The Book Smugglers: partisans, poets, and the race to save Jewish treasures from the Nazis

Abstract

he spent the remaining decades of his life (he died in 1971). He describes how he was urged to abandon his “anti-Soviet propaganda” because it allegedly besmirched the reputation of the USSR, the country that had stopped the Nazi advance and had supported establishment of the state of Israel. Notwithstanding, and unlike dozens of other former inmates who published their memoirs much later, Margolin did not succumb to pressure. He testified to Soviet crimes wherever could (for instance, at the Rousset libel trial in France in 1951), and he continued to write about the Gulag in his later publications. Margolin’s continued attempts to publish his manuscript in Israel, France, and the United States are noted in Timothy Snyder’s and Katherine R. Jolluck’s foreword and introduction to the English edition, as well as in the prefaces to earlier editions in other languages (the memoir was first published in French in 1949). Snyder highlights Margolin’s impatience with relativist approaches that essentially excused the Soviet system, and Jolluck adds interesting details concerning the philosopher’s postwar campaigning for the truth. This English edition, brought to press by Margolin’s son, Ephraim, and carefully translated by Stefani Hoffman, joins previous editions in Polish, German, and Hebrew that were published in the past decade. It also includes several additional chapters in a section titled “The Road to the West,” which detail Margolin’s re-emergence into the world of the living and his eventual return to Palestine. This was a journey in stages; among the depictions are those of Łódź, a city full of postwar ghosts, and a lively Paris, which Margolin described as greeting with his “toothless camp grin” (p. 554). From the time of his return to Palestine, Margolin felt a moral imperative to break through the wall of silence, sound an alarm, and “throw a lifebelt into the Soviet sea of injustice” (p. 576). While it is too late to alter the fate of Margolin’s fellow prisoners, this English edition of his memoir may play an important role in preserving the memory of millions of people of various nationalities and religions who perished in the Gulag – people who, “concealed from the human eye and human judgment,” (p. 525) had come to think that the outside world was nothing more than a dream.