WALTHAM — Judaism has a rich and longstanding tradition of facing down horror with humor, and for Brandeis University library metadata coordinator Lou Hartman, that’s proven a lifeline over the past two years.
They pulled a century-old book with a worn, cracked spine off one of the carts ringing their desk at the university’s main library. “So this is ‘A Psychoanalytical Study of the Menstruation Complex,” said Hartman, translating the title from German on the spot and quickly perusing the table of contents. “So much of this early psychoanalysis is like, ‘OK, I . . . your heart’s in the right place, but . . . no, sweetie. That’s not the way.”
However, the reason the book was on the cart and not in the stacks had nothing to do with its subject matter. Hartman examined the inside cover of the book and pointed out an ink stamp in stark black Gothic letters. The book had presumably been looted from a Jewish home or library, and then “held at the central archive of the Nazi Party,” they said.
Hartman, who has worked at Brandeis for 17 years, is one of the leaders on a special project at the university’s library to identify and document materials in the library’s holdings that may have been looted by the Nazis from European Jews. Shortly after its founding in 1948, the university received sizable donations of books that were recovered from Nazi looting, and those were then “scattered all throughout the library,” Hartman said. Now, Hartman and other library workers have taken on the Herculean task of tracking them down and making sure the history within the pages is preserved.
In the summer of 2022, the Brandeis Library embarked on a multiyear project to clean up its collection of physical books, which includes de-accessioning outdated or duplicate materials. From that seed grew this project, as the library wanted to make sure none of the recovered books were accidentally discarded.
The staff began by identifying books in the library published prior to 1945 in target languages such as German, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian, and prioritized pulling those off the shelves for inspection.
One day near the beginning of the project, Hartman inspected a Jewish prayer book published in Frankfurt in 1933. There, they found a slip of paper with a handwritten transliteration of “Shalom Aleichem,” a traditional liturgical song in Hebrew. Whoever wrote it, their most familiar language was German, Hartman concluded from the spellings.
“I just about sat down in the middle of the aisle and started crying,” they said.
Already, these books are a tangible and physical memorial for those who were murdered in the Holocaust, said Brandeis Judaica librarian Rachel Greenblatt. But even after the final living Holocaust survivors pass on — this Jan. 27 will mark 80 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp — the books will remain as “material survivors, as witnesses.”
These books arrived at Brandeis through an organization called Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. (JCR). The organization had been tasked with collecting and distributing unclaimed Jewish cultural materials that were recovered in the American-occupied zone of Germany following World War II.
JCR sent the then-new university books on numerous subjects, including Jewish religious texts, science, history, and German literature. In the same time period, JCR also sent books to other Jewish institutions such as Yeshiva University, as well as the Library of Congress and other non-Jewish university and public libraries.
One of those recipient institutions, Baltimore Hebrew College (later University), merged with Maryland’s Towson University in 2009 and its books joined Towson’s library collections. Last year, Brandeis and Towson received a federal grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to create a shared catalog of their JCR materials. Towson is also prioritizing using the JCR books in public educational programming intended to fight disinformation about the Holocaust.
Though the librarians know how many books JCR sent to Brandeis (11,288), no inventory of titles has surfaced. Upon arrival, the JCR books joined Brandeis’s general collection, where they remained for decades. The only way to find them was to cast a wide net; Hartman’s initial list of books to inspect as possible JCR donations contained some 30,000 titles. The search has turned up roughly 700 volumes bearing evidence of Nazi looting.
JCR did provide libraries with “a pile of beautiful book plates,” said Greenblatt, who has taken charge of networking and collaborating with other libraries known to have JCR materials. However, “we have not found a single institution” where librarians consistently used the book plates, including Brandeis, said Greenblatt.
Further complicating matters, glue deteriorates over the years, so some of the plates might have been applied then fallen off on their own, Hartman said. As of June, only 67 books had been found at Brandeis bearing the official JCR plates, which display a distinctive logo of two nested Stars of David and a Hebrew inscription.
However, sometimes the librarians will find an ink stamp that can instantly confirm a book was looted. Anything with a swastika or Nazi eagle immediately gets flagged. The same goes for any stamp bearing a recognizable acronym from a Nazi institution, or the circular seal of the Offenbach Archival Depot, the warehouse near Frankfurt where the United States military collected and attempted to organize looted items between 1946 and 1949.
In other instances, it’s not so clear. If a book has a stamp from a library or other Jewish institution that was looted during the Nazi era, it could have come through JCR, but it also could have found its way to Brandeis through any number of other avenues, explained Hartman. This is the case with the prayer book where Hartman found the transliteration, which has no identifying stamps besides a sticker from a Berlin bookstore. However, in combination with its publication date of 1933, Hartman concluded it was likely in Germany for some time while the Nazis held power, and so it’s not out of the question that it was looted.
Greenblatt, Hartman, and fellow Brandeis librarian Ari Kleinman are part of a newly established task force at the Association of Jewish Libraries specifically focusing on Nazi-era looted books, which aims to identify the materials and create a database of stamps and other markings found within.
But even if a book wasn’t looted, those marginalia are still important, Hartman clarified. “In some cases, those stamps are some of the last surviving evidence that a given person or community existed,” they wrote in a follow-up email. “It also potentially would allow for restitution of books to organizations that have been revived or re-founded, which is a very exciting possibility.”
To assist with the search, Hartman trained three students, two of whom have since graduated. Those students, especially those who were descended from Holocaust survivors, got “really invested” in the search, Hartman said. “This is an emotionally resonant sort of project.”
Those descendants of survivors tend to have “that family tradition of terrible humor,” and Hartman thinks that helped the students shoulder the psychological weight of the subject matter.
“I’m sure there are people who find other ways to cope, but it helps so much,” they said.
When Hartman opens up a book and finds a Nazi stamp, “it’s creepy, it’s chilling.” But that revulsion is tempered with a sort of giddiness, they said: “You thought your empire would last a thousand years. And now you’re dead, and your books are at Brandeis, and I’m touching your stuff!”
A.Z. Madonna can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @knitandlisten.
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