Of all the accounts of destruction & preservation in #Burningthebooks the most moving to me is the account of the organisation known as @yivoinstitute. Formed in Vilnius (Vilna) in the 1920s it sought to preserve Jewish culture in Eastern Europe (like Herzl's diary) 1/6

In June 1941 the Germans occupied Vilnius & began to seize & destroy library & archive collections, a cultural genocide alongside the human genocide of the Holocaust. A group, known as 'The Paper Brigade' risked their lives to save books & documents. #Burningthebooks 2/6

Some of the books were stolen by the Nazis, and some of them were found after the war at Offenbach: some of the original YIVO documents then came to New York, where Max Weinrich, its Director, had relocated its HQ. #Burningthebooks 3/6

Still more materials were hidden by a Lithuanian librarian, Antanas Ulpis, who risked his own life to hide a vast number of materials from Communist authorities which the Paper Brigade had saved. This material emerged from the 1990s, now in the National Library of Lithuania 4/6

The organisation @yivoinstitute has organised the digitization of this material with the Nat Lib Lithuania. It maintains a strong link with Vilnius, and one of the Paper Brigade, Dina Abramovicz, worked there as a Librarian after the war. #Burningthebooks 5/6

Despite such horrific attacks, people have gone to extraordinary lengths to preserve knowledge, to educate & to stand witness: to inform the future from the lessons of the past. This is what I try to convey in #Burningthebooks out 3/9 @johnmurrays https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Burning-the-Books-by-Richard-Ovenden-author/9781529378757#:~:text=Burning%20the%20Books%20is%20a,shelling%20of%20the%20Sarajevo%20library.