The Book Thieves

by Anders Rydell

  In 1999, Great Britain acquired documentation on British prisoners of war in German concentration camps by offering in exchange some classified documents on the murder of Tsar Nicholas II. France, by avoiding any mention of the sensitive concept of “restitution,” managed to successfully negotiate the repossession of remaining parts of the archive that had earlier been blocked. In 2000, several truckloads of materials were handed back, including some belonging to Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris, which received more than 34,000 documents.

  The Netherlands and Belgium, after long-drawn-out negotiations, also took back some archives. The Belgians were made to pay $130,000, a retroactive rental fee to the Russians for “preserving and storing” these archives for fifty years.

  The Netherlands had reached an agreement with Yeltsin as early as 1992, but this was stopped by the Duma. The solution, after years of fruitless and time-consuming negotiations, had been to send over Queen Beatrix in 2001 to sign an agreement with Vladimir Putin. The chief archivist for the Netherlands State Archive had heard from an Israeli ambassador that the Russian regime was keen on royal glamour. Later that same year, the first boxes of archive materials started arriving in the Netherlands. It was rich material, over three thousand files, containing hundreds of thousands of documents. Most belonged to a series of Jewish organizations and institutions, including the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam and the Grootoosten der Nederlanden in The Hague. However, the material was not given freely. The Netherlands had to pay over $100,000 in archive rent, administrative costs, and microfilming of the material for Russian archives.13

  For private individuals it proved almost impossible to reclaim material, with one spectacular exception: the Rothschilds. As early as 1993, a researcher looking for documents relating to Auschwitz in Stalin’s special archive came across documents touching upon branches of the famous family in both Austria and France. There was just about enough time for the French papers to be sent back to France in 1994, including the archives of the Paris-based family bank, de Rothschild Frères. On the very day that the archives came to Paris, an aggressive debate began in the Duma that led to the blocking of all restitution. The documents were taken to the Rothschild Archive in London, which has collected and housed a large part of the famous family’s archive since 1978.

  However, the papers from Austria were still in Moscow, and these were considered to be priceless historical material about one of the world’s most powerful industrial and banking families in the 1800s. It also emerged that the archive contained some of the earliest of all Rothschild documents, harking back to Frankfurt and the first steps in the career of the family’s ancestor, Mayer Amschel, who established himself as a banker in the 1760s.14 The Rothschild documents were not only of significance for the family itself, but in a much broader sense had importance for the writing of history from the end of the 1700s and up to the First World War.

  Any prospects of relying on a legal restitution process to regain these documents from the Russian archives—which were increasingly being shut off from the outside world—seemed absolutely unlikely. But there was another possibility, namely offering the Russian authorities something they could not refuse, which, in the end, proved to be a collection of Russian love letters. In the summer of 1999, a large number of rare letters that Tsar Alexander II of Russia had written to his second wife, Princess Ekaterina Mikhailovna Dolgorukova, turned up at Christie’s auction house. The Rothschilds bought the five thousand letters for 180,000 pounds. It had been indicated to them that the Russian state archive was interested in the letters but did not have the funds to acquire them.15 The bait worked, and almost at once the negotiations came unstuck.

  As with several other exchanges, the government had a good excuse for returning the archives, namely that they had been seized in Poland and not in Germany. It was more than anything the idea of restitution to the old “Fascists” (Germany and Austria) that was politically impossible in Russia. But in the anti-restitution legislation there was a clause stating that “exceptions” could be made for victims of Nazism. After the government found that the Rothschild papers were not trophy documents, the archives were returned in 2001. The tsar’s love letters were offset against Russian “costs” incurred in preserving the archive.

  But although some documents have been returned, much remains in Russian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian archives, including documents stolen from the Jews in Thessaloniki. A great deal has still not been recovered, and the political situation in Russia has made further investigation almost impossible. Even if some of the plundered archives found their way home after the fall of the Soviet Union, considerably fewer of the millions of trophy books ever did. The return of 604 books to the Netherlands in 1992 remains the only “restitution,” in accordance with rules and regulations, of books from Russia.

  Already before 1991, information had surfaced about many of the more valuable libraries, or rather parts of them, which were still in existence in the former Soviet Union. One of these was the Turgenev Library of Paris. However, it was soon learned that the relevant books had been hopelessly dispersed all over Russia, Belorussia, and the Ukraine. In the 1980s, books bearing the stamp of the Turgenev Library had turned up in secondhand bookshops in Moscow.16 Later, fifteen books were found in the university library, Voronezh, in central Russia, while another book was found at the university in Luhansk in the Ukraine. Odd copies were found as far east as a library on the Russian island of Sakhalin, north of Japan.17 Some of the books had found their way out into the world, probably by exchanges or Russian emigration. For instance, two books from the Turgenev Library were found at Stanford University in California.

  When the Turgenev Library celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2001, only a single book of the 100,000 that were plundered had found its way back to Paris. Among the 600 books returned to the Netherlands in the early 1990s, there was a Bible with the library’s stamp inside. Most likely the book had been sent to Amsterdam by accident, as it was printed in Dutch. In the early 2000s it was confirmed that between 8,000 and 10,000 books from the Turgenev Library were still in Russian state collections, primarily in the former Lenin Library in Moscow.18 Finally, a few years later, 118 books were sent back, which can be seen today in the library in Paris. The reason for their being handed back was a legal loophole, which meant that these particular books were not subject to the anti-restitution laws passed by the Duma. The books had been found earlier in Poland, and in the 1980s they were given as a gift by Poland to the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. They were therefore not regarded as “trophy books” protected by law. They were handed to the French embassy in Moscow toward the end of 2002.

  A possibly even more tragic case was that of the Biblioteca della Comunità Israelitica, the missing library of the Jewish congregation in Rome. The commission set up by the Italian government in 2002, after due pressure by the congregation, had concluded that it was “not inconceivable” that the books had been taken to the Soviet Union.19 Its sister library, Biblioteca del Collegio Rabbinico, which had also been housed in the synagogue on Lungotevere de’ Cenci in Rome, had been found in Hungen and handed over to Offenbach Archival Depot. But the Biblioteca della Comunità Israelitica was never found, and the fate of the library has remained a mystery. It was not likely that such a remarkable library would have been missed at the sorting stage in Offenbach or Tanzenberg—as the library’s books were clearly stamped.

  The conclusion of the commission was that the libraries were dispatched in two stages in 1943; while Biblioteca del Collegio Rabbinico ended up in Frankfurt, the train transporting the Biblioteca della Comunità Israelitica had taken another route. The most likely hypothesis was that this library was moved either to the ERR or the RSHA in Berlin, and from there was evacuated east, to Poland, Sudetenland, or Silesia. Yet there was no supporting evidence for this, as documents relating to the activities of the ERR and the SS in Italy had largely been destroye
d.20 The commission’s further investigation into relative archives had not yielded any clues as to the whereabouts of the library, yet indications seemed to suggest that the library had been taken to the Soviet Union, most likely to Moscow.

  For this reason, in 2005 the commission started investigating the possibilities of looking for the books in Russian collections, something that required negotiation at the very highest political level. The commission’s own researchers were not given independent access to the Russian archives—the investigations had to be handled by a Russian “party.” In 2007 an agreement was reached in which the commission, with the backing of a bank, paid 30,000 euros to Moscow’s Library for Foreign Literature to look for the books. The library presented three reports, which the commission dismissed as insufficient, because they were largely based on references to already known sources, archives, and collections. When the commission presented its final report in 2009, not a single book had been recovered. Although it was not possible to prove that the books were to be found somewhere in the former Soviet Union, the commission declared with some resignation that further investigations would only be possible “after an end to the limitations to consultation in Russian archives encountered by the commission during its activity.”21 In the present climate there is no political will to make Russian archives more accessible, nor to go back to restitution. The political situation does not seem likely to change in the foreseeable future. Until such a time, millions of trophy books—although no one can say how many there are—will remain as “prisoners of war,” which is how the historian Patricia Kennedy Grimsted chooses to see it: “Today, in Russia, there is no willingness to return books to the countries or families that were plundered. But we still have to know what books are still represented there from Europe’s cultural inheritance, a monument to the libraries that were destroyed and scattered as a consequence of the most terrible war in human history.”22

  After a long wait, Christine Ellse from Cannock outside Birmingham finally holds her grandfather’s book. It is the only thing belonging to Richard Kobrak that has ever been returned.

  • • •

  Christine Ellse is holding up a sheet of A4 paper on which she has written my name in large capital letters in green felt-tip pen. It is not really necessary, because we are alone in the little station in Cannock. Even calling it a station is a bit of an exaggeration, because it is more of a breather for the diesel train that has brought me here from Birmingham. Cannock in Staffordshire, in central England, is an old mining community of terraced brick houses built back when coal mining was the lifeblood of the town. But after the Thatcher era there is not much left of it.

  “They say we have the highest teenage pregnancy rate in England, but I don’t know if that’s true,” says Ellse as she drives me the short distance to the family house in Cannock’s “only good street,” as she puts it with a laugh. Ellse, a lanky woman of about fifty with a delivery that one would describe in England as “witty,” works as a music teacher at a nearby school.

  Moments later Christine Ellse sits on a beige leather sofa, taking a deep breath. Outside lies the big garden, rustically unkempt. She holds the little olive-green book in both her hands—looks at it for a long time and then at me.

  “Today I wrote on Facebook that I was waiting for this book. I tried to do some other things today, but it didn’t go so very well. I’ve been waiting and waiting for this book to come back. And I’ve asked myself why, I mean I can’t even read it; it’s in German. I really just wanted it, I suppose. Although I’m a Christian I have always felt very Jewish. I’ve never been able to talk about the Holocaust without crying. I feel so connected to all this,” says Ellse, opening the book and turning the pages for a while before she goes on.

  “I’m very grateful for this book, because . . . I knew my English grandparents on my mother’s side. They lived and then they died. It was normal, not having any grandparents on your father’s side. Many people didn’t, but there was something abnormal about this. I didn’t even have a photograph of them. There was a hole there, an emotional vacuum, if you see what I mean. There was always something hanging midair, something unexpressed,” Ellse says, squeezing the book.

  “You know, my father never spoke about this. About the past, the war. But my aunt talked about it endlessly, all the time. She was the eldest of the siblings, so she was also the most ‘German’ of them. She coped with it by talking; my father coped with it by staying silent about it. I knew already when I was small that something horrible had happened. I knew my grandparents had died in the war. Then I found out they’d been gassed, but when you’re a child you don’t know what that means. It’s just a story—you don’t understand it. Then I learned they’d died at Auschwitz. Only after I grew up did I begin to understand and get a grip on it. It was very difficult when I found out they’d been murdered just ten days before the gas chambers were shut down. It was agonizing. I imagined myself sitting on that train, experiencing the cold and the hunger. And then straight into the gas chambers. I’ve never been able to get over it.”

  Christine Ellse stands up and goes to a table, where she’s spread out folders and files on her family history. Most of this she has been given by the German historian Tomas Unglaube, who has done research on the Kobrak family. From one of the folders she gets out a family portrait, taken just before the Second World War. Richard Kobrak sits on the right—an elderly man with a round face, a small, neat mustache, his hands clasped together. His wife, Charlotte Kobrak, sits in the middle of the group, smiling at the camera, a beautiful woman with graying temples. Around them stand the three children of the couple, their daughters Käthe Kobrak and Eva-Maria Kobrak. And then Christine Ellse’s father, Helmut Kobrak, his hand resting on his father’s shoulder. He was in his late teens when the photograph was taken.

  The family had moved from Breslau to Berlin in 1927 when Richard Kobrak got a job in Berlin’s city hall. The family was Christian and did not identify itself as Jewish. Fifty years after the war, the elder sister, Käthe Kobrak, wrote down her memories in a book, which Ellse shows me:

  The Sunday after Hitler had been made Chancellor our parents informed us about our Jewish background. None of them had been practising Jews. They had married in a church, had never observed any Jewish traditions, and taught us children Christian prayers. But their grandparents had been Jews, and so according to Hitler’s definition they were also Jews, and for the same reason we were too.23

  By 1933, Richard Kobrak had already been demoted to a less important position, but he was allowed to keep his job because he had been a frontline soldier in the German army during the First World War. He had been awarded the Iron Cross. But in 1936, once the Nuremberg Laws were introduced, Kobrak was forced into “retirement” at the age of forty-five. Käthe describes her family life in the 1930s, and how she grew increasingly isolated:

  “I was popular at school but I was worried that if my friends found out they wouldn’t want to socialize with me anymore. For that reason, I kept away from real friendships and I stopped visiting or inviting home my old friends. It could have been dangerous for them or their parents to socialize with Jews.24

  “It’s so tragic. The children didn’t know they were Jewish until their parents told them. But I don’t understand how they could have stayed. Why they didn’t emigrate. My grandfather was an intelligent man, how could he make such a mistake? He was a high-ranking civil servant. Couldn’t he see what was coming?”

  In her recorded memories, Christine Ellse’s aunt answers this very question, and her answer could to some extent be applicable to many of those who chose to stay in Nazi Germany:

  “The reason was my father’s fixedness: We are Germans, we belong here and Hitler (that Austrian demagogue!) is not going to drive us out. He and his deranged ideas will not last forever. It was a fatal error of judgement by my usually so wise and politically well-informed father.”25

  One can
see for oneself in Käthe Kobrak’s journal how the noose slowly tightens. Her father loses his job, friends are taken away by the Gestapo, and one by one the siblings lose any possibility of an education. As the children of a war veteran they have been allowed to keep attending classes, when other Jewish children have been kicked out. After Kristallnacht in November 1938 even Richard Kobrak had to admit that there was no future. By then it was almost too late. Just a few months before the outbreak of war, the family managed to get the children out. Their youngest daughter, Eva-Maria, was sent out on the Kindertransport, while Helmut and Käthe got out on work and student visas. Käthe, the last to depart, left in early August, one month before the declaration of war.

  “By the time they realized what was about to happen it was too late. My grandparents invested everything they had to get the children out, but unfortunately they did not manage to leave themselves. They didn’t have enough money for that.”

  After the war began, contact with their parents in Germany was sporadic. From time to time they managed to send a letter in which the children were given “piecemeal information.” They learned that their parents had been evicted from their apartment and allotted a small room in an apartment in Charlottenburg, how their father’s mother had disappeared, most likely deported to the “East,” and how they had very little food. Käthe got one last postcard from Theresienstadt, where the parents were deported in 1943. After that there was silence. The little olive-green book, Recht, Staat und Gesellschaft, was most likely plundered from the family apartment in Berlin when the homes of deported Jews were being cleared. The path of the book from there to the Berliner Stadtbibliothek is unclear, but certainly it was just one of hundreds of thousands of books to be confiscated, sorted, and sold.