Heroes: The Paper Brigade

Notes on the creation of ink and fire (NdeNovela)a novel by Benito Olmo about the looting of books carried out by the Nazis during World War II.

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ink and fire It does not only refer to the literary looting committed by the Nazis and which constitutes the largest theft of books documented throughout history. It also refers to all those men and women who risked their lives to save the books from looters in a form of resistance that I find as admirable as it is inexplicable.

I have my reasons.

I stopped sanctifying books a long time ago. I don’t think there is a single copy in the world that is worth more than the life of a human being, no matter how beautiful its edition or no matter how exciting the story it houses within its pages. That is why it is difficult for me to understand that someone could risk their life to save books from plunder.especially when, in most cases, they were not even their property.

However, the theft of books was met with resistance from a good number of librarians and reading lovers who, demonstrating courage and unconsciousness bordering on madness, managed to keep many copies safe. It happened in Holland, in Italy, in Paris…

Let me tell you about Vilnius, Lithuania.

“I have no way of knowing what led all these men and women to risk their lives to save those books.“

During the sack of Vilnius, there was so much work to do that the Germans had to seek help. They took advantage of the workers of the Institute of Jewish Culture, who were forced to work for them. Under close surveillance, those men and women had to face the painful task of deciding which books should be looted and which should be destroyed. Furthermore, they worked with minimum daily quotas, so not a single day could pass without condemning a certain number of specimens to looting or destruction, before returning to the ghetto in which they were forced to live after the occupation. Nazi would have thrown them out of their homes.

However, these men and women soon organized themselves and, as soon as the vigilance of their guardians relaxed, they began to secretly remove books to safety. Every night, at the end of the day, they hid some valuable specimens in the folds of their clothes that they later hid in the ghetto.. Also in this sense they were very imaginative, since they introduced books in the most unexpected places, such as in storage rooms, in the sewers, on rooftops and inside hollow walls.

I have no way of knowing what led all these men and women to risk their lives to save those books. I suppose that after seeing their country devastated, being expelled from their homes and being forced to settle in a ghetto, they made this decision as a form of resistance and, of course, revenge against those who had taken their lives and, They had probably wiped out many of their friends and family. Preventing the looters from getting their way must have given them an incentive to get up every morning and carry out the thankless task they had been entrusted with.

In the ghetto they came to be baptized as The Paper Brigade (Die Papier Brigade), the name by which they would end up being remembered.

“German soldiers entered the ghetto and found some of these hiding places full of books. They took all those copies and made a large pile that burned until late at night.“

As I have already mentioned, the members of the Paper Brigade had plenty of imagination. One of them even asked the guards for permission to take some of the documents they were discarding to the ghetto to use as fuel for the stoves. The Nazis agreed, without knowing that in this way they were enabling this group of heroes to save a large number of valuable manuscripts and letters right under their noses.

They soon ran out of space in which to hide all the material they kept safe and They went so far as to build an underground bunker that had its own electricity supply.in which they introduced all the material that they managed to steal from the looters.

Towards the end of the war, German soldiers entered the ghetto and found some of these caches filled with books. They took all those copies and made a large pile that burned until late at night. However, they could not find them all and, thanks to the efforts of the Paper Brigade, many books were saved from burning.

After the war, excavation began in the remains of the ghetto to find the bunker. After several days of work, and when they had already abandoned all hope, they finally found it, full of books and some small works of art.

However, they also found something else: in the bunker was the body of one of the members of the Paper Brigade, who died there while trying to protect all those books from looters.