The story of the Paper Brigade is usually told as a story of rescue: poets and scholars in the Vilna Ghetto who risked their lives to save rare books and manuscripts from the Nazis. That story is true. But the archival record shows something more specific, and more useful for anyone thinking about how cultural heritage survives occupation. The brigade’s members were conscripted into the Nazi looting apparatus itself. They sorted, cataloged, and packed the looted collections of Vilna for shipment to Germany. Their rescue work depended on that access. What they saved was shaped by what the Germans wanted, what the Germans ignored, and what could be moved.
This is not a paradox to resolve. It is a condition to describe. Preservation under occupation often runs through the institutions of occupation. The Vilna case lets us see how that works in practice, and how the resulting archive — fragmentary, mixed in provenance, physically damaged — records those conditions as legibly as it records the texts it contains.
The looting apparatus and the forced labor brigade
Einsatzstab Rosenberg, the Nazi unit tasked with plundering cultural treasures across occupied Europe, arrived in Vilna in June 1941 with lists of libraries and collections it intended to seize. Among the targets were the Strashun Jewish Public Library and the YIVO Institute, the Yiddish scientific institute founded in Vilna in 1925. The unit took over the YIVO building as a collecting point for rare Jewish cultural treasures. Its staff, however, was not sufficiently versed in Jewish culture to organize and catalog the material. So it conscripted a forced labor brigade from the ghetto, made up of poets and intellectuals, including Zelig Kalmanovitch, who had been YIVO’s co-director before the war. Every day they were taken from the ghetto to the YIVO building to sort, catalog, and pack rare Jewish cultural treasures for shipment to Germany (YIVO, “The Paper Brigade”).
The brigade’s position was structurally ambiguous. They worked inside the looting apparatus. They handled the objects the Nazis wanted. They also had access to the objects the Nazis did not want — the materials judged unimportant, redundant, or not worth the shipping cost. That distinction became the basis for one of the two rescue strategies that emerged.
Two strategies, two logics of value
Kalmanovitch understood that rare YIVO materials in which the Germans were not interested would be destroyed. He and others decided to sneak portions of YIVO’s collection that were not slated for inclusion into the shipments of rare Judaica being sent to Germany. Their rationale was that the Germans would eventually lose the war and, though they themselves might not survive, the treasures would (YIVO, “The Paper Brigade”). This was, in effect, a bet on the long term. It also meant that the materials saved by this method were, by definition, materials the Germans had already judged unimportant. The rescue was partly a byproduct of Nazi indifference.
Others, among them the poets Avrom Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski, chose a different and more dangerous method. They smuggled rare materials into the ghetto, where they hid and buried thousands of books, documents, and works of art in hopes of returning after the war to retrieve them (YIVO, “The Paper Brigade”). This strategy did not depend on German indifference. It depended on concealment, on the cooperation of contacts among the Jewish police at the ghetto gate, and on the willingness to carry books under clothing past guards who would execute anyone caught. The ghetto police mocked them, calling them “The Paper Brigade” — because they carried paper instead of food (YIVO, “The Paper Brigade”).
The mockery is worth pausing over. In the ghetto, smuggling meant bringing in food for starving people or valuables for bribing guards. Risking your life for a book looked like lunacy. That judgment — that preservation is a luxury in the face of survival — is one that recurs in heritage debates. The Paper Brigade’s answer was not to argue the point but to keep carrying.
What the collection actually contains
The materials that survived are now held in two principal collections at YIVO in New York: RG 223 Part I, the Vilna Ghetto materials, and RG 223 Part II, the Collection of Literary and Historical Manuscripts. The collection is of mixed provenance. Part I relates to the Vilna Ghetto during the Nazi occupation and was generated there. Part II consists of historical and literary manuscripts that had belonged to the YIVO Institute of Vilna before the war (YIVO Archives, RG 223 control card).
Part I includes maps of the ghetto from 1942; diaries, chronicles, and manuscripts on the history of the ghetto by Zelig Kalmanovitch, Herman Kruk, Yitschak Rudashevsky, and Szmerke Kaczerginski; personal identification documents such as badges, armbands, identification cards, and passes; materials on ghetto administration, health, social relief, distribution, the ghetto police, the ghetto court, cultural affairs, labor, and education; issues of Geto yedies (Ghetto News), 1942–43; materials on partisan groups; and photographs of daily scenes in the ghetto, partisans, and the destroyed buildings of YIVO, the Strashun Library, and the Vilna Gaon’s synagogue (USHMM, RG-67.042M).
Part II contains correspondence with literary, communal, political, and religious figures; Yiddish and Hebrew literary manuscripts; documents of the Yiddish theater; folklore materials; historical and legal documents; rabbinic responsa; and pinkasim (communal registers) — including registers of the Vilna Gaon’s synagogue, the Jewish community of Skuodas, and fragments of the register of the Vilna Kehillah. The collection holds approximately 650 folders arranged in eight series. The bulk of the materials cover the period from the eighteenth century through the eve of World War II. It includes fragments of YIVO’s prewar archival collections, as well as documents from other prewar collections, such as materials from the S. Ansky Historical and Ethnographic Society of Vilna and private papers of Matisyahu and Shmuel Strashun (YIVO Archives, RG 223.2 finding aid).
The finding aid is explicit about what this breadth means. The collection “reflects what aspects of Jewish culture were valuable to Jewish intellectuals in the Vilna Ghetto who needed to make quick and on-the-spot decisions about what to save.” Their notion of value was broad: they saved everything from documents relating to traditional Jewish religious life to artifacts of modern Yiddish and Hebrew culture (YIVO Archives, RG 223.2 finding aid). This was not a prewar collecting policy. It was a wartime judgment, made under pressure, by people who had good reason to believe that Jewish civilization in Eastern Europe had come to an end.
The condition of the collection as evidence
The collection is in very poor condition. Much of it was hidden underground for years and was smuggled out of Vilna into Poland in the postwar period, then into France, before being sent to New York (YIVO Archives, RG 223.2 finding aid). The finding aid describes the collection as “multiple provenance” and states that its “very fragmentary nature reflects the circumstances of war and the activities of the Nazi plundering unit called the Einsatzstab Rosenberg whose pillaging resulted in the breakup and destruction of much of the YIVO Archives and other Jewish cultural treasures” (YIVO Archives, RG 223.2 finding aid).
This is not incidental damage. It is the physical record of the conditions under which the collection was assembled, hidden, recovered, and moved. Reading the collection means reading those conditions. A folder of letters from Sholem Aleichem may be complete; the next may contain fragments. The gaps are as legible as the contents. For a heritage studies perspective, this is the point: the archive is not a neutral container of texts. It is an artifact of the decisions and pressures that produced it.
The postwar re-smuggling
The rescue narrative usually ends in 1945. The archival record does not. After the war, Sutzkever and Kaczerginski returned to Vilna and found that much of what they had buried had survived. They retrieved what they could and founded a small Jewish museum. But it became apparent to them that the Soviets were not interested in supporting a Jewish museum. They recognized the beginnings of a Soviet anti-Jewish campaign that would decimate Jewish culture in the USSR. They arranged for the smuggling of much of the materials to Poland and France, with the ultimate destination of YIVO in New York (YIVO, “The Paper Brigade”).
The same objects had to be saved more than once, from different regimes, by different means. The materials that had been smuggled into the ghetto now had to be smuggled out of the Soviet Union. In 1947, 465 crates of Jewish cultural treasures arrived in New York and, after a brief stay at the Manischewitz Matzo warehouse, became part of YIVO’s collections (YIVO, “The Paper Brigade”). Sutzkever sent many of the rescued materials to YIVO from 1947 to 1956 (YIVO Archives, RG 223.2 finding aid).
This sequence complicates the rescue narrative in a productive way. It shows that preservation is not a single act but a series of acts, each shaped by the political conditions of its moment. The Paper Brigade’s work in the ghetto was one phase. The postwar smuggling was another. The institutional decisions that followed — what to keep, what to return, what to reclassify — were a third. The archive we have today is the product of all three.
What the record does not yet show
The sources available for this account are institutional: YIVO’s exhibition text and the collection-level finding aids. They are detailed and reliable for what they describe. But they are not primary documents from the perpetrators’ side, nor are they the brigade members’ own postwar testimony in full. The Einsatzstab Rosenberg’s own records on the Vilna operation would allow us to corroborate the looting sequence from the German side. Sutzkever’s and Kaczerginski’s postwar writings would allow us to move beyond the exhibit’s summary of their motivations and decisions. The full finding aid for RG 223 Part I would allow a more specific description of the ghetto materials than the collection-level record permits. And documentation of the postwar smuggling out of the Soviet Union would allow us to trace that phase with the same precision as the wartime phase.
None of this undermines the account. It situates it. The Paper Brigade’s story is well documented at the level of institutional memory. The next layer of evidence — the perpetrators’ records, the survivors’ testimony, the transit documents — would let us see the same events from other positions. That work remains to be done.
Why this case matters beyond Vilna
The Vilna case is often treated as exceptional: a story of heroism under impossible conditions. It is that. But it is also a case study in how preservation decisions get made under occupation, and how those decisions are later re-narrated. The brigade’s members did not choose what to save from a position of freedom. They chose from inside the looting apparatus, with limited time, limited information, and the knowledge that they themselves might not survive. Their choices were shaped by what the Germans wanted, what the Germans ignored, and what could be moved. The collection they left behind records those constraints as clearly as it records the texts.
That is the uncomfortable part. The rescue was real. But it was not a matter of pure cultural devotion. It was a matter of access, judgment, and luck. Kalmanovitch’s strategy depended on German indifference. Sutzkever and Kaczerginski’s strategy depended on concealment and contacts. Neither was available to everyone. The archive that survives is not a representative sample of Jewish Vilna. It is what could be saved by particular people, in particular circumstances, using particular methods.
This does not diminish the achievement. It makes it legible. The Paper Brigade’s buried books are not just treasures recovered. They are evidence of how heritage survives — not through heroic exception, but through the exploitation of cracks in the system that is trying to destroy it. The cracks are where the archive comes from.
Frequently asked questions
What was the Paper Brigade?
The Paper Brigade was a forced labor unit of Jewish intellectuals in the Vilna Ghetto, conscripted by the Nazi Einsatzstab Rosenberg to sort, catalog, and pack looted Jewish cultural treasures for shipment to Germany. Some members, including Zelig Kalmanovitch, Avrom Sutzkever, and Shmerke Kaczerginski, used their access to the materials to divert and hide portions of the collections. The name was originally a mocking label used by the ghetto police, who thought it absurd to risk one’s life for books (YIVO, “The Paper Brigade”).
What did they save?
The surviving materials include prewar YIVO archival collections, correspondence with major Yiddish and Hebrew writers, rabbinic responsa, communal registers (pinkasim), Yiddish theater documents, folklore materials, and documents generated in the ghetto itself — diaries, chronicles, administrative records, ghetto newspapers, and photographs. The collection is fragmentary and of mixed provenance, reflecting the conditions of its survival (YIVO Archives, RG 223 and RG 223.2).
Where are the materials now?
The principal collections are held at YIVO in New York. RG 223 Part I contains the Vilna Ghetto materials; RG 223 Part II contains the literary and historical manuscripts. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum holds a digitized microfilm copy of Part I (USHMM, RG-67.042M). Access to the originals at YIVO is by appointment with an archivist.
Why is the collection in such poor condition?
Much of it was hidden underground for years, then smuggled out of Vilna into Poland, then into France, before being sent to New York. The finding aid states that the collection’s fragmentary nature reflects the circumstances of war and the activities of the Einsatzstab Rosenberg, whose pillaging broke up and destroyed much of the YIVO Archives and other Jewish cultural treasures (YIVO Archives, RG 223.2 finding aid).
Did the rescue end with the war?
No. After the war, Sutzkever and Kaczerginski recovered what they could and founded a small Jewish museum in Vilna. When it became clear that the Soviets would not support Jewish cultural institutions, they arranged for the materials to be smuggled to Poland and France, with the ultimate destination of YIVO in New York. The same objects had to be saved more than once, from different regimes (YIVO, “The Paper Brigade”).
What sources does this article rely on?
The account draws on YIVO’s exhibition text “The Paper Brigade” (vilnacollections.yivo.org), the YIVO Archives control card for RG 223 (Sutzkever-Kaczerginski Collection), the finding aid for RG 223.2 (Collection of Literary and Historical Manuscripts), and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s catalog record for RG-67.042M. These are institutional sources. Primary documents from the Einsatzstab Rosenberg, the brigade members’ full postwar testimony, and transit records for the postwar smuggling would allow a more complete account.