Kind: captions
Language: en
it may seem surprising but the Germans
aspired to have the greatest judaical
library in the
world uh they developed a whole field of
uden for study of the Jews which they
thought would prove to the world you
know the depravity of the Jews the
evilness of the Jews and they wanted to
do it scientifically based on primary
sources in books so they needed the
books to prove that their racial the
series and their genocidal designs uh
were
correct so the slogan of this field was
uden for on audin study of the Jews
without
Jews uh the Paradox is when they came to
Villa they discovered so many books from
so many libraries great libraries middle
and small libraries personal
libraries and they had to figure out
what to do with them how to sort them
what to send to Germany they can't send
everything to Germany and they don't
need 20 copies of a single book and they
ended up needing to have Jews who can go
through the and do the Sorting but pick
out and that's how they created this um
slave labor
Brigade which got the nickname in the
ghetto among Jews Jews called it The
Paper
Brigade uh you know most laborers worked
in fact factories mines railway station
but these people just work with paper so
they were called The Paper Brigade and
they were all
intellectuals that is they were
Educators Scholars poets artists
musicians they were given a quota 30%
will be sent to Germany 70% will be sent
to destruction actually kind of
recycling they'll be sent to paper mills
where they' be rep pulped into new paper
so that's it and nothing in between they
decide that they must rescue this
material and rescuing the material means
putting it on your body at the end of
the workday and uh smuggling it back
into the GTO past the guards uh at the
gate this was impermissible and on every
ground first of all it was stealing
property from their workplace second of
all there was strict rules no books or
papers maybe brought in the ghetto so
they were Breaking All the
Rules um and were risking their
lives um by smuggling the papers into
usually into the ghetto there were
ghetto inmates that said you're a
crazy uh you know this is a time of
danger this is a time of life and death
you should be smuggling in potatoes you
should be smuggling in food what are you
smuggling books in
but the Le one of the leaders of this
brigade The Scholar zeel kovich
replied books don't grow on
trees uh we have to preserve this for
posterity uh I think there was a lot
going on
here one was yes they believed the core
the essence of VNA is in these
books it may be that the Jews won't
survive but if the books survive if the
papers survive if the documents survive
then the spirit of VNA Will Survive so
they really saw it as an act of not
Rescue of individual items but ra
rescuing a whole culture and a whole
spirit in Spare
Time when the Germans left for lunch and
they were left to their own designs at
the lunch hour the work many the workers
would spend that spare time reading a
lot of books around not only religious
books poetry
novels and that was a very both one of
the rare pleasurable moments in the
ghetto to be able to peacefully read
poetry and
escape and it was also a poignant moment
because they say in their Memoirs this
might be the last book I'm
reading and it might be for the book
that I'm their last reader as we might
both might be destroyed very very soon
um so they relished that so what
developed was a very intimate
relationship between these workers and
the books that surrounded them I see The
Paper Brigade as the culmination of the
ethos of VNA the spirit of villa um
under those terrible conditions of of
mass murder not forgetting who they are
we may die but culture is
eternal and it must be preserved even at
the cost of our life that mean that's
not something they realized in the
ghetto that's what they were raised with
and then acted upon in the
ghetto