January 19 – May 19, 2024
Would you risk your life to save a book?
The Paper Brigade of Vilna was a dedicated group of Jewish heroes whose goal was to rescue Vilna’s Jewish culture for future generations. A true story of bravery and resistance to inhumanity and persecution.
The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis documents the nearly unbelievable true story of ghetto residents who, through brave acts of resistance, powerful friendships, and devotion to literature, rescued thousands of rare books and manuscripts – first from the Nazis, then from the Soviets – by hiding them, burying them and smuggling them into the Vilna Ghetto, and later, across borders.
Spotlighting a combination of original artifacts and archival materials with state-of-the-art technologies, follow the Vilna Paper Brigade through World War II, into the post-war Soviet era, and across the borders to Moscow, Europe, the United States, and Israel.
The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis is curated by Holocaust Museum Houston based on the book by David E. Fishman.
