Books Bear Witness: Judaica Libraries and Nazi-Looted Materials

• In Event: Restorative Justice?

Abstract

For decades, stories of Nazi-looted art, its rightful heirs and their battles for restitutions have grabbed headlines, served as the basis for feature films, tugged at our heartstrings. In recent years, attention has gradually grown in the closely-related realm of Nazi-looted books. These books arrived at libraries in North America, Europe, and Israel through a variety of pathways. For example, tens of thousands were shipped from a depot in Offenbach, near Frankfurt, where they were gathered by allied forces at the end of World War II. As Jewish communities globally resisted return of the books to their countries of origins–German, Poland, Russia, etc–an organization called Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc (JCR) was formed to distribute heirless books to libraries elsewhere. The journeys of others have other stories. In this paper, I survey current efforts by libraries to identify such books in their collections, make their provenance clear in online catalogs, and, in some cases, consider restitution or return them to original owners, such as the Jewish Museum in Prague. Crucially, as human survivors pass from this earth, libraries are considering ways to use these material artifacts, the body and soul of surviving books, to tell the stories coming generations will not hear directly from first-hand survivors and witnesses of atrocities. The paper considers the implications of this work for both scholarship and higher education pedagogy.

Author

• Rachel Greenblatt, Dartmouth College