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| Karla McCabe speaks at a ceremony where she returned postcards that her Nazi soldier grandfather looted from the Lublin yeshiva, |
Before World War II, Lublin was a vibrant center of Jewish culture in Poland dating back to the 16th century. A large share of the city was always Jewish, roughly one-third — or 40,000 people — when the Nazis invaded. The Lublin Yeshiva opened in 1930, led by Rabbi Meir Shapiro, and lasted only nine years. In its brief life it became one of the world’s largest Jewish religious schools and boasted a library of between 15,000 and 40,000 religious books, among them some of the earliest manuscripts in print.
The Nazis turned Lublin into a center of mass extermination, killing 99% of its Jews and eradicating symbols of Jewish culture. Although the broad yellow structure of the yeshiva remained, used as an office by the German army, its vast library disappeared. The destruction was so effective, leaving so few traces of the yeshiva’s documentation, that even how its books vanished has remained a subject of speculation. For decades, a popular theory said they went up in flames at a Nazi book burning.
