How Capt. Isaac Benkowitz Saved a World of Jewish Books

A rare look into two volumes that contain hints of a cultural world that was and is no more...

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In the city of Offenbach, near Frankfurt am Main, inside a five-story building, Captain Isaac Benkowitz stood among hundreds of boxes of books, wondering what to do. His unit’s mission, part of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program (MFAA) responsible for the preservation of cultural property under the Allied Military Government, was to return all the identifiable books in the Offenbach warehouse looted by the Nazis to the countries they belonged to.

The Nazis stole millions of books during the Holocaust. Nearly two million volumes had found their way from Eastern and Western Europe to the Institute for the Research of the Jewish Question in Frankfurt. Founded by Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi regime’s chief ideologue, this institute was just a small part of his grandiose plan to establish a network of research institutes for Nazi studies under the umbrella of an Academic Institute for Nazi Studies (Hohe Schule der NSDAP), for which he had received Hitler’s personal blessing. However, Hitler asked that Rosenberg begin with the establishment of a library and wait until after the war to establish the institute. Nevertheless, the institute in Frankfurt began to operate during the war and its library became the largest “Jewish Library” in Europe.

אנשי צוותי העבודה של רוזנברג ממיינים ספרים שנגנבו
Members of Rosenberg’s staff sorting through stolen books

Because Frankfurt was under bombardment, the institute sent most of the books to the town of Hungen, where American forces found them at the end of the war. In order to deal with these books and the many others that continued to surface in various storerooms and cellars, all the books were sent to the warehouse in Offenbach.

It was Benkowitz’s predecessor, another Jewish officer by the name of Seymour Pomrenze, who established the Offenbach Archival Depot (as it was known). A huge and daunting task lay ahead of him but within a short while he had the whole process of sorting and organizing the books up and running. In a matter of months, he was able to return roughly a million and a half books. Pomrenze was fortunate not to have to sort through all of them, as a large portion of the books, mainly from The Netherlands and France, were still in the crates from their original libraries. All he had to do was examine the crates and arrange for their return.

מימין: סימור פומרנץ; משמאל: אייזיק בנקוביץ
Left: Isaac Benkowitz, right: Seymour Pomrenze

Benkowitz, on the other hand, who had been Pomrenze’s assistant and right hand until the latter’s departure, knew that he would have to deal with hundreds of thousands of other books from all across Europe, each from a different place.

The majority of the books were from Jewish libraries and institutions, and some had stamps to that effect.

Benkowitz entered the huge sorting room, picked up a volume of the Talmud and saw the ex-libris of a communal rabbi from Lodz. He saw a book of Yiddish poetry that had recently been the property of a school library in Vilna. In a Jewish philosophy book in German, he found the stamp of a Jewish community library in Berlin.

Years later, Benkowitz would write in his memoirs:

There was something sad and mournful about these volumes … as if they were whispering a tale of yearning and hope since obliterated … I would find myself straightening out these books and arranging them in the boxes with a personal sense of tenderness as if they had belonged to someone dear to me, someone recently deceased

Benkowitz did not know then whether these books would actually be returned to the countries they had been stolen from. Was it possible that Germany would receive the books of the Jews they had murdered? That Soviet Ukraine would be given the prayer books from the now empty synagogues in Kiev?

Until he received a formal decision, Benkowitz was tasked with the work of sorting. Such a vast number of books required a professional and skilled staff. He had a team. The army had placed under his supervision German workers who were assigned a variety of jobs after the war. But these Germans weren’t librarians, most had no foreign language skills and did not know how to sort books. While a large portion of the books contained stamps bearing the owners’ names, the Germans weren’t able to read the names in Yiddish, Polish or any of the other languages.

עובדים גרמנים ממיינים ספרים במחסן באופנבך
Workers sorting books in the warehouse in Offenbach

 

אורזים את הספרים למשלוח חזרה לארצות מוצאם
Books being packaged to be sent to their countries of origin

Benkowitz had an idea. He and his team collected stamps that were found repeatedly in a variety of books in the storeroom. He photographed the stamps and pasted them into a large catalogue organized by country. There were countries with hundreds of stamps of institutions and single owners, and countries with smaller representation. The wording, shape or color of the stamps of some of the institutions had changed over the years, and Benkowitz made sure that all the variations appeared on the same page in the volume.

The German workers thus did not have to read the writing. They just had to identify the form of the stamp and the letters. In this way, hundreds of thousands of books were sorted into crates according to country. Benkowitz prepared two volumes containing thousands of stamps. The first volume contained stamps from Austria, France, Germany, The Netherlands and other countries in Western Europe. The second contained stamps from countries in Eastern Europe such as Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus and Ukraine as well as a detailed list of libraries in a number of cities.

שני כרכי הקטלוגים מתוך ארכיון הספרייה הלאומית

 

שני כרכי הקטלוגים מתוך ארכיון הספרייה הלאומית
The two stamp catalogs from the Offenbach warehouse, the National Library collections

The books were sorted with the help of these catalogs, but they were not necessarily returned to their countries of origin. In the years after the war, additional books were discovered. A large portion of these books eventually reached the National Library in Jerusalem through the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction organization, which took over responsibility for the Offenbach warehouse from the US Army. That is the reason that today we find books in the National Library bearing the stamp of the JCR and of the original library from where the books were stolen by the Nazis.

For example, here is a Midrash Rabbah book which can be identified as part of the collection of the Strashun Library in Vilnius, named after Rabbi Mattityahu Strashun. Warehouse workers who were incapable of reading the Hebrew letters could make use of the stamps collected in the Offenbach catalog. The book also contains JCR stamps.

מימין: חותמת בית עקד ספרים על שם שטראשון בקטלוג החותמות; משמאל: חותמת הספרייה
Right: the stamp of the Strashun Library in the Midrash Rabbah book, left: the same stamp as it appears in the Offenbach catalog.

Here is another example, featuring a book from the Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau, alongside the stamp used to identify the book’s origin. This stamp appears in the list of German stamps in the Offenbach catalog.

חותמת ספריית הסמינר היהודי בברסלאו
Right: the stamp of the Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau, left: the same stamp as it appears in the Offenbach catalog.

Like his predecessor, Benkowitz did not remain long in his post in the Offenbach warehouse, but during his time there he was able to sort through the identifiable books. There was no longer a need for the volumes with the stamps and he took them back with him to the United States. Shortly after, he decided to donate them to the National Library in Jerusalem and since May 1947 they have been kept in the Library’s archives. Copies of the volumes can be also found in the archive of Seymour Pomrenze, the first director of the Offenbach warehouse. His archive is preserved by the American Jewish Historical Society in New York and there are some who posit that it was actually Pomrenze who came up with the idea for the catalogs. Of course, it is possible that Pomrenze and Benkowitz came up with the idea together.

Today, seventy years later, these heavy tomes from the warehouse of looted books in Offenbach serve as a kind of obituary list. Not a list of names of those murdered in the Holocaust, whose final resting places remain unknown, but an eternal memorial of the Jewish schools, yeshivas, and community centers across Europe. Institutions in which the sounds of learning and of memorization were silenced by the Holocaust. The memory of these institutions is commemorated among the pages of these volumes and now online as well, following the digitization of these two books by experts at the National Library.

Volume I

Volume II

 

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From a Jewish Haven in Vienna to the Death Marches of the Holocaust

It was only when Leo saw the smoke from the crematorium that he understood that he would never see his father again.

luster

Moshe and Golda Luster, 1942. Photo courtesy of Centropa.

Before the First World War, Vienna, the seat of the old Habsburg dynasty, was the capital of a great multi-ethnic empire brimming with culture, art, and history. It’s where more than 175,000 Jews lived including textile salesman Moshe Luster and his wife Golda.

Moshe and Golda were married in Vienna in 1919 and in 1921, their first child, Helli, was born. Six years later, their son, Leo joined the family. The Lusters lived, like many other Jewish families, in Vienna’s second district, on 12 Schreygasse Street which was a Jewish world of its own. The children attended a religious school and the family attended the local synagogue on Shabbat and holidays. The Lusters enjoyed the cultural experiences Vienna had to offer and particularly loved going to the theatre together to watch the comedic films of the era. But as the years went by, the Lusters learned that the Jews had nothing to laugh about.

luster
Moses and Golda Luster’s wedding photo. Photo courtesy of Centropa.

Friday, March 11, 1938.

Moshe and Leo Luster were in the synagogue for traditional Shabbat prayers. On their way home, a neighbor stopped Moshe on the street and said, “Mr. Luster, something terrible has happened. Chancellor Schuschnigg (Chancellor of the Federal State of Austria) has resigned.” Moshe Luster knew at once: this was the beginning of the end.

Leo Luster
Leo Luster, 1935. Photo courtesy of Centropa.

The Austrian military had been instructed not to resist and the next day the Germans marched on Austria. The Viennese public quickly took up the cause and began wearing swastika armbands. Soon after, the Jews of Austria became a hunted minority. The beautiful multi-ethnic metropolis that was Vienna ceased to exist as the Nazi party took over the country and occupied all government functions.

The country’s Jews, including Moshe Luster, lost their jobs, their apartments, and their dignity. Eight months after the initial invasion of the Germans, the pogrom of Kristallnacht brought out the worst in a nation that had once been so accepting.

Moshe, Golda, and their children watched as their Viennese neighbors rioted.

They stood helplessly by as they burned synagogues and destroyed Jewish shops.

Thousands of Jewish men were arrested – Moshe was among them.

He was eventually released by the Nazis but was given strict orders not to speak of the horrors he experienced at the hands of his imprisoners or risk further trouble.

From December of 1938, the Jews were segregated from the rest of the city. Jewish children were required to attend separate schools and were not allowed to play in public parks. The Jewish community found the only solution available – they opened the Jewish cemetery as new playgrounds for the local children.

With their synagogue lying in ruins, the Luster family was forced to hold Leo’s bar mitzvah quietly in the family home, with the curtains drawn tight.

Jews began frantically fleeing Vienna, taking refuge wherever it was offered. Moshe managed to get Helli out of the country and sent her on her way to the Land of Israel. Leo and his parents were not so lucky.

On 24 September 1942, the Nazis deported Moshe, Golda, and Leo from Vienna. Leo was just 15 years old when he was forced into a crowded train car for the two-day journey to Theresienstadt

Theresienstadt
Postcard with a photo of Terezín before it became a Jewish ghetto. Photo courtesy of Centropa.

Terezín was originally built by Emperor Joseph II as a fortress in the 1780s, and after 1918, it was used by the Czechoslovakian army. The Nazis turned it into the Jewish ghetto of Theresienstadt and filled it with tens of thousands of people forced to live in squalor.

Leo was put to work in the kitchens. While the work was labor intensive, he was grateful to have enough to eat. Sometimes the youth was even able to smuggle rations out of the kitchen to his parents. Leo would watch as people were hauled out of the Ghetto in train car after train car. On September 28th, 1944, Leo, Moshe, and 2,500 others were added to the transport list.  Golda was left behind to fend with fates unknown.

Terezín
Postcard of Theresienstadt. Photo courtesy of Centropa.

Moshe and Leo spent two days traveling in a cramped cattle car. The train stopped suddenly in the middle of the night and the men were forced out of the car into a brightly lit area surrounded by electric fences where they were stripped of all their belongings. One by one they were forced to stand in front of an SS officer.

“What is your profession,” the officer asked Leo.

He wisely answered, “electrician.”

Leo was sent to one side, Moshe to the other. It was only a few hours later, when he saw the fires from the crematorium, that he understood that he would never see his father again.

Three weeks later, Leo was sent to a labor camp in Gliwice where he was forced to repair train cars. A few weeks later, on January 18, 1945, the SS officers gathered their prisoners and forced them to march through the terrible conditions of the dead of winter, barefoot and in tattered clothing. Those who could not go on were shot and left for dead.

Finally, they stopped marching. They had arrived at a camp called Blechhammer. The SS officers locked their prisoners in the barracks and set fire to the buildings. Those who tried to escape were shot. But Leo managed to hide and avoid the inferno that claimed the lives of his fellow prisoners.

After some time, Leo dared to sneak out of his hiding space. The Nazis were gone and Leo set off, walking along the street that led out of the camp in search of help. He came upon a group of trucks with red stars on their hoods. A Russian soldier approached him and Leo shouted out in Yiddish: “Yid, ja. Yid, Yid.” – I am a Jew.

The soldier looked at him and said, “Ja tosche Yid.” – I too am a Jew.

LEO LUSTER IN KATOWICE WITH POLES AND RUSSIAN SOLDIERS 1945
Leo Luster in Katowice with Polish and Russian soldiers in 1945. Photo courtesy of Centropa.

Leo guided the soldiers back to the smoldering ruins of the camp. The soldiers gave the surviving Jews food and water and cared for them. A few weeks later they made their way to Krakow, where they received identification documents from the Red Cross.

One day, a Russian officer turned to Leo and said, “The war is over, you can go wherever you want.”

Leo had but one mission in mind: to find out what became of his poor, beloved mother Golda who had been left behind to fend for herself.  He set out on his journey to Theresienstadt. He traveled by train and through the kindness of others who were willing to pick up a refugee hitchhiker. He arrived in the newly liberated Ghetto and immediately sought out those who would have information on Golda’s whereabouts.

Leo found Golda hiding in a tiny attic.

“Where is your father?” she asked.

For more on the story of Leo Luster, please visit the Centropa website.

This post was written as part of Gesher L’Europa, the NLI’s initiative to connect with Europe and make our collections available to diverse audiences in Europe and beyond.




 

Learning the Value of a Potato in the Holocaust

Sensing the dangerous sparks in the air, Miriam smuggled her family to Russia where they were forced to fend for themselves in a Siberian labor camp.

Hecht family

משפחת העכט (פירר) אחרי שהגיעו בשלום לניו יורק. משמאל נראים מרים וישרואל. יחיאל בשורהה העליונה, לצידה של מרים. באדיבות רו אורנים

We don’t know how old my grandfather was when he died in 2014.

He did not remember his birthdate and his birth certificate was destroyed along with everything else during the war. All he remembered was that it was warm out during his birthday celebrations as a child and that the celebrations always took place during the week when the Torah Portion of Bereshit would be read after the Jewish New Year. These memories seem to contradict – especially if you have ever examined the weather patterns in Poland.

Yechiel Hecht, my grandfather, was born to a religious Jewish family in Tsanz, Poland. His family moved to the town of Zagosh where his father, Yisroel Hecht-Firer, served as a well-respected community rabbi and worked as a Shochet, a ritual slaughterer. His wife Miriam was a strong, independent and intelligent woman who ran the home and worked alongside her husband as a Shochtke, a job not typically held by a woman, though she certainly did not let that affect her choices.

krakow
A street in Krakow before 1915, a postcard from the Folklore Research Center at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

In the early 1930s, with the rise of the Nazi party, Miriam felt a dangerous spark in the air. She felt instinctively unsettled by the extreme shifts in the political climate and could sense that it was only a matter of time before life would change forever in her hometown of Krakow.

Her intuitions proved undeniably correct when she was out in town running errands and faced a violent altercation with a Polish police officer. The officer shoved Miriam to the ground and shouted anti-Semitic slurs at her as she struggled to right herself.

That same day, Miriam decided her family was no longer safe in Poland and took it upon herself to remove them from the unknown dangers that lay ahead. She gathered every valuable she had in her possession and arranged for a truck to take her family from their home in Krakow over the Russian border to what she believed would be a safe location.  She begged her eight siblings who were also living in Europe to join her, to escape from the horrors that lay ahead but they refused, believing that it was just a passing phase that would fade into the pages of history.

Miriam, her husband, and five of their six children set out to start their new life in Russia. Leibish, their eldest son, was left behind to continue his religious studies in Yeshiva, a decision that ultimately led to his untimely death. When the Nazis invaded, the students were taken out to the courtyard, where they were shot. Leibish was among them.

The family made their way across the border, believing they had left their troubles behind – but trouble caught up with them when the war reached the Russian front. Over 200,000 Jews in Russia, Miriam, Yisroel and their children among them, were torn from their homes and sent to a Siberian work camp.  In this desolate, wintery wasteland, they were forced to fend for themselves. Hundreds of people found themselves living in the same building with nothing but a sheet to divide the spaces between families.

Yisroel was immediately singled out for suspicious activity as a practicing rabbi. He was separated from his family, imprisoned, and forced into a prison work crew where he was subjected to physical labor: chopping and collecting wood for the military.

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Miriam took the remaining valuables she had left after paying for passage to Russia and used them to barter with the local officials for wood to feed the fire in the stove in their building. That fire was the only thing that prevented the people living under that roof from freezing to death.

Yechiel, as the oldest remaining son, quickly became the man of the house.  With a mother and four siblings to protect and feed, he put his looks and talent for languages to work for him. Yechiel would wake up at the crack of dawn, put on what little warm clothing he had and hike for hours to a food distribution point where he would pose as a Russian citizen, standing in endless lines in the cold in the hopes of bringing home a hunk of dry bread to feed his starving family.

On the days when he actually managed to get a piece of bread, he faced a treacherous walk back to his building where he was forced to contend, not only with the freezing temperatures but also with muggers and vandals on the road who would accost him and steal his meager rations putting his hours of effort to waste. Beyond the stale bread, the family only ate what they could scrounge up from the fallow fields, usually a lone potato or forgotten onion that they would use to make a watery soup that could feed the crowd living in their shared space.

hechts
The Hecht (Firer) Family after their safe arrival in New York City. Miriam and Yisroel are on the left. Yechiel is in the top row standing next to Miriam. Courtesy of Ro Oranim

It was in this way that the Firer family survived the war – on instinct, with endless determination and resistance against those who had left them for dead. After the war, the family managed to reconnect with Yisroel and, after a few months in a displaced person camp where Yechiel and his brother were treated for exposure to Tuberculosis, with their papers proving their Polish citizenship, the Firer family was offered passage to either Palestine or America. Miriam was through with the idea of pioneering and the family chose to join her brother who had emigrated from Poland to New York City in 1920. When they arrived in America, grieving and broken from the horrors they had faced, the family changed their surname to Hecht, Yisroel’s mother’s maiden name, to avoid the associations the word Firer could bring up.

hechts
Yechiel Hecht and his new bride, Judith. Courtesy of Ro Oranim

The Hecht family reestablished themselves and built a new life in America. Yechiel got married, had five children, 26 grandchildren and an ever-growing number of great-grandchildren. He never forgot his experiences in the war and, until the day he died, he held a great appreciation for a basic piece of bread and a simple potato which graced his table at every meal so he could say a blessing on the very items that spared his life in the frozen tundra of Siberia.

This post was written as part of Gesher L’Europa, the NLI’s initiative to connect with Europe and make our collections available to diverse audiences in Europe and beyond.

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What Would You Serve at a Passover Seder During the Korean War?

The soldiers who participated in Operation Matzo were probably grateful both for the welcoming service and for the food that reminded them of home.

Soldiers celebrating Passover in Seoul, South Korea, 1952. Photo courtesy of the American Jewish Historical Society.

Soldiers celebrating Passover in Seoul, South Korea, 1952. Photo courtesy of: The American Jewish Historical Society.

If you were hosting six hundred people at a Seder during the Korean War, what would you serve for the Seder meal? According to a menu that appears in a Haggadah printed for American troops in Korea in 1952, the correct answer is matzah, kosher wine, gefilte fish, chicken soup with kneidlach (matzah balls), and finally, macaroons for dessert.

It’s not so hard to imagine the challenges in providing an elaborate, traditional Jewish meal to hundreds of soldiers in the middle of a remote war zone. This festive meal was made possible by a coordinated effort of Jews and gentiles, soldiers and civilians, and people on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.

הגדה קוריאה
Haggadah used for the Passover Seder by the Jewish American troops in Korea in 1952. From the National Library of Israel Collections.

The Chaplains: The Seder was organized and officiated by two Jewish chaplains, who also were the authors of the Haggadah. Herbert Chanan Brichto, a recently ordained Reform rabbi who began his rabbinic career as a chaplain in Korea, dubbed their efforts “Operation Matzo.” His colleague, Harry Z. Schreiner, also a Reform rabbi, had served in two congregations before becoming a chaplain. Schreiner would go on to an illustrious career in the military, receiving several awards for his service. But in a 1951 interview with a Jewish newspaper, he proudly reported that he had become “the biggest scrounger in Korea”, which was probably his most relevant skill for this particular operation.

The Jewish Organization: Back home in the United States, this Seder was business as usual for the Jewish Welfare Board (JWB), founded in 1917 to serve Jews in the military. According to a JWB document from World War II, the organization had already sent supplies and educational materials to chaplains organizing Seders in dozens of countries all over the world, many of them large-scale events.

The General: The Seder efforts enjoyed the full support of the United States Army, which has a policy of accommodating the diverse religious needs of its troops. The US Army granted Jewish soldiers time off for the celebration, moved army operations out of the abandoned schoolhouse in Seoul that the chaplains chose as the location for their Seder, and transported the soldiers from all over Korea to that location. But they also showed their encouragement in ways that went well beyond mere accommodation. The Haggadah begins with two pages of Passover greetings from the top military brass stationed in Korea. Many high ranking officers also attended the Seder.

הגדה קוריאה

It’s possible that some of these enthusiastically supportive officers felt a connection between Passover as a holiday of freedom and their larger mission in the Korean War. The Korean War (1950-1953), in which American and other troops helped South Korea repel an invasion by Communist North Korea, was seen by Americans as part of a global struggle against Communism – a fight for values of democracy and freedom.

The highest ranking officer to attend the Seder was General F.F. Everest, the commanding general of the US Fifth Air Force, who delivered an address to the soldiers as part of the festivities. We have no record of what he said at the Seder, but in his greetings inside the Haggadah he wrote:

Even as the Ancient Hebrew people answered the call of freedom symbolized by Passover, we too must heed its voice and stand fast in preserving freedom’s principles for the world of our time.

A Unique Haggadah

The Haggadah compiled for this event by Rabbis Brichto and Schreiner is the only Haggadah in the National Library of Israel’s vast Haggadah collection to be written and published in Korea. The 32-page booklet contains photo offsets of Haggadah texts from other Haggadot, but there are also various songs and dedications typed in by the chaplains. The Haggadah’s cover is decorated with hand-drawn insignias of the main military units involved in the Seder, with the insignia of the Jewish chaplaincy in the middle. A schedule printed on the back mentions only one Seder on the first night but shows that prayer services took place for three days, from Passover Eve until the second day of the holiday.

הגדה קוריאה
A page inside the Haggadah used by the Jewish American troops in Korea in 1952. The Hebrew text was printed upside down. From the National Library of Israel Collections.

Preparing a Haggadah in Korea must not have been simple: a page in which the Hebrew text appears upside down illustrates the challenges of working with local printers who were not familiar with Jewish text. However, in his recollections in the 1962 book “Rabbis in Uniform,” Brichto describes the Seder, and the Haggadah, as a great success:

The Seder began with the Cantor’s magnificent rendition of the Kiddush. Thanks to the Haggadah which we had specifically prepared and published in Korea, the service was smooth, dignified, and inspiring. Although the power failed, the service continued without interruption. From the stage we were awed by the sight of that huge auditorium, extending almost without end in all directions, ablaze with the light of thousands of candles.

Tradition and Innovation

The Korean Haggadah is designed to appeal to soldiers from a variety of Jewish backgrounds. While some prayers and songs, such as the Kiddush at the beginning, appear in the original Hebrew, the bulk of the readings and many of the prayers are in English. The chaplains typed in popular Hebrew Seder songs transliterated into English so everyone could join in.

הגדה קוריאה
Passover Seder menu from inside the Haggadah used during the Korean War by  Jewish American troops. From the National Library of Israel Collections.

The soldiers who participated in Operation Matzo were probably grateful both for the welcoming service and for the food that reminded them of home. But like so many Seders, often the most special part is the opportunity to be with family. Brichto recalls:

There were many highlights to this first Seder, not the least being the superb meal… but the heartwarming scenes were the reunions. Captain Dunn of the 45th division came up to the platform to ask that an announcement be made, “Is Captain Dunn’s brother here tonight?” Came the ecstatic answer from the rear of the auditorium, “Here I am, Jimmy!” And there were other equally moving reunions. Brother met brother and uncle found nephew at that Passover Seder in Korea.

 

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