incorporating not only the archives of YIVO and other Vilna institutions but private collections from Kaunas, Šiauliai, Marijampolė, Valozhyn and other towns. The Nazis then established a sorting office in 1942 to go through the resulting material, selecting high-quality items to be shipped to the Institute for Study of the Jewish Question: the remainder were to be pulped. ERR orders stated that a maximum of 30 percent of works could be deemed of high quality and saved. To ensure that the right works were selected, Jewish Ghetto inmates, largely people with some involvement with YIVO, were selected to do the sorting work. Labourers included Zelig Kalmanovich, Uma Olkenicki, Abraham Sutzkever, Shmerke Kaczerginski and Khaykel Lunski. The concept of destroying the YIVO archives and associated material was profoundly traumatising to the labourers; in his diaries, Herman Kruk wrote that they were "in tears. ... YIVO is dying. Its mass grave is the paper mill". Nicknamed the "Paper Brigade" the labourers, led by Sutzkever and Kaczerginski, began sabotaging the ERR's plans. The Brigade initially engaged in passive resistance by simply refusing to work, reading aloud from the books rather than destroying them—Kaczerginski and Sutzkever later published volumes of poetry that they had written instead of doing the actual sorting work. From there, they accelerated to smuggling the works to safety. Some books were smuggled on their person when they returned home each night from the sorting office, and hidden in caches within houses, bunkers and secret compartments within the Ghetto; others were handed off to trustworthy non-Jews outside the Ghetto, such as the librarian Ona Šimaitė, or hidden in the attic of the YIVO building, which also served as a transit point for weapons for armed resistance. Military manuals, largely Russian, were also identified and smuggled to Jewish partisans within the Vilna Ghetto. With the liquidation of the Ghetto in September 1943, the immediate work of the Paper Brigade came to an end. Many members were killed by the Nazis, but both Sutzkever and Kaczerginski managed to escape, hiding with the Jewish partisans. Cache recovery After Vilna was captured from the Nazis on 13 July 1944, Sutzkever returned to the city in the company of Justas Paleckis. Quickly joined by Kaczerginski and Abba Kovner, the group opened a Jewish Museum on 26 July and began enlisting anyone available to hunt for the hidden caches. Initial results were mixed: the YIVO building had