. The conservatives are armed with firearms of every type and dreams of what used to be.
If you are among the conservatives, you likely are not reading my work; if you are among the progressives, it is instructive to know that we’ve been here before and to have a sense of what folks have done to resist, to survive, perhaps even to circumvent the worst of the worst outcomes — to find consolation and meaning with death on the horizon.
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These three books tell three stories of resistance to Hitler’s Germany. They are true; their authors are all historians.
In The Book Smugglers, Jewish intellectuals from the Vilna ghetto in Poland (now Lithuania) created the means of rescuing thousands of Jewish antiquities from Nazis. Vilna was global a center for Jewish cultural life, known especially for its vast collections of Jewish writings. Besides a large library of some 40,000 volumes, including some pieces nearly 1500 years old, it had a publishing house, a Great Synagogue, and also a research institute devoted to Jewish life with branches in Paris, New York and Berlin. Plus a large, advanced Yiddish high school, and a musical academy. Vilna, wrote Fishman, became a code word for high-quality Jewish culture, a shorthand for excellence.
So, Vilna was targeted by the Nazis, who ordered the gathering of Hebrew and Yiddish books, papers, magazines, documents, archives, photographs, antiquities and relics, copies of the Torah hundreds of years old, plays and manuscripts, academic, religious and secular, diaries — millions of items from across Nazi-occupied eastern Europe.
Jewish prisoners were assigned as slave labor to sort and catalog. Enough would be kept to help the Germans study the culture they were wiping out; everything else would be destroyed — papers incinerated along with the people whose stories they told; worship vessels of silver and other metals melted to make ammunition; ancient leather scrolls used to resole worn-out german boots.
These ghetto inmates assigned to work in the great Vilna Library began smuggling volumes out under their clothing, thousands of them over 18 months, to relay them to safety in Russia until the war’s end. (They then realized the treasures were not safe in Russia, and so had to smuggle them back again after the Nazis fell.)
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In Paper Bullets, the protagonists were two French lesbians, Lucy and Suzanne, mid-forties, writers and artists, who were trapped on the German-occupied island of Jersey in the English Channel when France was invaded.
The women first just tried to stay out of trouble. Then, they became propagandists — typing anti-war messages on cigarette rolling papers, tucking them into magazines at the news stand, leaving them on public transit seats, even boldly dropping them in the pockets of unsuspecting German soldiers as they crossed paths. They got hints along the way that their messages were, in fact, deflating the soldiers, making them question the war; even when they were arrested, they continued their campaign in prison, working to undermine the morale of the German guards. “You’ll never get Hitler,” said one German soldier to a French informant. “I’ll tell you why you’ll never get Hitler. Because WE are going to get him.”
After the war, Suzanne reflected, “We belonged by the power of our formative years to a world that had died in 1914, and our conviction that abstract values could only exist as long as mankind cherished the made it … more imperative to fight for their survival.”
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Adlington (The Dressmakers of Auschwitz) is a clothes historian; this work is a bit of history of the war through the lens of fashion, but also invites a perspective on the power of clothing — for self-esteem, for social position.
The story follows a group of young women mostly 20-ish, mostly from Bratislava in Czechoslovakia, (now Slovakia). Jews owned most clothing stores and most wholesale fabric warehouses; their power in the German economy was incalculable. Dressmaking was a vital and viable occupation for most Jewish women, one they thought would be their salvation. Even as genocide was escalating all around them, the women of Bratislava were able to live in a degree in denial. “Whatever the rumors about ghettos and concentration camps, it was hard for the young dressmakers and their families in Bratislava to take them seriously. ‘If they need our work, they won’t let us die of starvation,’” thought one.
But the Nazis came for them, as they did for everyone else. Post-arrest, then, sewing fashion for wives of the Third Reich and sewing uniforms for German soldiers became their required occupation. Germans had depended on Jews for clothing; that would not stop.
In the camps, this small group was part of a much larger industry, a factory assembly line of sorts, which tended to every phase of clothes-making, beginning with rummaging through the mounds of clothes and other belongings of the murdered ones, (by way of explaining why Nazi prisoners were forced to strip before their execution, said Adlington, “no point wasting clothes in the burial pit), and more often than not involving multiple fittings with the women and children of the Nazis, who gave little indication they knew of their husbands’ day jobs. Some sewed in the homes of the Nazi wives; others were permitted to form a sewing collaborative.
One supposes it would perhaps have been a quite comfortable living, but for the starvation and illness, the deprivation of every sort, and the terror that a minor mistake could lead to execution, and in fact the murder of those around them. Plus that the clothing and fabric they would retrieve from the warehouses would have blood or bullet holes or other telltale signs. One of the women stumbled upon her own Mother’s coat.
For most, resistance was secondary to survival. The acts of resistance were usually very small and personal— sharing a bite of food or pair of shoes, stealing bread from an employer’s home, pretending to be someone else who was too sick to work or show up for roll call.
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Of the three, Dressmakers is the most personal, the most graphic in its telling of the lives of those arrested. It was excruciating to read in some places, as one would feel the humiliation, vulnerability or fear the women endured. It was also the most challenging in attempts to remember the individuals, as they all get introduced at the same time. (The Book Smugglers includes a useful index, Dramatis Personae, of the 6 individuals key to the telling.)
Paper Bullets carried the most intrigue, reading in some places like a spy novel. It was also the most suggestive of the plight of everyday would-be resisters who ask “but what can I possibly do?” With no illusions of stopping a war on their own, two women contributed what they could — typed notes on cigarette papers — believing they would die but unwilling to let tyranny bow them.
The story told in The Book Smugglers was the most organized act of resistance, and embodied perhaps the highest ideal — an ideal carried out, it is worth noting, by poets and scholars in their 20s and 30s. Fifty years after the war, at a celebration to mark the survival of all the cultural artifacts the Smugglers had saved, a reporter asked Rachela, one of the first smugglers “‘Why had she risked her head to rescue books and manuscripts?’ Without batting an eye, she answered, ‘I didn’t believe at the time that my head belonged to me. We thought we could do something for the future.’”
Times are careening us toward something we cannot yet see, something deadly and world-changing. But times require something of us. Resistance can be the work to survive the worst, or an attempt to save the world or a portion of it, or a commitment to retaining your dignity and that of those around you when the worst happens. When the devastation appears inevitable, it behooves us to ask the question, “what will we do?”
‘I didn’t believe at the time that my head belonged to me.’
To what will we devote our lives? And how will we resist. These are not just history, but enlightening and inspiring stories for the dangerous times in which we live.