Search results
The Paper Brigade was the name given to a group of residents of the Vilna Ghetto who hid a large cache of Jewish cultural items from YIVO (the Yiddish Scientific Institute), saving them from destruction or theft by Nazi Germany.
Known as “The Paper Brigade,” they were a group of slave laborers who smuggled and hid rare books and manuscripts in the midst of the Holocaust. Theirs is an incredible story of cultural resistance in the face of almost certain death.
A brief, fast-paced history of the Paper Brigade, a group of poets and scholars who risked their lives to smuggle Jewish books and materials from YIVO’s coll...
- 6 min
- 3.4K
- YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
Jun 25, 2021 · The moving story of how a small band of Jewish poets and writers saved priceless collections of Jewish books and manuscripts from destruction during the Nazi occupation….
The Paper Brigade was a group of 40 Jewish poets, writers and intellectuals who during the Nazi occupation of Vilna (now Vilnius), Lithuania, risked their lives to save the city’s Jewish library collections from destruction in Poland, Belarus and Russia.
Faced with the eradication of their cultural heritage, members of the paper brigade began to salvage whatever they could, concealing valuable letters, manuscripts and drawings in their clothing, boots, or hats, and smuggling them into the ghetto.
Dec 16, 2012 · During WWII, a small group of Jewish scholars called “the paper brigade” waged a modern Maccabean revolt in an effort to preserve Yiddish literature.
