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INTRODUCTION Jonathan Rose THE story of the Six Million is also the story of the One Hundred Million. That is the toll of books destroyed by the Nazis throughout Europe in just twelve years, according to the calculations of one library historian. Of course, this is only the roughest of estimates, which we will probably revise as research progresses. But we can begin with this terrible certainty: the mass slaughter of Jews was accompanied by the most devastating literary holocaust of all time. Historians of the book all share the working premise that, in literate societies, script and print are the primary means of preserving memory, disseminating information , inculcating ideologies, distributing wealth, and exercising power. The first question they ask about any civilization is how it saved, used, and destroyed documents. From the culture of New England puritanism to the causes of the French Revolution to the implosion of the Soviet Union, this new approach to history has compelled us to rethink how the past worked. It can also, in the case of the Nazi Holocaust, help us to comprehend the incomprehensible. Film documentaries of the Hitler era commonly open with the book burnings of  and fade out with the death camps. That has become the standard narrative frame, the first and final chapters of the Third Reich. Those who witnessed the bonfires, as well as historians who wrote about them in retrospect, could not help but quote the words of Heinrich Heine: “There where one burns books, one in the end burns men.” But even Heine’s premonition, as true as it is terrible, threatens to become a platitude if we pursue it no further. Strikingly, most histories of the Holocaust have nothing more to say about books. We sense that there must be a connection between the book burnings and the gas chambers, but can we explain specifically how one led to the other? Were those bonfires a necessary prelude for what was to follow, and if so, precisely what role did print play in the Holocaust? Though they differ in method and focus, all the essays in this volume confront that question. For many, the answer is obvious: the book has always been the foundation stone of Jewish theology, Jewish culture, Jewish survival. Joseph Goebbels knew that and proceeded accordingly. The Jews of the Vilna ghetto knew that equally well, when they flocked to their library and tried to find in War and Peace some clue to the current horrors. As a survivor, Charlotte Opfermann tells us that even in the camps books were tools for human endurance. Where the rich literary life of Jewish communities was snuffed out, as in Salonika, the communities themselves were effectively destroyed, as Yitzchak Kerem shows. The yisker books described by Rosemary Horowitz are not only priceless documents of reading and writing in the Holocaust; they were also a means of preserving what remained of Jewish Europe. The Soviets, as David Fishman illustrates, cultivated their own hostility to expressions of Jewish culture, and after the liberation of Vilna they continued the literary vandalism begun by the Nazis.1 Before, after, and (incredibly ) even during the war with Germany, Soviet authorities suppressed reports of Nazi atrocities against the Jews. Russian scholar Arlen Blium draws on the archives of Soviet censors to show that the crescendo of state-enforced antiSemitism after the war was spearheaded by the suppression of Jewish authors, publishers, and even literary characters, as well as a complete ban on the publication of Yiddish books. There is good reason to believe that, shortly before his death in , Stalin was planning to deport the Jews of the USSR to the far reaches of Siberia. The destruction of books may have been, once again, a first step toward the destruction of the Jews. Yet it is equally true that for any nation—and not only for “The People of the Book”—the printed word is essential to survival and identity. That is one of the central insights offered by book history. All of the essays in this collection, and particularly those in Part II, demonstrate that books were indispensable tools of resistance for the Jews as well as for other victims of the Nazis. In occupied Europe, bibliophily was more than a hobby for gentlemen and aesthetes: it became something dangerously political. For the Dutch, writes Sigrid Perry, publishing fine books was an act of resistance to the German invaders. For the Poles, as Sem...

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