Mark Oppenheimer: Hi friends. I’m Mark Oppenheimer, and this is Arc: The Podcast. A few months back, I was talking to Jonathan Brent, who is the director of YIVO, which is the world’s preeminent institution for research into Yiddish language and culture. Jonathan was telling me how this is YIVO’s hundredth anniversary and I was saying that we should really do something together to celebrate that milestone.  So we started talking and Jonathan was discussing some of the amazing work YIVO has done in the past and is still doing today, which includes teaching Lithuanians about how to teach their own Yiddish past. It’s a remarkable thing given that Lithuania, which used to be the world center of Yiddish culture, lost almost all of its Jews in the Holocaust. And now, as Jonathan was telling me, YIVO was helping to bring Yiddish learning back to a country that is almost entirely Christian today.

This sounded like a remarkable story. And so I decided to send my deputy editor at Arc, David Sugarman, to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, to learn more. David went and the story he came back with will blow your mind. It is a tale of language, love and loss, of cunning and espionage, of death and rebirth.

So, with this timeless tale of Yiddish survival, from the Baltic lands of Eastern Europe, all the way to New York and back again, here’s my friend and colleague, David Sugarman.

David Sugarman: In the early 1990s, a young man was walking around the old quarter of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.

The city had just survived 45 years of Soviet occupation, proceeded by several brutal years of Nazi occupation. This young man, his parents, his grandparents had lived through a half century of violence and suppression. Fifty years that had killed most of Lithuania’s large Jewish population, erased that community’s history, and warped the public and private lives of every Lithuanian citizen.

This young man was wandering the old city in a country that had just recovered its independence when he saw something: high up on a wall, an alphabet he couldn’t read. It wasn’t Lithuanian, and it wasn’t Russian, and he began to notice it all across the city.

MV: The alphabet was totally unknown to me. And I was wondering what these letters are. And I felt they are very beautiful. And I thought I would like to read them some time.

DS: Those letters turned out to be Hebrew and the language, Yiddish.

MV: But I was still a teenager. I knew almost nothing about Jewish history, Jewish culture, or Yiddish language. During the late Soviet period, these topics were nonexistent. Then I started looking for some information about the Jews, about the Jewish life in Vilnius.

DS: This young man’s name was Mindaugas Kvietkauskas. He would go on to learn Yiddish, gaining access to a lost world of Lithuanian Jewry. Along with other scholars of his generation, he would dig into his country’s past and start recovering its history, fragment by fragment, book by book, archive by archive.

Mindaugas would pick up a conversation, a Yiddish conversation, that the Nazis, the Soviets had nearly silenced. It was a Yiddish conversation that people had worked tirelessly to save, that people had died to save. Evidence of Yiddish culture, of Lithuanian Jewish life had to be hidden from the SS and from the Red Army in walls and floorboards and church closets all across of Vilnius.

Many of the people who did this work did it for one organization: YIVO. The Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut.

Rooted in pre-war Vilnius and today located in New York City, YIVO is one of the world’s preeminent institutions for preserving and promoting Yiddish culture and language.

I grew up hearing plenty about the Holocaust and plenty of Yiddish. My maternal grandparents were survivors and spoke Yiddish at home, but I didn’t know much about YIVO.

The institution was founded in the early twentieth century in Vilnius, or Vilnia in Yiddish, when that city was arguably the global center of the language. At YIVO’s founding, more than ten million people spoke Yiddish. Today, as YIVO marks its hundredth year, Yiddish is likely spoken by fewer than a million. Almost no one speaks Yiddish in Vilnius now, in this country where nearly all of the Jews were murdered, so I was surprised to learn YIVO is still active there, helping Lithuanians rescue their Jewish history.

I went to Vilnius to learn more. What I found there was an extraordinary story of a secret cache of Jewish artifacts stolen from the Nazis and secreted away from the Soviets. A story about a group of writers and academics risking their lives to preserve history, a salvaged history that today is changing Lithuanian culture. I want to tell you that story.

I am in Ponari, a beautiful forest just outside of the city, full of wildflowers and bright birds, which I see darting through the trees as I walk the wooded paths.

Flowers everywhere, all of these birds.

This the a place where, from 1941 to 1944, as many as seventy thousand Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators. For centuries before the Holocaust, Lithuanian Jewry had flourished.

KW: Vilna is unique as a city of both tradition and modernity.

DS: Kalman Weiser teaches Jewish studies at York University in Canada.

KW: Vilna is both old and new at the same time. Vilna is the Vilna Gaon. Goan of Vilna, it’s a place where Haskala took off in the nineteenth century Jewish enlightenment. It’s also a place of the birth of the Bund in 1897, where Zionism was popular very early in Eastern Europe.

DS: In short, Vilna was the center of all of these strands of Jewish modernity. It was a vibrant hub of Jewish learning, literature, and culture, the home of yeshivas and artists and intellectuals.

KW: This is the place to be to create the modern Jewish secular nation. It’s the Jerusalem of Lithuania.

DS: Before World War II, when Vilna had about one hundred and fifty thousand people, roughly forty percent of its population was Jewish and the language of life in Vilna was Yiddish, a language intimately tied not only to everyday Jewish life in Europe but also to arguments about the Jewish future. In the early 1920s, a group of European Jewish scholars decided that Yiddish needed its own research center, and that such a center should be in Vilna. That center was YIVO.

JB: It was founded as an institute serving multiple purposes.

DS: This is Jonathan Brent, YIVO’s current director.

JB: To preserve records of the past at a time when it was obvious to the leaders of the YIVO Institute that Jewish life was radically changing.

DS: At the time, large numbers of Jews were leaving Eastern Europe, often for the United States. Many who left intermarried or assimilated into broader Western culture. Fewer and fewer children learned Yiddish or grew up in the same village as their grandparents.

JB: And it was felt that the past of perhaps thousand years, if not more, of Jewish life would be lost and would not be transmitted to future generations. And so the YIVO Institute was born partly out of that desire. Another desire was to create a place where the Yiddish language was honored, where the Jewish people were understood to have the right to its own sovereign identity. It also meant studying for the first time the history of day-to-day life that represented for these scholars the true account of how the Jewish people came to be what they are.

DS: But European Jewry was on the cusp of calamity. First, the Soviets occupied Vilna in 1940 and then the Nazis conquered Lithuania from the Soviets in 1941. Part of the Nazis genocidal project was the creation of the Frankfurt Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question. Founded in 1939, the Frankfurt Institute aimed to legitimize the Nazis murderous program through pseudoscientific studies and racist rhetoric. The Institute produced pamphlets, organized conferences, and churned out deeply anti-Semitic materials that sought to frame the Jews as an existential threat to German society. In many ways, it was the antithesis to YIVO, producing research about the Jews, but in the case all anti-Semitic lies.

YIVO and the Frankfurt Institute had one thing in common though: an interest in Jewish artifacts. The Nazis wanted artifacts for a museum on the degeneracy of the Jew, a museum that could justify their genocide. To do so, they forced into labor the Jews themselves, in fact the very Jews who had been collecting Jewish artifacts for YIVO. They were now forced to loot their own collections for the Nazis.

JB: To find the very best materials and ship them back to Frankfurt. The task was for Kalmanovich and Krazinsky and others to select these materials because it required scholarship to know what was going on in these documents and everything.

DS: These researchers, Katriginski, Kalmanovich, and others were in a bind. They couldn’t outright disobey the Nazis, but they also couldn’t just give away all these Jewish treasures that they and their colleagues had accumulated.

JB: And so they started a surreptitious project of hiding the materials and taking them out under their shirts, in their pants, in their shoes, under their arms. God knows how they did this.

DS: These evil researchers managed to sneak thousands of artifacts into Vilna’s Jewish ghetto, all without tipping off the Nazis. In this time of war and terror and death, these men were not smuggling weapons or food into the ghetto, but books and manuscripts. And so, as a bit of a joke, a bit of a slight, people in the ghetto started calling these smugglers “The Paper Brigade.”

JB: They brought these materials back into the ghetto and they hid them in bunkers, in milk canisters. There were thousands and thousands and thousands of such materials, books, documents, letters. This little seven-page autobiography by Beba Epstein was one of them. What possessed them to take this little diary of thirteen-year-old Beba Epstein and bring it, at risk of their lives, from the YIVO building to the ghetto and their hide it with the hope that in twenty years it will be discovered.

Think of it. Think of what that meant. Think of the motivation that they had. It was not to save the crown jewels. It was not to save the discoveries of Einstein. It was to save a seven or ten-page autobiography that this little thirteen-year-old girl had. Why? Because that showed you what her life was and they valued every person’s life. For them, everything was valuable.

DS: The YIVO archive was divided. Some of its materials sent to Frankfurt for the Nazi propaganda museum and some smuggled by the Paper Brigade into the attics and basements of the Vilna ghetto. As the archive of materials hidden in the ghetto grew, the population there shrunk. The Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators systematically killed Vilna’s Jews. They shot thousands of them each year in the Ponary Forest.

After the war, the Jews who survived reclaimed the materials hidden under their floorboards. The American army found looted books all around Germany and sent them back to YIVO, but the archives soon faced a new threat. The Soviets came to control Lithuania, incorporating the Baltic states as Soviet socialist republics. To put it mildly, they didn’t seem interested in stewarding Yiddish culture and heritage.

KW: People literally go back from the. Those who survive, very few of them survive, go back to Vilnius and dig up this material.

DS: This is Kalman Weiser again.

KW: But the figures involved in this reclamation quickly understand that the Soviets are probably going to confiscate and destroy materials just as the Germans did, and they begin efforts to send materials elsewhere to smuggle them outside of Vilnius to bring them to the West, much of which they want to send to YIVO.

DS: YIVO had moved its headquarters to New York City at the start of the war. Their archive, however, and the vast majority of their staff, remained trapped in the ghettos of Europe. With the war over, work started on either side of the Atlantic to try to reunite what had been separated.

KW: I can’t do justice in the story of how people are literally smuggling papers and books and so on. They once upon did this to smuggle into the ghetto in Vilna. Now they’re trying to smuggle it out of Lithuania through various ways to get it sometimes to the Hebrew University or elsewhere, but mainly to YIVO in New York.

DS: Max Weinreich, YIVO’s co-founder, was on hand in New York to receive these materials, which often arrived with reminders of what had been lost back home.

KW: And there are these heartbreaking scenes where these figures, of course, who all knew each other from Vilna, where Max Weinreich receives a package. A package brought to him by an American correspondent. Max Weinreich brings them back to a safe place where he shows them to his colleagues and they break down emotionally. They burst into tears as the sign of this lost world.

DS: Try as they might, the Yiddish scholars left on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain couldn’t get everything out. Soviet control over information was only growing. Here’s YIVO’s Jonathan Brent again.

JB: In Lithuania, all of the things that the Paper Brigade had saved were now going to be destroyed again. At this point, a Lithuanian man by the name of Antanas Ulpis, who was the head of the Lithuanian book chamber, got wind of what was going to happen to all of these Jewish materials that had been saved. And so he single-handedly engineered a rescue operation for these materials, and he hid them in various locations throughout the Church of St. George. The Church of St. George in downtown Vilnius had been converted into the Lithuanian National Book Chamber, and Ulpis was the head of it. And he gave some to other institutions where they remained hidden from 1948 until really 1991.

DS: Thanks to people like Ulpis, this new secret archive, the second in Vilna in just a few years, kept growing. Most Lithuanians living through Soviet repression knew nothing about it or the broader history it represented. Then in 1990, Lithuania seceded from the USSR, becoming the first Soviet Republic to do so. That marked the end of more than a half century of Nazi and Soviet suppression. The country could now, finally, create its own future. But first, it needed to come to terms with its past.
For some, that process started with the old faded Yiddish letters spotted on the walls of Vilnius. Mindaugas, that young man from the start of our story, would go on to become a professor of literature at Vilnius University and briefly Lithuania’s minister of culture.

MK: All this memory suddenly appeared in an avalanche, and of course it was the discovery for us, the younger generation, as a narrative of a city of a place where we live, where we can’t empower the lived. It was totally different.

DS: As these scholars began digging into their country’s past, they discovered more than a story of Nazi violence or Soviet erasure. Learning Yiddish and reading the records of their country’s Jewish history and translating those texts into their own language uncovered a world.

MK: Not only Jewish history opened up, the entire multicultural history, entire cultural heritage, and our union heritage as well was into that process. So it was very, I would say, even a very enthusiastic and overwhelming discovery and the feeling to actually live on a very small piece of land which was submerged, which was destroyed, which was unknown. We were rediscovering it as an Atlantis, which suddenly reappear. And now things have really changed. Jewish studies are part of our academic and cultural life. There is much to be done, but it became a normal part of our academic and public districts.

SJ: During Soviet time, fifty years of occupation, they don’t allow us to talk to all topics we want. And if you don’t follow these rules, you can be arrested. And we are healing from that Soviet slash Russian problem. And right now studies is much better, much higher, and we are working on that.

DS: Simonas Jurkštaitis is a high school teacher in Lithuania. We talked on a sunny morning outside an imposing concrete building left over from Soviet times, the National Library of Lithuania. The library with its soaring columns set atop a steep staircase, sits in the center of Vilnius. I met Simonas at a conference YIVO put on here. The conference brought together Lithuanian high school teachers to learn about the rich and tragic history of Lithuanian Jewry. What Mindaugas called a lost Atlantis.

The collection saved by Ulpis and the Paper Brigade is helping young Lithuanians understand their history. Beba Epstein’s diary, an autobiography of life in Vilna before and during World War II by a thirteen-year-old girl has now been translated from Yiddish to Lithuanian. Teachers are using it in classrooms across Lithuania to help school children understand their past. These students are learning about a teenage girl who was mischievous and athletic and observant, who looked forward all year to summer break because she loved camp so much and swimming. A girl who enjoyed reading books and seeing movies and spending time with her siblings. They’re learning about a girl whose childhood ended early and whose story would have been lost entirely were not for the people who risked their lives to save it.

Standing outside Lithuania’s national library and talking to the teachers there for the conference, I asked if these efforts were yielding change. If at a time when many countries are whitewashing their histories, Lithuania is learning these lessons from its past. If after decades of repression and state sanctioned silence, things are getting better.

SJ: Yeah, it’s much better. I see much more funding, much more scientific interest and much more empathy in all society. I made a lot of young people who was more freely than I am.

JB: It gives me unbelievable pleasure to help Lithuanian teachers use these materials.

DS: YIVO director Jonathan Brent.

JB: The idea of instilling in young Lithuanian children something about the story of Beba Epstein, something about the reality, the truth of what Jewish life was like in their town, on their streets, neither of which has changed very much since 1925. The photographs that you look at from 1925 and the photographs you look at today of the Jewish quarter, they’re entirely the same, but as Czesław Miłosz, the Polish poet, said when he visited some years ago before his death, the only thing that’s missing are the people. These documents help the Lithuanians themselves know what those people were like.

DS: YIVO’s founders in the early twentieth century understood that Jewish life in Europe was profoundly valuable, but also profoundly precarious. They built an archive to both celebrate and safeguard it. An archive that was then saved several times over by The Paper Brigade, by American soldiers in Europe, by European transplants in New York City, by librarians in Lithuania. Now, in its hundredth year, YIVO’s archive offers a living connection to the past and a vital source of understanding for the present, founded as a place where a flourishing community could assert itself and be proud of its language, culture, and traditions. YIVO today plays a very different role. It exists in many ways to archive what’s been lost without giving up on the present and future.

MO: Arc is a production of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. If you have thoughts on this episode, please write to me. I’m at mark.o@wustl.edu. Arc is produced by me and David Sugarman. This episode could not have been done without the expert editing assistance of Robert Scaramuccia. Original scoring for the podcast was done by Ben Tweel, also known as Build Buildings. I’d like to thank all of those at YIVO, including Jonathan Brent, Debbie Calise, and Shelly Freeman.

Full disclosure, when David traveled with YIVO to Lithuania, they picked up the cost of his ticket as he was traveling with them, but we here at Arc paid for everything else, including the production of the episode, which was editorially independent and had no interference from YIVO.

I’d like to thank everyone at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, including Abram Van Engen, Debra Kennard, Sheri Pena, and all the rest. If you enjoyed this episode, there’s no greater favor you could do us than subscribing to Arc: The Podcast, at Apple Podcasts, or whatever platform you choose. And please go, rate and review and share this episode. Until next time, I’m Mark Oppenheimer.