In one of the odder and more chilling moves, the Nazis occupying Lithuania once collected Yiddish and Hebrew books and documents, hoping to create a reference collection about a people they intended to annihilate. Even stranger, they appointed Jewish intellectuals and poets to select the choicest pearls for study.
These workers, assigned to sift through a major Jewish library in Vilna, Vilnius in Lithuanian, ended up hiding thousands of books and papers from the Nazis, smuggling them out under their clothing, and squirreling them away in attics and underground bunkers.
A large part of the collection was found in the basement of a Vilnius church, and were hailed as important artifacts of Jewish history.
Read more at – https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/arts/a-trove-of-yiddish-artifacts-rescued-from-the-nazis-and-oblivion.html
