Construction workers in a disused Lithuanian church made an unexpected discovery in 2017. Documents salvaged during the Second World War have come to light, and through them a novel story, known to few, has unfolded.
With Beba Epstein, her self-righteous personality, which hardly tolerates the admonitions of adults, got her into a lot of small and bigger problems. As a child, he did not want to eat, so his parents, who were concerned about his health, made him talk, and every time he opened his mouth to speak, they stuffed him with a large amount of food. Using the sideboard as a climbing frame, she smashed the family’s tableware to shreds, and despite being protected, she still went to school in her best summer clothes during the winter. From the almost one and a half years of treatment at the sanatorium following the incident, what he remembered most was how good it was to go on trips with the many children and do theater performances. The stories in the handwritten autobiography of the eleven-and-a-half-year-old girl are not much different from those of a child today, and we can easily recognize them. Beba himself probably did not think that his wording would last forever, and that it would survive the darkest periods of history like a bottle thrown into the sea. Beba Esptein’s biography was written for a competition in 1932.
In the 1920s, with the help and ideas of prominent European intellectuals of the Jewish community, including Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, the Yiddish Institute of Science (YIVO) was established in Berlin and Vilnius, Poland (now the capital of Vilnius, Lithuania), which before the Second World War was a it was both the home and spiritual center of a Jewish community of nearly ten million people. Although they lived in rapidly changing times, the founders of YIVO believed in the continuity of Jewish culture. The study of both the past and the present was approached from a modern perspective and the highest standards of scientific objectivity were set as the goal.
YIVO soon became known worldwide for the quality and originality of its scientific work. During the first fifteen years of the institute’s existence, more than a hundred volumes of social science and humanities studies were published.
“YIVO was created to study material culture, that is, social life,” says Jonathan Brent, current director of YIVO in New York. “In essence, it was one of the first independent social history research institutes in the world. Because all academic research conducted in similar institutions had something to do with politics, religion, different ideologies, i.e. the interests of one or another elite.”
One of their most important initiatives was a biographical contest announced in the early 1930s and published on the front page of the largest Jewish newspapers, which ran for three editions. In their call, young people between the ages of 16 and 22 were asked to write about themselves, their family and their relationship with them, their teachers and school, boyfriends and girlfriends, as well as youth and political organizations, regardless of education, occupation and political affiliation, but mostly about how they see their world and how they imagine the future. The biographical essays were submitted with a signature, and the authors provided their names in a separate sealed envelope in case their work won one of the monetary awards.
This also shows that the rebellious Beba Epstein broke three main rules at the same time: she was much younger than the prescribed age limit, and not only did she send her name, but also her photo. And how well he did.
Because although they certainly had an inkling that the world they were living in was facing enormous changes, neither the leaders of YIVO nor the young people who submitted their resumes could have known that in less than a decade, almost entire generations of Jews would disappear as a result of the Holocaust. and that the application materials intended for sociological research will be the guardians of the memory of an entire lost world.
This is the most important discovery in Jewish history since the Dead Sea Scrolls!
– said David Fishman, a board member of the history department of the American Jewish Theological Seminary, when in 2017 workers working on the renovation of a disused cathedral in Vilnius unearthed a lot of old documents, the autobiographies written by Jewish youth were preserved for the future by the organ pipes.
After the invasion of Poland in 1939, German troops entered Vilnius in 1941 and confiscated the YIVO collections. Part of the material was intended to be sent to the Research Institute for the Jewish Question (German: Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage) in Frankfurt, while the rest was to be destroyed. But since they were unfamiliar with Jewish culture and local languages, they needed people to sort through YIVO’s extensive collections. About forty forced laborers were assigned to work. They became known as the “paper brigade”. The group decided to smuggle back what they could and hide it in the ghettos. Risking their lives, they carried books, papers and all kinds of documents every day on their bodies, in their clothes or in their shoes. They managed to get hundreds of thousands of pages of materials and books out, which they then hid underground in metal boxes or gave to their Lithuanian and Polish non-Jewish friends for safekeeping.
After the war, most of the materials sent to Frankfurt were recovered by the American organization Monuments Men and sent to New York, where Max Weinreich, director of YIVO, established a new base for the organization as a refugee. Some of the documents left in Vilnius were dug up in 1944 after the liberation, but due to the anti-Jewish measures of the new Soviet regime, they could not be made public. Although some survivors smuggled some of them to the United States, the fate of the nearly 250,000 pages of documents left at the site was not resolved. Due to the lack of Jewish intellectuals, the Lithuanian librarian Antanas Ulpis hid them in the corners of the St. George Church and the Carmelite Monastery in Vilnius. Ulpis died in 1981, and not only did he not live to see the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, but he also took his secret with him, so nearly a quarter of a century had to pass before the treasures came to light.
Encouraged by the success of the first two tenders of the 1930s, YIVO dreamed big and, going beyond the imaginary boundaries of Eastern European Yiddishuania, addressed the third to the Jewish youth of the entire world. Many applications were received in Yiddish, Hebrew, English, Ukrainian, Hungarian, French, Romanian and many other languages following the calls published in all the Jewish newspapers of the world. YIVO employees read and documented them all and prepared with high hopes for the award ceremony, which was scheduled for September 1, 1939.
The global conflagration and the Holocaust swept away everything, including the award ceremony. The fate of the authors of the writings is unknown. Except for one.
Twenty-year-old Beba Esptein herself applied to the Paper Brigade in the Vilnius ghetto. She, who braved the winter cold as a child in her flowery summer dress, defied the Nazi execution squads every day and smuggled back the documents that needed to be saved.
Beba escaped before the full execution of the Vilnius ghetto and joined the Soviet resistance. His childhood photo was on the front page of the New York Times, which reported on the miraculous circumvention of the documents in 2017. The phone rang in the editorial office the next day. On the other end of the line was her son, Michael Leventhal, who recognized his mother’s name and picture. This is how it turned out that Beba, the self-righteous, was the only survivor of her family. He crossed half the world and died a free man.
Source: nepszava.hu
