• News
    • Business
    • Canada
    • Health
    • International
    • Israel
  • Perspectives
    • Ask Ella
    • Ask The Love Rabbi
    • Features
    • Jewish Parenting Wisdom
    • Opinions
    • Ideas
    • Letters
    • Personal Essays
  • Food
  • Culture
    • Arts & Entertainment
    • The Arts
    • Books & Authors
    • Canada 150
    • Jewish Learning
    • June 1967
    • Sports
    • Travel
  • Events
    • Contests
  • Supplements
    • Spotlights
  • Other Communities
    • En Français
    • Russian
  • Subscribe
  • Member Centre
  • Log Out
Search
  • Subscribe
  • Member Centre (eCJN)
  • Log Out
  • Newsletter
  • FaceBook
  • Twitter
  • Youtube
  • Instagram
CJN - Canada’s largest Jewish newspaper
April 22, 2018 - 7 Iyar 5778
CJN - Canada’s largest Jewish newspaper
  • News
    • Miles Nadal donates $11 million to Mount Sinai heart centre

      Federal politicians honour victims of the Holocaust

      Thousands celebrate Yom Ha-Atzmaut in Montreal

      Jews again head the list of groups targeted by hate crimes in Toronto

      Toronto public school responds to anti-Semitic incident

      AllBusinessCanadaHealthInternationalIsrael
  • Perspectives
    • Israel & the Internet: Circa 1948 – April 19, 2018

      Tales from the fascist book club

      The 70 faces Of Israel

      Documenting Israel’s birth

      Liba Augenfeld – the survivor who brought her love of Yiddish with her

      AllAsk EllaAsk The Love RabbiFeaturesJewish Parenting WisdomOpinionsIdeasLettersPersonal Essays
  • Food
    • The Shabbat Table: Happy 70th birthday Israel

      The Shabbat Table: A special post-Passover garlic shlissel challah

      Everyone gets gooey at downtown matzah bake

      Making matzah balls unites a modern Jewish family, says Phyllis Feldman

      The easy way out of Passover

      Bannock and matzah: our breads of affliction

  • Culture
    • Pound’s support of fascism didn’t deter his appeal to American poets

      Blending Caribbean sun and Jewish history in Curacao

      Novella splendidly blends math and literature

      Segal Centre features more Jewish content in 2018-19 season

      Popular Israeli podcast comes to the stage

      AllArts & EntertainmentThe ArtsBooks & AuthorsCanada 150Jewish LearningJune 1967SportsTravel
  • Events
    • Chai Lifeline’s Restoring Hope contest (Closed)

      The CJN Prize (CLOSED)

      BRITISH YIDDISH AND KIDDUSH CONTEST (closed)

      The CJN Prize for Young Writers Contest (closed)

      JEWISH MUSIC WEEK 2016 (closed)

      AllContests
  • Supplements
    • Home Beautiful

      CJL Magazine

      Passover Greetings

      Passover Greetings

      MTL Celebrations

      AllSpotlights
  • Other Communities
    • Quel avenir pour les Juifs de France ?

      Israël dans la grande poudrière du Moyen-Orient

      Une entrevue avec Enrico Macias

      L’héritage de Shimon Peres: “Aucun rêve n’est impossible”

      L’intelligence artificielle au service de la robotique

      AllEn FrançaisRussian
  • Subscribe
  • Member Centre
  • Log Out
Home Culture Books & Authors The war in letters, libraries and hidden notebooks
  • Culture
  • Books & Authors

The war in letters, libraries and hidden notebooks

By
Norman Ravvin
-
February 26, 2013
783
0
SHARE
Facebook
Twitter

Vilnius, the contemporary capital of Lithuania, is far north of Warsaw and inland from the Baltic Sea.  Known among Jews as Vilna before the Second World War, the life and death of its wartime ghetto is a story less well known than that of the Polish ghettos in Warsaw and Lodz.   Julija Šukys’ Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šímaite., provides an unusual avenue to recovering Vilna’s particular fate under German occupation.

Ona Šímaite., likely unknown to most readers, was living not far from Vilna’s ghetto in the fall of 1941.  Until her arrest by the Gestapo in April, 1944, she undertook complicated clandestine activities, including the smuggling of necessities into the ghetto, sneaking those incarcerated inside into hiding in the occupied city, as well as substantial efforts to hide documentation of the ghetto outside its environs, in the hope that this material would survive the war if its authors did not.  In this, she shared goals with the secret ghetto archivists of Lodz and Warsaw, who buried their work inside milk containers and tin boxes.

Šímaite.’s arrest led first to torture, then to a short term at Dachau, and transport to a work camp in German-occupied France.  The population of the Vilna Ghetto was decimated by a series of transports of thousands of Jews to the forested suburbs of Vilna known as Ponary, where they were murdered in pits.

Clandestine activity took many forms during the existence of the Vilna Ghetto.  It included efforts by the poet Avrom Sutzkever to preserve the archive and library belonging to YIVO, the Vilna-based institute for the study of Yiddish language and contemporary Jewish culture.  And under the poet Abba Kovner the ghetto harboured a resistance movement that later joined with Soviet-led partisans in the surrounding forests.

Šukys’ portrait of  Ona Šímaite. depicts a patchwork of periods and locales, which include postwar life in France and Israel, her letter writing to Lithuanians she would never see again, and her mission, based upon wartime promises, to inform “friends and family of Vilna dead” about the ghetto experience of their loved ones.  Epistolophilia, the unusual word that characterizes this latter commitment, refers to Šímaite.’s seeming compulsion to write letters, at all costs, sometimes as many as fourteen a day.  One must, she informed a niece by post, “write a letter as if saying a prayer: concentrated, and with bells ringing.”

The most remarkable of  Šímaite.’s recollections of the Vilna Ghetto appear in letters she wrote immediately after the war to Hirsz Abramowicz, who was traveling in America at the war’s outbreak, leaving him safely stranded while his wife and daughter were trapped in the ghetto.  Having attained permission to enter the ghetto under the made-up project of recovering unreturned university library books,  Šímaite. encountered Dina and Anna Abramowicz  “in a single tiny room together with the entire Schreiber family and with the Zhazdik girls, who were much loved by the family (in all, 9 people).  The furniture consisted of 1 bed, 1 table, 2 chairs.  During the day all the bedding and belongings were piled into one corner.”  Šímaite. informs Abramowicz that his wife “dedicated every free moment to reading.”  Her “favorite book in the ghetto was a volume of Bialik’s poetry.  She also read a great deal about black Americans . . . .”

Such reports on what her acquaintances in the ghetto read reflect Šímaite.’s reverence for books, for the libraries that protected them and the librarians who dedicated themselves to such work.

Šukys tells us that during the Ponary massacres, when the killings were at their height, there was a notable upsurge in borrowings from the ghetto’s lending libraries.  Demand was high for “semi-trashy” books; while from serious literature, those in the shadow of the mass killings chose to read War and Peace, Eric Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Emile Zola’s War and Franz Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, about the Armenian genocide.  This latter choice reflects readers’ deep appreciation of the historical events that were unfolding around them.

Šímaite. devoted herself to the ghetto’s record keepers.  Among these was Herman Kruk, who was ordered by the Nazis to choose rare books from Jewish libraries, which would be sent back to collections in Germany.  He and Šímaite. chose texts to hide from the Germans, while he filled 39 notebooks with depictions of life in the ghetto.  Secreting these out of the ghetto, Šímaite. stashed them “in a metal box under two floorboards in the university library’s attic.”  Kruk was murdered, but after the war, with Šímaite.’s directions, the notebooks were found. 

Epistolophilia is informed by Šukys’ interest in Šímaite.’s troubled family life, her seeming celibacy, her inability or unwillingness to compose a memoir of the war years, her troubled postwar life in France, and, her short stay in the 1950s in Israel.   Throughout the postwar years she refused awards and honours for her activities in Vilna. Notably though, in 1966, Yad Vashem designated her among its Righteous Among the Gentiles.

Norman Ravvin’s recent books include the novel, The Joyful Child (Gaspereau) and Failure’s Opposite: Listening to A.M. Klein, co-edited with Sherry Simon (McGill-Queen’s).

SHARE
Facebook
Twitter
Norman Ravvin
Norman Ravvin

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

Pound’s support of fascism didn’t deter his appeal to American poets

Miles Nadal donates $11 million to Mount Sinai heart centre

Federal politicians honour victims of the Holocaust

  • Popular
  • Recent
Subscribe to the CJNSubscribe
RSS FeedView
5,520FansLike
856FollowersFollow
10,105FollowersFollow
197SubscribersSubscribe
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Subscribe / Member Centre (eCJN)
  • eCJN Archives
  • Supplements
  • Media Kit
  • Advertising Terms
  • Premiums

One on One at Comicon with Leo Leibelman

Purim 2018 on Toronto's streets

Baba Fira's CJN Prize Awards invite

  • News
  • Canada
  • Israel
  • International
  • Opinions
  • The Arts
The award-winning Canadian Jewish News (CJN) is Canada’s largest, weekly Jewish newspaper with an audited circulation of nearly 32,000 and read by more than 100,000 people each week.
© Copyright 2018 Canadian Jewish News
  • Comments Policy
  • Community Links
  • Contact Us
  • Media Kit
  • Privacy Policy
  • Subscribe
  • Admin

Week in Review...

Comes Right to You

Sign up for our Weekly Newsletter

X