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Librarians at Brandeis preserve Holocaust history through looted books

By Katie Thompson

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    WALTHAM, Massachusetts (WCVB) — Brandeis University librarians are working to identify and organize thousands of books looted during the Holocaust, marking 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz.

“The books, in some ways, it feels to me that they have a soul,” said Rachel Greenblatt, Judaica librarian.

In 1948, shortly after the university was founded, more than 12,000 books originally looted from Jewish neighborhoods during the Holocaust made their way to Waltham as part of an effort by the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction.

“They literally, as far as I can tell, would put the entire library in a box and ship it off to Frankfurt,” said Lou Hartman, metadata coordinator.

Hundreds of these books tell that story, stamped as Nazi property.

“So they actually intended to keep them after the war as sort of evidence of their victory and to prove their own superiority over other races,” Greenblatt said.

Others have stamps from the U.S. military depot.

The university does not have an inventory of titles, so it is up to this task force to identify as many as it can.

“Until recently, we didn’t have the resources or the staff time to take on this project,” Hartman said.

But now, they say, is the time.

On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, it is even more important to recognize the future of Holocaust education may be in the pages of the books in their hands.

“We’re losing the last living survivors of the Holocaust, the last living witnesses,” Greenblatt said. “So we have these materials, we have these books that have these stamps that are the closest we have to being a witness to what actually happened.”

One of the major goals of this project is to create a joint database or catalog for these looted books so that they are discoverable for everyone moving forward.

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