This is a beautifully written and enthralling study that sheds important new light not only on an unknown chapter of the Holocaust but also on some of the larger questions of east European Jewish history in the twentieth century. Set in Vilnius, which was called by Jews “the Lithuanian Jerusalem,” the book examines how the local community's rich intellectual heritage found expression in an astonishing operation of cultural rescue during and after the German occupation.

The starting point of the story is the Nazi authorities’ obsession with all things Jewish, which led, alongside the genocide of the Jewish people itself, to the planned collection and preservation of Jewish cultural treasures. In Vilnius, this played out through the systematic cataloguing and ransacking of the great Jewish book collections of the town—the Strashun library, the libraries of various synagogues, including the Vilna Gaon's kloyz, and particularly the library of YIVO, the great Jewish research institute. In order to achieve that goal, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the German Agency responsible for looting all valuable cultural artefacts, under the direction of the Nazi Judaica expert Johannes Pohl, co-opted members of Vilna's Jewish intellectual elite to do the sorting and cataloging. The Nazis thus made the Jews themselves, many of whom had formerly been connected with YIVO in one way or another, accomplices in the theft of their own community's treasures.

Devastated by having to help in this rape of Jewish cultural heritage, the group of Jews involved in the project, prominent among them the world-renowned Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever, his friend Shmerke Kaczerginski, and Shmerke's lover, Rachela Krinsky, began to resist. At great personal risk, these men and women stole back at least some of the material taken by the Germans and smuggled it out on their bodies when they returned to the ghetto each evening. There it was hidden, hopefully to be retrieved after the war.

Fishman's astonishingly detailed reconstruction of these events, based on a wealth of primary sources of both Jewish and German provenance, is an important reminder of the all-encompassing nature of the Nazi Holocaust, which did not end with the Jews themselves but engulfed their culture and all that they had created, too. Beyond that, it deepens our understanding of the nature of Jewish resistance, for between the poles of armed resistance and the passive resistance of simply surviving, many Jews also engaged in forms of cultural resistance. These were aimed at rescuing from destruction Jewish culture, whether popular culture, as was preserved in the famous Oyneg Shabbes archive in the Warsaw ghetto, or the “high culture” rescued by the Book Smugglers of Vilna. This was an active form of resistance which not only complicated the daily struggle for survival of those engaged in it but put their very lives at risk.

Had Fishman ended his study with the stories of the Book Smugglers, many of whom became partisans after the liquidation of the ghetto, and the rediscovery of at least some of the treasures in the post-war ruins of Vilnius, its contribution to our knowledge of the Jews in twentieth century eastern Europe would have been very significant. However, he chose not to view the Holocaust as the endpoint of his tale, but rather to situate it within a longer-term flow of events—precisely as the survivors experienced it.

In doing so, he was able to trace the fate of the surviving cultural treasures after the liberation, which involved a quite remarkable second tale of rescue. That became necessary because the Soviet occupying power (and the local regime it put in place) proved hostile to the reconstitution of Jewish culture in Vilnius. Though the efforts of some sympathetic Lithuanian intellectuals prevented the total destruction of much of the material that had survived, most of it had to be kept out of sight and left to languish in terrible conditions. Those of the book smugglers who survived the war therefore decided that, if anything was to remain for future generations, a new operation was necessary to smuggle whatever could be saved to YIVO headquarters in New York. Since the removal from the Soviet bloc of cultural artefacts, even despised Jewish ones, was forbidden by law, the smugglers once again had to put themselves at great risk to preserve what little was left of their Jewish heritage.

This second part of the story has no less significance for our understanding of the Jewish past than the first. Fishman's research not only demonstrates the enormous threat that the post-war Soviet puppet regimes posed to the Jews who remained in eastern Europe but actually equates the ways they treated the Jews’ cultural heritage with what the Nazis had done. As research on Jewish history in the post-Holocaust world develops, that is a phenomenon whose importance should not be underestimated.

This book is therefore a major study of twentieth-century eastern European Jewish history on a number of different levels. Beyond that, it is also a wonderful read, with prose, particularly characterizations of people and descriptions of rescued treasures, that is quite belles-lettristic in quality.