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Buy on AmazonA regime bent on erasing a people goes after their books, art and records as well as their bodies, aiming to wipe out every trace that they existed. The destruction of a culture can be run with the same machinery as mass murder, an operation aimed at books instead of people. The building where books were sorted for shipment or pulping became a killing ground for paper.
When oppressors force victims to do the work of destruction, those same workers gain access they can turn against it. Scholars made to choose which books would be shipped away and which destroyed also hid what they could, carrying pages on their bodies and burying them in bunkers. The job the oppressor assigned became their cover for saving things.
Risking your life to rescue books in the middle of a genocide is a real form of resistance. It declares that culture is worth more than safety, and it stakes a claim that the people will still exist after the war to take their treasures back. Even with almost no power, people still choose how to answer a threat to their existence, and they can save something bigger than themselves.
People forced to take part in destroying their own heritage carry a moral wound, even while they are quietly saving what they can. One scholar wrote that he had sent thousands of books to their destruction with his own hands, like filling a mass grave. His dilemma mirrors that of ghetto officials forced to help deport their own communities.
Being freed from one oppressor does not mean your culture is safe, because the next regime may be just as hostile to it. The rescuers expected their hidden books to be safe after liberation. Instead the city became like a prison camp, and the books had to be smuggled out a second time, across borders.