At the beginning of the 20th century Vilnius was a profound centre of Jewish life. It was a city filled with learned rabbis and outstanding libraries and cultural life. Of course, that did not live on. Like so much else of culture and civilization, it was destroyed, in the case of Vilnius by operation Barbarossa launched by the evil partnership of Stalin and Hitler.
As Oxford Librarian Richard Ovenden pointed out, the Jewish intellectual leaders of Vilnius were forced each day to cooperate with the axis leaders in the destruction of Jewish archives and historical records. Yet somehow, they managed to resist the occupation and save some of the historical records at substantial risk to their own lives. Civilization was literally hanging by a thread, if that. Those intellectual giants smuggled out books and records and hid them with friendly people in the ghetto, doing what they could to salvage some civilization. They called themselves “the paper brigade.” We should call them heroes.
These intellectual warriors hoped that someone would come after them to retrieve those records and documents, and miraculously they did. How was that even possible? They literally rescued Jewish civilization from destruction at the hands of the Nazis and Communists.
The Communists discovered what was happening and once more sent the documents to the paper mill, but remarkably, they were rescued a second time by librarians who turned the trucks around and hid them until 1949 when it was again safe to release the.
Sometimes librarians are heroes.