>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. >> Helena Zinkham: Welcome to the Library of Congress on a wonderful fall afternoon. I'm Helena Zinkham, the Director for Collections and Services. I'm going to start today's special program with a few remarks about the library's amazing research resources. Then Stefan Hansen from the Swedish Embassy will introduce our speaker, author and journalist, Anders Rydell. He'll talk about his new title "The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance". We'll have time for questions afterwards and then at 4 Anders will be available to sign copies of his book. At that time you can also see examples of books from the Offenbach Archival Depot. The Library of Congress had staff in Europe after World War II whose work included helping to return the stolen books. The display opens with an album of photographs showing 350 bookplates that facilitated connecting books to their former owners. For publications that lacked any indication of ownership the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction group organized the distribution of the orphans. The Library of Congress did receive several thousand volumes from the JCR and close to 1500 are identified in our online catalogue with the heading "Holocaust Era Judaic Heritage Library", in other words the library as a participant in helping to identify and make sure the books remain visible. These books are cared for by the Hebraic Section of the African and Middle Eastern Division which has brought three special titles to share with you along with a brochure that describes them. Why would the Library of Congress take an active role in preserving international cultural heritage? Well, our name does emphasize that our primary duty is to the United States Congress. We answer questions for them. We undertake special research projects but we are also the national library of the United States, America's library and that means that our mission is global in scope, to make resources available, to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations. Just a few numbers, we're the stewards for more than 164 million items in 470 languages ranging from printed books, newspapers and of course electronic databases, but also manuscripts and maps, movies and music, unique photographs and sound recordings. The shelving, they tell me they've measured it in miles, 840 miles. We believe you could drive all the way to Iowa or Wisconsin and return and the books of the library would be lined up along the highway. While we are known as the largest library in the world, what really matters of course is content and quality. We're fortunate to have many divisions with subject matter experts to provide research guidance and insight into these massive collections and we serve people throughout the world. The Librarian of Congress likes to say that we preserve and provide access to a rich, diverse and enduring source of knowledge in order to inform but also to inspire and engage you in your intellectual and creative endeavors. So whether you are new to the Library of Congress today or an experienced researcher, I see some familiar faces in the room, we have a world-class staff, ready to assist you either online or in person. Of particular interest this afternoon of course are the collections from or about Europe which number in the millions, covering Slavic and Eastern studies, Eastern European studies as well as Western European countries. We invite you to visit us or to reach out through the email service called 'Ask a Librarian'. Taru Spiegel is our reference specialist for the Scandinavian countries and organized the talk today. Grant Harris, Chief of the European Division is also here today as well as our colleagues from the African and the Middle East. I'd like to recognize their collective support for preparing this program. Is everyone's cell phone turned off? Just to double-check, okay thank you. And please also be aware that this event is being recorded for future webcast, thank you, Stefan? >> Stefan Hansen: Good afternoon everyone and hey Anders. And first and foremost thank you Library of Congress for hosting this wonderful start of the afternoon, this event and we are very proud to partner with you in this event. And my name is Stefan Hansen. I'm the Cultural Officer of the Embassy of Sweden and we are located in the House of Sweden in Georgetown, and if you've never been visiting us, please do because we are having a lot of exhibitions and literature events just like this one, and seminars. And we are open for the public and free all the weekends, all the year and you can come and visit us not only for exhibitions and theater performances, we also have a library room for children, dedicated for the youngest ones filled with treasures of Swedish authors. So please come and join us there. The Swedish government is very proud of our [inaudible] about libraries. Every municipality in Sweden has a library, all over the country. And the libraries' roles are crucial for a democratic society. And I would like also to say that Swedes are the people in the world that are reading the most and that is based on facts [laughter] and citizens of today need to be exposed to training and critical analysis of texts, pictures and video more than ever in this day and age of filter bubbles. And our minister, the Cultural Minister is also the Minister of Democracy and the Swedish government believes that culture, media and literature allows people to grows as citizens and that strengthens our democracy. But now back to this and back to Anders, we are thrilled that the Library of Congress has invited a Swedish author Anders Rydell. Anders is an established journalist, editor and author of non-fiction. "Book Thieves" is actually the second part out of three. The first part dealt with the looting of artworks in the Second World War and the third will talk about music. Anders' work, the Nazi looting of art and books has been translated into 19 languages including German, Italian, Russian and Chinese. And the "Book Thieves" is his first book translated into English. And this has been a very busy year for you Anders, you both published your first book in English here and you also had your son? >> Anders Rydell: Yes. You can, he's part of the exhibition. >> Stefan Hansen: So, congratulations on that. And please help me to give a warm welcome to Anders Rydell. [ Applause ] >> Anders Rydell: Yeah, I will first say, thank you for inviting me to this great library and as Stefan told before, this is actually the second book in a three-part series. The first book came out in 2013 and the last book I'm working on right now, on the looting of music instruments, sheets of music and music literature. But, it was when I started working on the book about the looting of art I also discovered the looting of books. And it was a couple of things that got me interested in this subject. First of all, when you looked into the organizations that organized the looting, they didn't go after the art first, they went after the books, especially in France and it was quite particular. And another thing was the scale of it. The looting of books, the operation to loot, sort and transport books was much, much larger than the looting of art. Art was, if you compare it, a small operation. But the last and maybe most important issue was that the organizations that were responsible for the looting of cultural items, they weren't really interested in the art. The art was sent to the big collectors like [inaudible] and Otto Fichler [phonetic] of course. But what they were interested in was the books and not just books but also archives. And this was interesting because these organizations were also the central intellectual organizations in Germany. It was to, first of all Heinrich Himmler's SS and Alfred Rosenberg's organization, ERR. The common picture we have of the book, the Nazis' relations to literature is this, the book burnings on the 10th of May, 1933. And it's a very strong picture and I think this image of the Nazis, it's still powerful today. And it's so powerful because we want to believe that the Nazis didn't read books, they destroyed books but the truth isn't that. And I think the truth is more horrific actually. The book burning in May 1933 wasn't done immense destruction of books, actually quite few books was destroyed. Already in 1933 the Nazis started looting books all over Germany. The book burning was more a ritual, a symbolic display where they burned books in a kind of ritual that a lot of Germans at that time understood. This was something that went deep in German history. A hundred years earlier German students had burned French literature of the Napoleon Wars. But the most important reference was to Martin Luther and his burning of the Papal Bull. Because, in the Nazi perspective the burning of the Papal Bull wasn't an act of religious freedom, it was a nationalistic act. It was the moment when the German people freed themselves from the Catholic Church, the power of the Catholic Church. In Berlin 42,000 people came together on this night and the speaker here was the new Minister of Propaganda, Goebbels and he said "Here, the intellectual foundations of the November Republic sinks to the ground. But from the debris, a new spirit will raise triumphantly like the Phoenix". The interesting part here is the new spirit. What was this new kind of spirit? The Nazis didn't distance themselves from intellectuals, from poets, from librarians, writers, researchers, actually they recruited them and very actively because they needed them to create the image of a new human being. A couple of years later a new institute was opened in Germany, a historical institute. And one of the historians here described the role of the historian in the new Nazi Germany and this description I think is valuable also for other kinds of academics, writers, poets. He said "The purpose of research is not to fight directly for power. But they can forge their weapons, it can provide us with the shields, it can train the warriors and awaken the fire within them, hardening them against the trials that lie ahead. The goal of this Institute is to develop weapons for the struggle of thought, one of the most important challenges of all". The Nazis always fought to cancel wars, the first one was on the battlefield, the battle of soldiers, tanks, machine guns but then they fought the other kind of war, the intellectual war, the war about ideology, the war where the Nazis wanted to prove that the Nazi ideology was the only true fate. And in this war, the looting was essential. During the research for this book I used this map and this map came from Alfred Rosenberg's organization, Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, one of the most important looting organizations during the Second World War. And I took this map and made a travel for almost six months and followed looters in their footsteps, from the book burnings in Berlin to the great Jewish libraries in Amsterdam, to Paris, to Rome, to Thessaloniki and of course Eastern Europe. And the purpose of this trip was to see what happened to the libraries that were looted, what came back, what was lost, but also to get knowledge about what happened to the people, the communities, the families that in some cases had built these libraries through generations. To simplify it you can say that the Nazis looted three kinds of libraries. The first one was libraries on socialist and communist literature. After the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 the Nazis came upon enormous amounts of libraries, archives especially from the Communist Party. But there were also targets in Western Europe and one of the most important institutions was the institute in Amsterdam, the Institute of Social History. And this institute had been created in the early 1930s, as you can say a response to what happened around Europe at that time. This institute's goal was to save an important part of Europe's history, the worker's movements' libraries and archives. And just in a few years they built fantastic collections because in the 1930s it wasn't just political refugees, there were libraries and archives on the road that had been smuggled out from the Soviet Union, Mussolini's Italy, Franco's Spain and of course from Hitler's Germany. And one of the most important archives had been smuggled out in the early 1930s from the Nazi Germany and this small paper here is a part of that and maybe you can read in the bottom Karl Marx. This is the, what you can call the first draft of the "Communist Manifesto". They had the hallmarks of Friedrich Engels' Archive and this archive was kind of a Holy Grail for the Nazis because the Communists, the Socialists, the Bolsheviks were one of the Nazis' main enemies. But wasn't just the political enemies, because there were strong social influences in the Nazi Party. Early on, there were parts of the Nazi movement that wanted to nationalize the large companies for example. You can say that the Communists and especially the Bolsheviks weren't so much a political enemy, they were something more. They were part of what you call the Bolshevik Communist conspiracy. The idea that Jews created the Communists and the Jews ruled actually in [inaudible]. And these ideas were put ahead especially from Alfred Rosenberg's point of view. And the Nazis always tried to prove these Jewish Bolshevik conspiracies. And one of the most important proofs was of course that the Communists' ideology was founded by a Jew, Karl Marx. Another kind of libraries that were looted was the Freemasons' libraries. The Freemasons were one of the first organizations that were attacked in Germany in the 1930s. And, why did the Nazis attack the Freemasons? For one instance they were a secret society but they were also an international organization and both didn't work very well in a totalitarian state. But the Nazis also had a special interest for the Freemasons' libraries and especially the libraries on the occult, libraries on witches, black magic, alchemy. And this interest was especially large in the SS. I will get back to later what they wanted to do with this collection. This is a picture from Klossiana, one of the oldest Freemason libraries in Europe and this library was looted during the war and had a fantastic collection on literature on alchemy. But of course the most affected were Jewish libraries. The oldest and most important Jewish libraries in Europe were looted. One of them was in Rome, the library that belonged to the Jewish community in Rome and this library had a fantastic history because it belonged to a community with a fantastic history. The Jewish community of Rome was one of the oldest Jewish communities in Europe. Some of the first Jews came here as slaves during the Roman age. And this library had, went through, down through the ages and it was saved from the Inquisition in the 15th and 16th centuries. In 1943 this library was put on a German train and the train headed somewhere into Central Europe and then it disappeared. This library has never been found. The Italian government had tried to find it for ten years but practically it failed. And the author, Robert Katz had described what this library included, the only copies of books and manuscripts from before Jesus' birth, from the time of the Roman emperors and the early popes. There were engravings from medieval times, books from the first printing presses and documents that had been passed from hand to hand through history. But the places that you could say, that were most affected by the looting were a couple of places in Europe that you can describe as places of Jewish culture and learning. And one of those places was Vilnius. Vilnius was the center, the heart of the Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe and it was known for its poets, its rabbis, its libraries. And one of the most important institutions here was YIVO, the Yiddish Institute. And as the Institute of Social History this institute had a mission to save the Yiddish culture and history. And during a couple of decades they collected/sent out hundreds of historians, authors, researchers that collected folk tales, songs, and ancient manuscripts. This institution of course was one of the main targets of the Nazi looters. The problem the Nazis had, especially in Eastern Europe was that they got more material than they had Nazi researchers that could read Yiddish or Hebrew. So they solved this in a very, you could say Nazi way, they let the victims do the work. They created slave labor groups of Jewish academics, writers, poets, that themselves got to sort through the collections for the Nazis. The sad story is that these places of Jewish culture and learning also were the places that were hardest-hit by the Holocaust and the Nazis, because the Nazis saw this place as dangerous, as places where the Jews could fight back. The other great Euro-center of culture and learning was Thessaloniki. And to Thessaloniki or Thessalonica as it was called at the time, isn't as famous today as Vilnius and it's because its history is almost gone. Here the Nazis succeeded. This was once one of the biggest Jewish cities in Europe, like a center for a very special Jewish community and one of the few European cities when the Jewish population dominated. And this city had been founded by Jews that left Spain in 1492 after the Reconquista, when they were forced to leave Spain. And when they came here from Spain they brought a unique culture because these Sephardic Jews had been part of what you call the Arabic Translation Movement during the Middle Ages and when a lot of the classics from Greek and Roman literature were saved, because they were translated into Arabic. And they were often, the Sephardic Jews that did these translations, so when they moved to Thessaloniki in today's Greece, they took with them their books, and this city already during the 16th century became known for its libraries, its culture. And when the Nazis came here almost 400 years later people still spoke Ladino, the ancient Spanish-Jewish language. This was a society a culture, a whole civilization that perished during the Holocaust, not only the people disappeared but also their history and their culture. The libraries and archives of this culture were looted and scattered. Today when you walk around in Thessaloniki you see few traces from this civilization that existed here for less than 100 years. But there are some traces, outside the city walls where there today is the Aristotle University, was once one of Europe's largest Jewish cemeteries, a half a million graves. During the war this cemetery was blown up, destroyed and then they used the stones as building material. The SS used it to build a swimming pool at the SS villa. But also, ordinary Greeks used it. So today when you know what, where to look, you can find pieces of this history. I found it at a small wall in the center that smelled of urine, in a wall built in the 60s and here I found a part of a Jewish gravestone. And you can say that these words on this stone are there, some of the few words that still exist from this lost civilization. Who were the men who were responsible for this? Of course one of them was Heinrich Himmler. The SS was one of the big looters of books and during the war they started to build a big collection in Berlin, a big library that they called the Library of the Enemies of the Reich. And it was a library with different departments for Jews, Communists, Freemasons, and Catholics, everyone that they perceived as an enemy. And at this library they planned to study their enemy, but not only to destroy them in the physical sense but also to fight their ideas, their thoughts. Here they're going to fight the idea, the intellectual war. But the SS also did another kind of research and especially research on the occult. There were some authors on popular descriptions of the Nazi interest in the occult. It was an interest that went through the whole Nazi movement but it was strong especially in SS. And maybe the most, the strangest research that they did was the witch project. It went on for almost ten years. And in this project they collected material on thousands of witches that had been burned from the Middle Ages and forward. And they collected this to archive that was called Himmler's Hexenkarrochek. Why did they do this? You could say that the Nazi, that Nazi Germany was probably the only regime in history that was positive to witches. They loved witches and they often described them like Nordic amazons. The Nazi interest in witches is that, especially the SS, they saw the witch hunts and the burnings of witches as part of a larger war between civilizations. The witches were victims in a war between the Catholic, Semitic Church and the true Nordic faith and myths. It was a way for the Catholic Church to destroy the true Nordic religions and ideas in the SS perspective. The other person that was responsible for the looting and maybe the most serious collector is the man in the hat here, Alfred Rosenberg. He's one of the lesser-known persons in the Nazi elite but I think some of the most important. In the early 1930s Hitler appointed him the role as the Party's spiritual leader, the chief ideologist. And Rosenberg's mission was to purify, develop and protect the Nazi ideology. And Rosenberg realized one thing, that the Nazi movement wasn't held together by its ideology but by something else. It was held together by the cult surrounding the man in the middle, the cult, the Hitler cult and the Fuhrer cult. Rosenberg believed that if the man in the center disappeared, everything would come crashing down. But, how would you build an empire that would last 1000 years if you have only, if it all depends on just one man? Rosenberg meant that they needed something else, of course they needed an idea but an idea can't exist without institutions and he especially looked at the Catholic Church. He meant that what would Christianity be without the Catholic Church, the power of this institution? Would the Christian faith even exist today without this institution? Rosenberg meant to create such new Nazi institutions and he believed the two most important areas were education and science. Already during the 1930s the Nazis started to experiment on special elite schools. They created the Adolf Hitler Schools for young, gifted boys. Then they went to the Ordensburgen Schools. It was like a military academy where a boy should read Goethe and shoot the machine gun. You should be what the Nazis would describe as poetic warriors. And they would finish their education at Rosenberg's crown jewel, the University of the Nazi Party. This was a school that was planned to be built in the south of Germany after the war. And here the Nazis would create the future leadership of Nazi Germany and secure it, the future. But these institutions would also be the head of the other pillar, research and science. Connected with university Alfred Rosenberg planned several institutions, spread out over Germany that would study some of the Nazis' favorite questions, Indo-German, German history, folk history, Celts, Eastern research for example. And it was for, mainly for this kind, these institutions, the institutes that the Nazis, that the Rosenberg organization looted. But there was only one of these that was officially open during the war, the last one, the Institute of the Jewish Question. And this was an institute and a question that Rosenberg meant couldn't be, had to be dealt right now. And it was actually opened in 1941 when the Holocaust started and its projects and its operation was connected to the Holocaust. At this institute Nazi researchers studied Jewish history, language, culture and to this institute some of the most important Jewish collections were sent. Why was it so important to study Jewish history and culture? When Alfred Rosenberg inaugurated the institute he said that it may come a day when our grandchildren grow up in a world freed from Jews where maybe they can't really understand the threat the Jews proposed for our time, therefore the goal of this institute is to remind them. And he said the human memory is very short. What Alfred Rosenberg was afraid of was of course, that future generations in a world without Jews, would judge them for their actions and that they wouldn't understand why they had to do this horrible thing. I think one of the most important lessons about the looting is that it wasn't done to eradicate the history or culture of their enemies but to take control over it. Because, if you own your enemies' libraries, if you own their books, their archives, you also have the power to write their history, that was the main goal with the looting. As Alon Confino puts it in his book "A World Without Jews", "Remembering the Jews after a victorious war would have been important precisely because total liquidation of the Jews could not have been achieved by physical annihilation alone, it required as well the overcoming of Jewish history, memory and history. The Nazis struggle against the Jews was never principally about the political and the economical influence. It was about their identity waged by the means of Nazi appropriation of Jewish history, memory and books". The Nazis wanted a future with generations to remember, remember what happened but only by taking control of Jewish history and culture. Could the Nazis also take control over the memory of the Jews in a world where they didn't exist anymore? In the Nazi world view the Jew would become the devil and incarnation of evil that would scare the children long after they were dead. After the war these books, libraries and archives were found all over Europe and their fate was very different depending on who found them and where they were found. Early in 1945 Stalin in a secret operation created so-called Soviet Trophy Brigades. And the goal of these brigades was to take as much as they could from Germany but also from Central Europe. And the Soviet Trophy Brigades took over 11 million books to the Soviet Union that were looted and many, many more from German libraries and universities. Many of these collections were scattered, separated and most of these books have never been returned. It was a different procedure in the West where the monuments men sorted and succeeded in returning millions of books at the Offenbach Depot, a sorting center outside of Frankfurt, among them, many of the books that had been found at the Frankfurt Institute, but there was still a problem. Even if you could find out who owned a book there wasn't, it was far from certain that there was still someone to return the book to. As one of the monuments men later wrote "In the sorting room I would come upon a box of books which the sorters had brought together like scattered sheep into one fold - books from a library which once had been in some distant town in Poland or an extinct Yeshiva. There was something sad and mournful about these volumes as they were whispering a tale of yearning and hope since obliterated. I would find myself straightening out these books and arranging them in the boxes with a personal sense of tenderness as if they had belonged to someone dear to me, someone recently deceased". Many of these books were later sent out to Jewish communities, to institutions around the world. But still despite both the efforts to loot books after war and return them, there were millions and millions of books left in German libraries and in other European libraries. And, when I travelled around Europe I found them everywhere. In my book I especially focused on a library in Berlin, the Zentral und Landesbibliothek. Today there are estimates that there could be around a quarter million looted books just in this library. And most of the looted books at this library aren't valuable books, aren't important books, it's just books that belonged to ordinary people because the Nazis didn't just loot books from important libraries and archives, they looted from everyone. In 1942 Alfred Rosenberg initiated the so-called M-Aktion, Mobel Aktion. It was an operation where 70,000 homes in France, The Netherlands and Belgium were emptied of everything, furniture, toys [inaudible] and of course books. And, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of these books were brought to Germany and often sold to German libraries. And the library in Berlin, they don't have big collections either they have one or a few books from thousands and thousands of small libraries. And today a small team of librarians sort through a collection of 7 million books by hand and they have worked for almost a decade. And they have returned 600 books, so you understand that this is something that's going to go on for decades or maybe for generations. One question I asked when I came to this library was, why hasn't this been brought up earlier? The libraries started doing this research ten years ago. And one important reason was that it wasn't librarians that were held responsible for the crimes after the war. The same librarians ought to be, that had taken part of the looting, held that position after the war and often tried to hide this history. They hid the traces and today you can find a lot of books that look like this, when you have tried to destroy Jewish bookplates. In other cases you have, they have tried to falsify catalogues. During the war there wasn't a problem to put the 'J' in the books for Jewish books. It didn't look as good after the war so they tried to make it a donation from someone with 'J', Jiako [phonetic] or something. And, you can also ask, why is it important to return these books? They aren't valuable and ten years' of work for 600 books, and it's 600 books to around, a little more than 100 people. And in my book I wanted to do, follow one of these single books because I understood that every one of these books also carried a history. And, as one of the librarians here said it's often a history that ends at Auschwitz. And I came in contact with this book, and this book was a book that belonged to just an ordinary German Jewish man that was called Richjart [phonetic] Kobrak and he was a lawyer in Berlin and lived there with his wife and three children. And he didn't really have a Jewish identity. The family was Christian and he had been awarded the Iron Cross of the [inaudible] in the First World War. So, when Hitler came to power he refused to leave Germany. He meant that he was more German than that Austrian Hitler. And that was a mistake of course. After the Kristallnacht they understood that they'd found a big mistake. And they tried to get out and they succeeded sending out the three children but Richjart Kobrak and his wife died in Auschwitz. I took this book and followed it to Richjart Kobrak's son, Helmet [phonetic] Kobrak. Helmet Kobrak was 15 years old when he came to Great Britain in 1939. The problem was that the British didn't see him as a Jewish refugee so they arrested him and deported him on a ship with prisoners to Australia. It took almost 10 years for him to get back to his sisters in England. I took this book and returned it to Helmet's daughter, a woman living in a small village outside Birmingham. And this book was the first thing the family ever got back from Richjart Kobrak. This was a man that had left almost nothing. They didn't have any photographs. They didn't have a grave of course and in some ways this book was the only proof that he ever existed. I think this tells something important about restitution because with the focus on art, restitution has been a lot about the value of artworks and money. But I mean the moral center, the moral quest of the restitution isn't economical compensation, that's important but it's not the moral center. It's to get back. It's to give back something of the lives and worlds that were destroyed. To return a book to Thessaloniki is a way to return a small part of a history that isn't here anymore. And this book here, it's practically worthless, you can buy it for a dollar at the bookseller but for this family it's the most important book in the world. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Taru Spiegel: Thank you very much Anders for this very interesting and moving presentation and before we go to questions and answers a word from our sponsor. I'm Taru Spiegel. I work in the European Division and I have many wonderful colleagues here and also from the African and Middle Eastern and elsewhere in the library. We're here to answer your questions. You can reach us by coming here, by emailing us, by going to 'Ask a Librarian'. You just Google 'Ask a Librarian' and there you are and your question will be routed to the appropriate people. So, thank you, Helena? >> Helena Zinkham: We have a little time for questions. Who would like to begin? Yes [inaudible] or if you want to come and ask at the microphone, that's up to you. >> I think. I think [inaudible] First of all, thank you very much for your words today. I, in your book I'm reading with great interest. In your book I recently began. In your book I began reading the chapter about Vilnius and one thing that I was wondering is, throughout your research, were you able to root out or locate any books that belonged to the [inaudible]? >> Helena Zinkham: I want to just briefly repeat. So, for those who are watching the webcast later this is an appreciation for the talk and then a question. Has Anders seen any of the books that were at Vilnius? >> Anders Rydell: No, I'm sorry I haven't actually because they aren't there anymore and as I think some people here know, a lot of the books from Vilnius especially the books that were found at the Frankfurt Institute, were actually sent to New York. >> New York? >> Anders Rydell: Yeah, to the YIVO Institute in New York because YIVO had already at that time a department in New York, was like a side department [inaudible] become the main, the main YIVO because [inaudible] was destroyed. But it was a question at that time that they wanted to send the books back to Lithuania but of course at that time it wasn't possible for YIVO to exist there because as you know in the Soviet Union it wasn't allowed to have alternative identities, not officially. >> Helena Zinkham: So, it sounds like head to New York City. Other questions? [ Inaudible Question ] >> Anders Rydell: It was a library of the Jewish community in Rome. >> In Rome? >> Anders Rydell: Yeah. They had two libraries and I showed a picture from the second one, and it was the lesser important library. But the community's libraries were, it's lost. And, some believe it's in Russia but nobody knows. Some believe it had been destroyed. And it's really sad because it's such a fantastic library and the library was actually not that old. It was brought together when they took down the Jewish ghetto in Rome and as you maybe know the Jewish ghetto in Rome was the last ghetto in Europe before the Nazis created them again at the end of the 19th century. And these books were brought together because they had been hidden because the Inquisition had went into the Jewish ghetto in Rome several times, collected Jewish books and burned them. So, these books had been hidden away from the Catholic Church for hundreds and hundreds of years. And then the Nazis destroyed them. >> Helena Zinkham: There was another question on this side of the room. Please? >> Have any families laid claims for their libraries and [inaudible]? >> Helena Zinkham: So the question is, have any libraries made, have any families made claims for their libraries as they become more aware that the books still exist, some of the books exist? >> Anders Rydell: Yes, and especially at this library that I told you about, the Zentral und Landesbibliotheck in Berlin. They accurately search for people but it's a very time-consuming work. So, what they're doing right now is putting up all the information they can get from a book, bookplates, names and everything on the internet so a lot of people actually find them when they're doing research on the family, on their history. But the problem is of course that a lot of the survivors, I mean were scattered all over the world, changed name, changed identity and everything so it's. And it's also difficult sometimes to know who would [inaudible] entitled to because one of the [inaudible] went to Australia, one to Argentina and one to the United States for example. So it's a very difficult question. >> Helena Zinkham: Anyone else, alright oh? >> Were German scholars assigned to revise or otherwise just, more accurately distort Jewish history and if this was just so, do you [inaudible]? >> Anders Rydell: During which time? >> During the Nazi, yeah during the Nazi era. >> Helena Zinkham: So I believe the question is, during the Nazi era, were any of the people assigned to change history? How has that come into the literature? [ Inaudible Question ] >> Helena Zinkham: And how, okay and how was this rewriting of history challenged? >> Anders Rydell: Yeah, it's the, could I borrow your book? [ Inaudible Comments ] The Nazis, I mean they wanted to own Jewish memory and history and some of the Jewish writers, scholars understood this especially in Vilnius, and especially one of the librarians. The librarian of the ghetto of Vilnius, Herman Kruk and all, let me just find the section here. Yeah, during all the time the ghetto existed he put on a diary. He wrote everything down, what kind of books people borrowed, what happened. And they also created at the library a secret organization that collected all the German orders and material from the [inaudible] because they understood if the Germans want to control our memory, we must protect our history and get it out somewhere, somehow. Yeah, and after the, their ghetto in Vilnius was destroyed Herman Kruk was sent to a labor camp in Estonia. Herman Kruk was deported to a forced labor camp in Lagedi, Estonia. He would continue to keep a journal to the very end. On September 17, 1944 he wrote his final notes. I'm burying the manuscripts in Lagedi, in Herr Schulma's barrack, opposite the guardhouse, six people are present for the funeral. He buried all of his diaries to save them because he sensed that something was wrong. Kruk had a sense of what awaited him. The next day, he and 2000 other prisoners were forced to carry wooden logs to a forest outside the camp. The logs were put down in long rows where upon the prisoners were forced to lie down on top of them. They had built their own funeral pyres. After the Nazi guards had shot the prisoners in the head, another layer of logs and prisoners were added on top, and thereafter, another, and another. When the Red Army reached the scene a few days later, unburned bodies still lay in the pyres. But one of the witnesses of Herman Kruk's funeral managed to flee and went back to dig up his diaries. >> Helena Zinkham: I think that brings us to a good ending. I invite you again to view some of the books from the Jewish Cultural Restoration Commission that are here at the Library of Congress as well as the bookplate tools that help match former owners right at the end of World War II. But there are also copies of the books for sale in the next room and Anders will be ready to sign. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.