Abraham Sutzkever-Szmerke Kaczerginski Historical Collection

The Sutzkever-Kaczerginski is named in honor of the two Yiddish poets, Avraham Sutzkever and Szmerke Kaczerginski, who worked in the underground ‘paper brigade’ and smuggled more than 10,000 manuscripts, books and artifacts into the Vilna Ghetto, hiding the saved materials wherever they could, often in underground places. The members of the paper brigade were assigned by the Nazi plundering unit, called the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), to the task of sorting through the contents of tens of thousands of books, artifacts, documents, manuscripts, letters, religious artifacts and art works. They were instructed to select the most valuable materials for transfer to Germany, where they were to eventually become part of a museum of the ‘extinct’ Jewish people. The materials not selected were to be sent to the paper mills. The sorting process took place primarily in the YIVO building which had been taken over by the ERR. Determined to save valuable materials from being sent to Germany, the paper brigade hid manuscripts and artifacts and managed to smuggle them one by one into the Vilna Ghetto, hoping that the rescued documents would survive destruction.

After the war Sutzkever and his colleagues painstakingly searched for and found hidden documents, books and artifacts and brought them to the new Jewish Museum of Vilna. When it became apparent that the Soviet authorities had no intention of safeguarding these materials or making them available to the public, and instead were removing materials to the paper mills for destruction, Sutzkever and Kaczerginski devised a plan to smuggle out suitcases of materials to be taken first to Poland and then to France. From France the rescued documents were sent to the reestablished YIVO headquarters in New York. A portion of the documents were taken to Israel and sent to YIVO from Israel. The shipments took place between 1947 and 1956.

The documents and artifacts saved in the Vilna Ghetto contained categories of materials relating to a) The Vilna Ghetto, including diaries, reports about the Judenrat, cultural and educational and religious activities in the Ghetto (this group of documents is described in a separate finding aid); b) YIVO Archives documents and manuscripts held in the YIVO Institute in Vilna before the war, many of them bearing the original YIVO stamp; c) Documents from special archival collections in Vilna, such as the S. Ansky Historical and Ethnographic Society in Vilna; d) Documents relating to the Strashun Library including Rabbi Shmuel Strashun and Matisyahu Strashun and documents and manuscripts collected by the Strashun family; e) Books from the YIVO Library in Vilna and from the Strashun Library and from other Jewish libraries in Vilna