The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation

Chapter VIII - Polish Books in Exile: Cultural Booty across Two Continents, through Two Wars

VIII • POLISH BOOKS IN EXILE: CULTURAL BOOTY ACROSS TWO CONTINENTS, THROUGH TWO WARS Sem C. Sutter I MANUSCRIPTS and books have always been fundamental transmitters of human culture, taking their place beside older visual and oral media in bearing the thoughts, discoveries, and aspirations of one generation to those that succeed it. Indeed, the permanence and portability of the word on clay, parchment , and paper have made it the most powerful cultural medium of all. As Horace wrote, “Littera scripta manet” (“The written word remains”). In normal times we may not appreciate the extent to which books are symbols of national identity as well. But when war, revolution, or other forms of unrest disrupt the otherwise orderly world of libraries, we can see concretely how very much books matter and to whom and why. The lengths to which conquerors go to seize or destroy books, the perils that conservators courageously face to safeguard them, the efforts of rival political factions to possess them in order to gain the legitimacy that they can confer: all illustrate the powerful symbolism of the written word. During World War II a highly select group of priceless Polish books and manuscripts was successfully evacuated first from Poland and then from France, illustrating the extent to which they were national icons as well as cultural documents. Their rescue also calls attention to the story of the millions of books that remained behind in Europe where Nazi conquerors applied their full force to expunging Jewish culture while exterminating the Jewish people, to crushing the book heritage vital to the national identity of the Polish people whom they subjugated , and to seizing cultural treasures for their own institutions. As the war ended, the tale of the exiled books became entwined in the cold war and, quite improbably, in Quebec nationalism as well, offering further proofs of the potency of books as national cultural and political symbols. Et sua fata habent libelli; truly, “books too have their fates,” and they can mirror the fortunes of nations and peoples. T T  P On  August , one month before German troops invaded the Polish Corridor, the librarian of the Diocesan Seminary of Pelplin, Poland, set out on a carefully planned mission to save its most precious holdings. Dr. Antoni Liedtke had good reason for worry. If war came, little Pelplin lay in the path of its destruction, whether Germany invaded Poland from West and East Prussia or provoked a Polish attack on nearby Danzig. The town of some , inhabitants was the site of a thirteenth-century cathedral and the diocesan seminary and library whose core collection came from a Cistercian monastery established in the . By  it contained some , volumes including a collection of manuscripts and  incunabula.1 Early in the summer the librarian had begun to help parish churches and institutions throughout the diocese protect their valuable artifacts, photographing and describing liturgical objects and finding places to hide them.2 In the case of his own library, it wasn’t difficult for Father Liedtke to decide what was most essential to preserve: a beautiful little vellum-bound psalter manuscript with illuminations of the early-sixteenth-century Czech school, and (dwarfing it in size and fame) Poland’s only Gutenberg Bible in two massive volumes together weighing about forty pounds. The seminary’s Bible had a rich history. It had been in Poland since the fifteenth century. Among the forty-seven surviving copies of the Gutenberg Bible, the Pelplin copy was one of only nine in fifteenth-century bindings. A piece of overturned type had left an oblong mark in the lower margin of one page, apparently unique to this copy, enabling book historians to deduce the size and shape of Gutenberg’s type.3 During the s well-publicized sales of three Bibles had spread a kind of worldwide Gutenberg fever. Philadelphia dealer Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach sold Carl Pforzheimer of New York the earl of Carysfort’s Gutenberg for $, in  and in  bought the Melk Abbey copy from Austria for $, on behalf of Mary Stillman Harkness who donated it to Yale. Later that year, with the British dealer E. P. Goldschmidt as intermediary, Rosenbach attempted to acquire the superb example on vellum from St. Paul’s Abbey east of Klagenfurt, Austria, only to lose it to German collector and rare-book entrepreneur Dr. Otto H. F. Vollbehr who paid a dizzying $, plus  percent for an export license. Vollbehr’s copy came to the Library of Congress...