Scan barcode
A review by sevenlefts
The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance by Anders Rydell
4.0
There's been much interest lately in Nazi art looting stories as outlined in films like The Monuments Men. But I'd never heard of the Nazi looting of Europe's library - -and the immense scale of it.
Rydell travels around several cities, visiting libraries that were looted by the Nazis as part of a program to build their own institutes set up to study groups that they were intent on wiping out -- Jews, Freemasons and Communists. Sometimes these collections were recovered, but usually not, or were only partially retrieved. He visits (or describes) synagogue and Jewish community libraries in Amsterdam, Rome, Thessaloniki and Vilnius, as well as Russian and Polish libraries in Paris. World War II resulted in these collections being destroyed, scattered, left in warehouses and basements to rot, or "liberated" by allied powers and taken to North America or the Soviet Union. The scale is enormous, on the order of tens of millions of books, manuscripts and other documents.
There's a lot of detail about tracking collections as they were shipped around during and after the war, and a lot of discussion about the organization of the Nazi aperatus set up to find and disseminate books. But the part that brought me in were the personal interactions with librarians and scholars who are trying to put things right.
There are moments of real gut-wrenching emotion in this book, including the image of people in concentration camps, forced to sort pilfered volumes and running across their own books. Or a collection of books, owners unknkown, sent to Jewish communities in Canada after the war with a bookplate saying, "This book was once owned by a Jew, a victim of the great massacre in Europe."
In addition to libraries, individual book collections were also looted from homes. Rydell bookends this devastating history with a story about one these books and it's journey back to it's former owner's granddaughter. There are librarians out there trying to identify books in their collections that may have been acquired from this horrible event -- and trying to get them back to their owners or their descendants. There isn't much money for such programs, yet there are people out there still trying.
Kudos to Henning Koch who translated this from the original Swedish. It doesn't feel like a translated book at all.
Rydell travels around several cities, visiting libraries that were looted by the Nazis as part of a program to build their own institutes set up to study groups that they were intent on wiping out -- Jews, Freemasons and Communists. Sometimes these collections were recovered, but usually not, or were only partially retrieved. He visits (or describes) synagogue and Jewish community libraries in Amsterdam, Rome, Thessaloniki and Vilnius, as well as Russian and Polish libraries in Paris. World War II resulted in these collections being destroyed, scattered, left in warehouses and basements to rot, or "liberated" by allied powers and taken to North America or the Soviet Union. The scale is enormous, on the order of tens of millions of books, manuscripts and other documents.
There's a lot of detail about tracking collections as they were shipped around during and after the war, and a lot of discussion about the organization of the Nazi aperatus set up to find and disseminate books. But the part that brought me in were the personal interactions with librarians and scholars who are trying to put things right.
There are moments of real gut-wrenching emotion in this book, including the image of people in concentration camps, forced to sort pilfered volumes and running across their own books. Or a collection of books, owners unknkown, sent to Jewish communities in Canada after the war with a bookplate saying, "This book was once owned by a Jew, a victim of the great massacre in Europe."
In addition to libraries, individual book collections were also looted from homes. Rydell bookends this devastating history with a story about one these books and it's journey back to it's former owner's granddaughter. There are librarians out there trying to identify books in their collections that may have been acquired from this horrible event -- and trying to get them back to their owners or their descendants. There isn't much money for such programs, yet there are people out there still trying.
Kudos to Henning Koch who translated this from the original Swedish. It doesn't feel like a translated book at all.