Paper Brigade

The Paper Brigade was the name given to a group of residents of the Vilna Ghetto who hid a large cache of Jewish cultural items from YIVO (the Yiddish Scientific Institute), saving them from destruction or theft by Nazi Germany.

Established in 1942 and led by Abraham Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski, the group smuggled books, paintings and sculptures past Nazi guards and hid them in various locations in and around the Ghetto.

After the Ghetto's liquidation, surviving members of the group fled to join the Jewish partisans, eventually returning to Vilna following its liberation by Soviet forces.

Despite losses during both the Nazi and Soviet eras, 30–40 percent of the YIVO archive was preserved, which now represents "the largest collection of material about Jewish life in Eastern Europe that exists in the world".

Based in the Pohulanka district, YIVO maintained an extensive archive of Yiddish language works and other books relating to Jewish culture and history in its headquarters.

[4] Shortly thereafter Dr. Johannes Pohl, a representative of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR)—the Nazi organisation tasked with stealing or destroying Jewish cultural property—arrived in Vilna to examine the archives.

[6] The Nazis then established a sorting office in 1942 to go through the resulting material, selecting high-quality items to be shipped to the Institute for Study of the Jewish Question: the remainder were to be pulped.

Initial results were mixed: the YIVO building had been destroyed by bombing, and the largest cache in the Vilna Ghetto had been discovered by the German forces shortly before their retreat and burnt.

[13] Although the Museum was theoretically supported by Lithuanian and Soviet authorities, they provided few resources, assigning the organisers no budget and only giving them a burnt out former Ghetto building as a headquarters.