Before Jews in Lithuania’s Kaunas Ghetto took up arms to resist the Nazis, the community’s adolescents helped rescue Torah scrolls and other books in response to the Germans’ so-called “Books Aktion”.
At the end of February 1942, the Nazis ordered the Jew of Kaunas — or Kovno, in Yiddish — to hand over every book in their possession. Torah scrolls and other religious texts were to be put aside for Germany’s future “museum of the destroyed Jewish race”, while secular literature would be recycled into paper.
“The Germans confiscated a lot of books, about 100,000, but quite a lot of books were hidden”, historian Samuel Kassow, an expert on Jewish resistance in the Kaunas Ghetto, told The Times of Israel.
By all accounts, adolescents were at the forefront of hiding and smuggling books. Some teenagers were already doing work suited to rescuing books, such as pushing wagons with supplies into and out of the ghetto. In addition to rescuing books, some Jewish teachers operated an underground school in defiance of the ban on education.
One group of gutsy teens smuggled 1,000 “secular” books into a makeshift library comprised of books pilfered from the ghetto assembly point. Soon, at least one teacher associated with the pop-up library would pay the ultimate price for violating German edicts.
As a 14-year old in the Kaunas Ghetto, Yitzchak Elhanan Gibraltar took part in the community’s underground response to the “Books Aktion”. After the German order was issued, the rabbis of Kaunas fiercely debated what to do with the community’s holy books. Some rabbis concluded it was best to keep their ovens lit at all times, so as to destroy the books lest they fall into German hands.
Not all efforts to rescue books that winter were aimed at Torah scrolls and Talmudic texts. For example, 14-year old diarist Solly Ganor wrote about hiding up to 1,000 “secular” books in an “abandoned house on the outskirts of the ghetto, which was off limits”.
Among the books collected by Ganor and his friends were texts in Yiddish, Hebrew, Lithuanian, Russian, French, German, and English.
