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Abraham Sutzkever (Yiddish: אַבֿרהם סוצקעווער — Avrom Sutskever; Hebrew: אברהם סוצקבר; July 15, 1913 – January 20, 2010) was an acclaimed Yiddish poet.[1] The New York Times wrote that Sutzkever was "the greatest poet of the Holocaust."[2]
Contents
1 Biography
2 Literary career
3 Works
4 Works in English translation
5 Awards and recognition
6 Recordings
7 Compositions
8 See also
9 References
10 Further reading
11 External links
Biography
Abraham (Avrom) Sutzkever was born on July 15, 1913, in Smorgon, Vilna Governorate, Russian Empire, now Smarhon’, Belarus. During World War I, his family moved to Omsk, Siberia, where his father, Hertz Sutzkever, died. In 1921, his mother, Rayne (née Fainberg), moved the family to Vilnius, where Sutzkever attended cheder.
Sutzkever attended the Polish Jewish high school Herzliah, audited university classes in Polish literature, and was introduced by a friend to Russian poetry. His earliest poems were written in Hebrew.[3]
In 1930 Sutzkever joined the Jewish scouting organization, Bin ("Bee"), in whose magazine he published his first piece. There he also met with wife Freydke. In 1933, he became part of the writers’ and artists’ group Yung-Vilne, along with fellow poets Shmerke Kaczerginski, Chaim Grade, and Leyzer Volf.[4]
He married Freydke in 1939, a day before the start of World War II.[5]
In 1941, following the Nazi occupation of Vilnius, Sutzkever and his wife were sent to the Vilna Ghetto. Sutzkever and his friends hid a diary by Theodor Herzl, drawings by Marc Chagall and Alexander Bogen, and other treasured works behind plaster and brick walls in the ghetto.[4] His mother and newborn son were murdered by the Nazis.[4] On September 12, 1943, he and his wife escaped to the forests, and together with fellow Yiddish poet Shmerke Kaczerginski, he fought the occupying forces as a partisan.[6] Sutzkever joined a Jewish unit and was smuggled into the Soviet Union.[4]
Sutzkever's 1943 narrative poem, Kol Nidre, reached the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in Moscow, whose members included Ilya Ehrenburg and Solomon Mikhoels, as well as the exiled future president of Soviet Lithuania, Justas Paleckis. They implored the Kremlin to rescue him. So an aircraft located Sutzkever and Freydke in March 1944, and flew them to Moscow, where their daughter, Rina, was born.[7]
10:22
Sutzkever testifies before the International Military Tribunal, 27 February 1946
In February 1946, he was called up as a witness at the Nuremberg trials, testifying against Franz Murer, the murderer of his mother and son. After a brief sojourn in Poland and Paris, he emigrated to Mandatory Palestine, arriving in Tel Aviv in 1947.[7]
In 1947, his family arrived in Tel Aviv. Within two years, Sutzkever founded Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain).[7]
Sutzkever was a keen traveller, touring South American jungles and African savannahs, where the sight of elephants and the song of a Basotho chief inspired more Yiddish verse.[7]
Belatedly, in 1985 Sutzkever became the first Yiddish writer to win the prestigious Israel Prize for his literature. An English compendium appeared in 1991.[7]
Freydke died in 2003. Rina and another daughter, Mira, survive him, along with two grandchildren.[7]
Abraham Sutzkever died on January 20, 2010, in Tel Aviv at the age of 96.[8][9]
Literary career
Sutzkever wrote poetry from an early age, initially in Hebrew. He published his first poem in Bin, the Jewish scouts magazine. Sutzkever was among the Modernist writers and artists of the Yung Vilne ("Young Vilna") group in the early 1930s. In 1937, his first volume of Yiddish poetry, Lider (Songs), was published by the Yiddish PEN International Club;[4] a second, Valdiks (Of the Forest; 1940), appeared after he moved from Warsaw, during the interval of Lithuanian autonomy.[3]
In Moscow, he wrote a chronicle of his experiences in the Vilna ghetto (Fun vilner geto,1946), a poetry collection Lider fun geto (1946; “Songs from the Ghetto”) and began Geheymshtot ("Secret City",1948), an epic poem about Jews hiding in the sewers of Vilna.[4][10]
Works
Di festung (1945; “The Fortress”)
About a Herring (1946)[11][12]
Yidishe gas (1948; “Jewish Street”)
Sibir (1953; "Siberia")
In midber Sinai (1957; "In the Sinai Desert")
Di fidlroyz (1974; "The Fiddle Rose: Poems 1970–1972")
Griner akvaryum (1975; “Green Aquarium”)
Fun alte un yunge ksav-yadn (1982; "Laughter Beneath the Forest: Poems from Old and New Manuscripts")[10]
In 1949, Sutzkever founded the Yiddish literary quarterly Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain), Israel's only Yiddish literary quarterly, which he edited until its demise in 1995. Sutzkever resuscitated the careers of Yiddish writers from Europe, the Americas, the Soviet Union and Israel. Official Zionism, however, dismissed Yiddish as a defeatist diaspora argot. "They will not uproot my tongue," he retorted. "I shall wake all generations with my roar."[7]
Sutzkever's poetry was translated into Hebrew by Nathan Alterman, Avraham Shlonsky and Leah Goldberg. In the 1930s, his work was translated into Russian by Boris Pasternak.[13]
Works in English translation
Siberia: A Poem, translated by Jacob Sonntag in 1961, part of the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works.[14]
Burnt Pearls : Ghetto Poems of Abraham Sutzkever, translated from the Yiddish by Seymour Mayne; introduction by Ruth R. Wisse. Oakville, Ont.: Mosaic Press, 1981. ISBN 0-88962-142-X
The Fiddle Rose: Poems, 1970-1972, Abraham Sutzkever; selected and translated by Ruth Whitman; drawings by Marc Chagall; introduction by Ruth R. Wisse. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990. ISBN 0-8143-2001-5
A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, translated from the Yiddish by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav; with an introduction by Benjamin Harshav. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. ISBN 0-520-06539-5
Laughter Beneath the Forest : Poems from Old and Recent Manuscripts by Abraham Sutzkever; translated from the Yiddish by Barnett Zumoff; with an introductory essay by Emanuel S. Goldsmith. Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing, 1996. ISBN 0-88125-555-6
Sutzkever Essential Prose; translated from the Yiddish by Zackary Sholem Berger (A Yiddish Book Center Translation); with an introduction by Heather Valencia. Amherst, MA: White Goat Press, 2020. ISBN 978-1-7343872-6-1
Awards and recognition
In 1969, Surzkever was awarded the Itzik Manger Prize for Yiddish literature.[15]
In 1985, Sutzkever was awarded the Israel Prize for Yiddish literature.[16] Sutkever's poems have been translated into 30 languages.[17]
Recordings
Hilda Bronstein, A Vogn Shikh, lyrics by Avrom Sutzkever, music by Tomas Novotny Yiddish Songs Old and New, ARC Records
Karsten Troyke, Leg den Kopf auf meine Knie, lyrics by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, Itzik Manger and Abraham Sutzkever, music by Karsten Troyke
Abraham Sutzkever, The Poetry of Abraham Sutzkever (Vilno Poet): Read in Yiddish, produced by Ruth Wise on Folkways Records
Compositions
"The Twin-Sisters" - "Der Tsvilingl", music by Daniel Galay, text by Avrum Sutzkever. Narrator (Yiddish) Michael Ben-Avraham, The Israeli String Quartet for Contemporary Music (Violin, Viola, Cello), percussion, piano. First performance: Tel-Aviv 2/10/2003 on the 90th birthday of Avrum Sutzkever.
"The Seed of Dream",[18] music by Lori Laitman,[19] based on poems by Abraham Sutzkever as translated by C.K. Williams and Leonard Wolf. Commissioned by The Music of Remembrance[20] organization in Seattle. First performed in May 2005 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle by baritone Erich Parce, pianist Mina Miller, and cellist Amos Yang. Recent performance on January 28, 2008, by the Chamber Music Society of Southwest Florida[21] by mezzo-soprano Janelle McCoy,[22] cellist Adam Satinsky[23] and pianist Bella Gutshtein of the Russian Music Salon.
Sutzkever's poem "Poezye" was set to music by composer Alex Weiser as a part of his song cycle "and all the days were purple."[24]
See also
List of Israel Prize recipients
Alexander Bogen
Paper Brigade ***** Abraham Sutzkever (Yiddish: אַבֿרהם סוצקעווער — Avrom Sutskever; Hebrew: אברהם סוצקבר; July 15, 1913 – January 20, 2010) was an acclaimed Yiddish poet.[1] The New York Times wrote that Sutzkever was "the greatest poet of the Holocaust."[2]
Contents
1 Biography
2 Literary career
3 Works
4 Works in English translation
5 Awards and recognition
6 Recordings
7 Compositions
8 See also
9 References
10 Further reading
11 External links
Biography
Abraham (Avrom) Sutzkever was born on July 15, 1913, in Smorgon, Vilna Governorate, Russian Empire, now Smarhon’, Belarus. During World War I, his family moved to Omsk, Siberia, where his father, Hertz Sutzkever, died. In 1921, his mother, Rayne (née Fainberg), moved the family to Vilnius, where Sutzkever attended cheder.
Sutzkever attended the Polish Jewish high school Herzliah, audited university classes in Polish literature, and was introduced by a friend to Russian poetry. His earliest poems were written in Hebrew.[3]
In 1930 Sutzkever joined the Jewish scouting organization, Bin ("Bee"), in whose magazine he published his first piece. There he also met with wife Freydke. In 1933, he became part of the writers’ and artists’ group Yung-Vilne, along with fellow poets Shmerke Kaczerginski, Chaim Grade, and Leyzer Volf.[4]
He married Freydke in 1939, a day before the start of World War II.[5]
In 1941, following the Nazi occupation of Vilnius, Sutzkever and his wife were sent to the Vilna Ghetto. Sutzkever and his friends hid a diary by Theodor Herzl, drawings by Marc Chagall and Alexander Bogen, and other treasured works behind plaster and brick walls in the ghetto.[4] His mother and newborn son were murdered by the Nazis.[4] On September 12, 1943, he and his wife escaped to the forests, and together with fellow Yiddish poet Shmerke Kaczerginski, he fought the occupying forces as a partisan.[6] Sutzkever joined a Jewish unit and was smuggled into the Soviet Union.[4]
Sutzkever's 1943 narrative poem, Kol Nidre, reached the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in Moscow, whose members included Ilya Ehrenburg and Solomon Mikhoels, as well as the exiled future president of Soviet Lithuania, Justas Paleckis. They implored the Kremlin to rescue him. So an aircraft located Sutzkever and Freydke in March 1944, and flew them to Moscow, where their daughter, Rina, was born.[7]
10:22
Sutzkever testifies before the International Military Tribunal, 27 February 1946
In February 1946, he was called up as a witness at the Nuremberg trials, testifying against Franz Murer, the murderer of his mother and son. After a brief sojourn in Poland and Paris, he emigrated to Mandatory Palestine, arriving in Tel Aviv in 1947.[7]
In 1947, his family arrived in Tel Aviv. Within two years, Sutzkever founded Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain).[7]
Sutzkever was a keen traveller, touring South American jungles and African savannahs, where the sight of elephants and the song of a Basotho chief inspired more Yiddish verse.[7]
Belatedly, in 1985 Sutzkever became the first Yiddish writer to win the prestigious Israel Prize for his literature. An English compendium appeared in 1991.[7]
Freydke died in 2003. Rina and another daughter, Mira, survive him, along with two grandchildren.[7]
Abraham Sutzkever died on January 20, 2010, in Tel Aviv at the age of 96.[8][9]
Literary career
Sutzkever wrote poetry from an early age, initially in Hebrew. He published his first poem in Bin, the Jewish scouts magazine. Sutzkever was among the Modernist writers and artists of the Yung Vilne ("Young Vilna") group in the early 1930s. In 1937, his first volume of Yiddish poetry, Lider (Songs), was published by the Yiddish PEN International Club;[4] a second, Valdiks (Of the Forest; 1940), appeared after he moved from Warsaw, during the interval of Lithuanian autonomy.[3]
In Moscow, he wrote a chronicle of his experiences in the Vilna ghetto (Fun vilner geto,1946), a poetry collection Lider fun geto (1946; “Songs from the Ghetto”) and began Geheymshtot ("Secret City",1948), an epic poem about Jews hiding in the sewers of Vilna.[4][10]
Works
Di festung (1945; “The Fortress”)
About a Herring (1946)[11][12]
Yidishe gas (1948; “Jewish Street”)
Sibir (1953; "Siberia")
In midber Sinai (1957; "In the Sinai Desert")
Di fidlroyz (1974; "The Fiddle Rose: Poems 1970–1972")
Griner akvaryum (1975; “Green Aquarium”)
Fun alte un yunge ksav-yadn (1982; "Laughter Beneath the Forest: Poems from Old and New Manuscripts")[10]
In 1949, Sutzkever founded the Yiddish literary quarterly Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain), Israel's only Yiddish literary quarterly, which he edited until its demise in 1995. Sutzkever resuscitated the careers of Yiddish writers from Europe, the Americas, the Soviet Union and Israel. Official Zionism, however, dismissed Yiddish as a defeatist diaspora argot. "They will not uproot my tongue," he retorted. "I shall wake all generations with my roar."[7]
Sutzkever's poetry was translated into Hebrew by Nathan Alterman, Avraham Shlonsky and Leah Goldberg. In the 1930s, his work was translated into Russian by Boris Pasternak.[13]
Works in English translation
Siberia: A Poem, translated by Jacob Sonntag in 1961, part of the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works.[14]
Burnt Pearls : Ghetto Poems of Abraham Sutzkever, translated from the Yiddish by Seymour Mayne; introduction by Ruth R. Wisse. Oakville, Ont.: Mosaic Press, 1981. ISBN 0-88962-142-X
The Fiddle Rose: Poems, 1970-1972, Abraham Sutzkever; selected and translated by Ruth Whitman; drawings by Marc Chagall; introduction by Ruth R. Wisse. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990. ISBN 0-8143-2001-5
A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, translated from the Yiddish by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav; with an introduction by Benjamin Harshav. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. ISBN 0-520-06539-5
Laughter Beneath the Forest : Poems from Old and Recent Manuscripts by Abraham Sutzkever; translated from the Yiddish by Barnett Zumoff; with an introductory essay by Emanuel S. Goldsmith. Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing, 1996. ISBN 0-88125-555-6
Sutzkever Essential Prose; translated from the Yiddish by Zackary Sholem Berger (A Yiddish Book Center Translation); with an introduction by Heather Valencia. Amherst, MA: White Goat Press, 2020. ISBN 978-1-7343872-6-1
Awards and recognition
In 1969, Surzkever was awarded the Itzik Manger Prize for Yiddish literature.[15]
In 1985, Sutzkever was awarded the Israel Prize for Yiddish literature.[16] Sutkever's poems have been translated into 30 languages.[17]
Recordings
Hilda Bronstein, A Vogn Shikh, lyrics by Avrom Sutzkever, music by Tomas Novotny Yiddish Songs Old and New, ARC Records
Karsten Troyke, Leg den Kopf auf meine Knie, lyrics by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, Itzik Manger and Abraham Sutzkever, music by Karsten Troyke
Abraham Sutzkever, The Poetry of Abraham Sutzkever (Vilno Poet): Read in Yiddish, produced by Ruth Wise on Folkways Records
Compositions
"The Twin-Sisters" - "Der Tsvilingl", music by Daniel Galay, text by Avrum Sutzkever. Narrator (Yiddish) Michael Ben-Avraham, The Israeli String Quartet for Contemporary Music (Violin, Viola, Cello), percussion, piano. First performance: Tel-Aviv 2/10/2003 on the 90th birthday of Avrum Sutzkever.
"The Seed of Dream",[18] music by Lori Laitman,[19] based on poems by Abraham Sutzkever as translated by C.K. Williams and Leonard Wolf. Commissioned by The Music of Remembrance[20] organization in Seattle. First performed in May 2005 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle by baritone Erich Parce, pianist Mina Miller, and cellist Amos Yang. Recent performance on January 28, 2008, by the Chamber Music Society of Southwest Florida[21] by mezzo-soprano Janelle McCoy,[22] cellist Adam Satinsky[23] and pianist Bella Gutshtein of the Russian Music Salon.
Sutzkever's poem "Poezye" was set to music by composer Alex Weiser as a part of his song cycle "and all the days were purple."[24]
See also
List of Israel Prize recipients
Alexander Bogen
Paper Brigade *** Abraham Sutzkever (Yiddish: אַבֿרהם סוצקעווער — Avrom Sutskever; Hebrew: אברהם סוצקבר; July 15, 1913 – January 20, 2010) was an acclaimed Yiddish poet.[1] The New York Times wrote that Sutzkever was "the greatest poet of the Holocaust."[2]
Contents
1 Biography
2 Literary career
3 Works
4 Works in English translation
5 Awards and recognition
6 Recordings
7 Compositions
8 See also
9 References
10 Further reading
11 External links
Biography
Abraham (Avrom) Sutzkever was born on July 15, 1913, in Smorgon, Vilna Governorate, Russian Empire, now Smarhon’, Belarus. During World War I, his family moved to Omsk, Siberia, where his father, Hertz Sutzkever, died. In 1921, his mother, Rayne (née Fainberg), moved the family to Vilnius, where Sutzkever attended cheder.
Sutzkever attended the Polish Jewish high school Herzliah, audited university classes in Polish literature, and was introduced by a friend to Russian poetry. His earliest poems were written in Hebrew.[3]
In 1930 Sutzkever joined the Jewish scouting organization, Bin ("Bee"), in whose magazine he published his first piece. There he also met with wife Freydke. In 1933, he became part of the writers’ and artists’ group Yung-Vilne, along with fellow poets Shmerke Kaczerginski, Chaim Grade, and Leyzer Volf.[4]
He married Freydke in 1939, a day before the start of World War II.[5]
In 1941, following the Nazi occupation of Vilnius, Sutzkever and his wife were sent to the Vilna Ghetto. Sutzkever and his friends hid a diary by Theodor Herzl, drawings by Marc Chagall and Alexander Bogen, and other treasured works behind plaster and brick walls in the ghetto.[4] His mother and newborn son were murdered by the Nazis.[4] On September 12, 1943, he and his wife escaped to the forests, and together with fellow Yiddish poet Shmerke Kaczerginski, he fought the occupying forces as a partisan.[6] Sutzkever joined a Jewish unit and was smuggled into the Soviet Union.[4]
Sutzkever's 1943 narrative poem, Kol Nidre, reached the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in Moscow, whose members included Ilya Ehrenburg and Solomon Mikhoels, as well as the exiled future president of Soviet Lithuania, Justas Paleckis. They implored the Kremlin to rescue him. So an aircraft located Sutzkever and Freydke in March 1944, and flew them to Moscow, where their daughter, Rina, was born.[7]
10:22
Sutzkever testifies before the International Military Tribunal, 27 February 1946
In February 1946, he was called up as a witness at the Nuremberg trials, testifying against Franz Murer, the murderer of his mother and son. After a brief sojourn in Poland and Paris, he emigrated to Mandatory Palestine, arriving in Tel Aviv in 1947.[7]
In 1947, his family arrived in Tel Aviv. Within two years, Sutzkever founded Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain).[7]
Sutzkever was a keen traveller, touring South American jungles and African savannahs, where the sight of elephants and the song of a Basotho chief inspired more Yiddish verse.[7]
Belatedly, in 1985 Sutzkever became the first Yiddish writer to win the prestigious Israel Prize for his literature. An English compendium appeared in 1991.[7]
Freydke died in 2003. Rina and another daughter, Mira, survive him, along with two grandchildren.[7]
Abraham Sutzkever died on January 20, 2010, in Tel Aviv at the age of 96.[8][9]
Literary career
Sutzkever wrote poetry from an early age, initially in Hebrew. He published his first poem in Bin, the Jewish scouts magazine. Sutzkever was among the Modernist writers and artists of the Yung Vilne ("Young Vilna") group in the early 1930s. In 1937, his first volume of Yiddish poetry, Lider (Songs), was published by the Yiddish PEN International Club;[4] a second, Valdiks (Of the Forest; 1940), appeared after he moved from Warsaw, during the interval of Lithuanian autonomy.[3]
In Moscow, he wrote a chronicle of his experiences in the Vilna ghetto (Fun vilner geto,1946), a poetry collection Lider fun geto (1946; “Songs from the Ghetto”) and began Geheymshtot ("Secret City",1948), an epic poem about Jews hiding in the sewers of Vilna.[4][10]
Works
Di festung (1945; “The Fortress”)
About a Herring (1946)[11][12]
Yidishe gas (1948; “Jewish Street”)
Sibir (1953; "Siberia")
In midber Sinai (1957; "In the Sinai Desert")
Di fidlroyz (1974; "The Fiddle Rose: Poems 1970–1972")
Griner akvaryum (1975; “Green Aquarium”)
Fun alte un yunge ksav-yadn (1982; "Laughter Beneath the Forest: Poems from Old and New Manuscripts")[10]
In 1949, Sutzkever founded the Yiddish literary quarterly Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain), Israel's only Yiddish literary quarterly, which he edited until its demise in 1995. Sutzkever resuscitated the careers of Yiddish writers from Europe, the Americas, the Soviet Union and Israel. Official Zionism, however, dismissed Yiddish as a defeatist diaspora argot. "They will not uproot my tongue," he retorted. "I shall wake all generations with my roar."[7]
Sutzkever's poetry was translated into Hebrew by Nathan Alterman, Avraham Shlonsky and Leah Goldberg. In the 1930s, his work was translated into Russian by Boris Pasternak.[13]
Works in English translation
Siberia: A Poem, translated by Jacob Sonntag in 1961, part of the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works.[14]
Burnt Pearls : Ghetto Poems of Abraham Sutzkever, translated from the Yiddish by Seymour Mayne; introduction by Ruth R. Wisse. Oakville, Ont.: Mosaic Press, 1981. ISBN 0-88962-142-X
The Fiddle Rose: Poems, 1970-1972, Abraham Sutzkever; selected and translated by Ruth Whitman; drawings by Marc Chagall; introduction by Ruth R. Wisse. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990. ISBN 0-8143-2001-5
A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, translated from the Yiddish by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav; with an introduction by Benjamin Harshav. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. ISBN 0-520-06539-5
Laughter Beneath the Forest : Poems from Old and Recent Manuscripts by Abraham Sutzkever; translated from the Yiddish by Barnett Zumoff; with an introductory essay by Emanuel S. Goldsmith. Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing, 1996. ISBN 0-88125-555-6
Sutzkever Essential Prose; translated from the Yiddish by Zackary Sholem Berger (A Yiddish Book Center Translation); with an introduction by Heather Valencia. Amherst, MA: White Goat Press, 2020. ISBN 978-1-7343872-6-1
Awards and recognition
In 1969, Surzkever was awarded the Itzik Manger Prize for Yiddish literature.[15]
In 1985, Sutzkever was awarded the Israel Prize for Yiddish literature.[16] Sutkever's poems have been translated into 30 languages.[17]
Recordings
Hilda Bronstein, A Vogn Shikh, lyrics by Avrom Sutzkever, music by Tomas Novotny Yiddish Songs Old and New, ARC Records
Karsten Troyke, Leg den Kopf auf meine Knie, lyrics by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, Itzik Manger and Abraham Sutzkever, music by Karsten Troyke
Abraham Sutzkever, The Poetry of Abraham Sutzkever (Vilno Poet): Read in Yiddish, produced by Ruth Wise on Folkways Records
Compositions
"The Twin-Sisters" - "Der Tsvilingl", music by Daniel Galay, text by Avrum Sutzkever. Narrator (Yiddish) Michael Ben-Avraham, The Israeli String Quartet for Contemporary Music (Violin, Viola, Cello), percussion, piano. First performance: Tel-Aviv 2/10/2003 on the 90th birthday of Avrum Sutzkever.
"The Seed of Dream",[18] music by Lori Laitman,[19] based on poems by Abraham Sutzkever as translated by C.K. Williams and Leonard Wolf. Commissioned by The Music of Remembrance[20] organization in Seattle. First performed in May 2005 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle by baritone Erich Parce, pianist Mina Miller, and cellist Amos Yang. Recent performance on January 28, 2008, by the Chamber Music Society of Southwest Florida[21] by mezzo-soprano Janelle McCoy,[22] cellist Adam Satinsky[23] and pianist Bella Gutshtein of the Russian Music Salon.
Sutzkever's poem "Poezye" was set to music by composer Alex Weiser as a part of his song cycle "and all the days were purple."[24]
See also
List of Israel Prize recipients
Alexander Bogen
Paper Brigade Abraham Sutzkever (Yiddish: אַבֿרהם סוצקעווער — Avrom Sutskever; Hebrew: אברהם סוצקבר; July 15, 1913 – January 20, 2010) was an acclaimed Yiddish poet.[1] The New York Times wrote that Sutzkever was "the greatest poet of the Holocaust."[2]
Contents
1 Biography
2 Literary career
3 Works
4 Works in English translation
5 Awards and recognition
6 Recordings
7 Compositions
8 See also
9 References
10 Further reading
11 External links
Biography
Abraham (Avrom) Sutzkever was born on July 15, 1913, in Smorgon, Vilna Governorate, Russian Empire, now Smarhon’, Belarus. During World War I, his family moved to Omsk, Siberia, where his father, Hertz Sutzkever, died. In 1921, his mother, Rayne (née Fainberg), moved the family to Vilnius, where Sutzkever attended cheder.
Sutzkever attended the Polish Jewish high school Herzliah, audited university classes in Polish literature, and was introduced by a friend to Russian poetry. His earliest poems were written in Hebrew.[3]
In 1930 Sutzkever joined the Jewish scouting organization, Bin ("Bee"), in whose magazine he published his first piece. There he also met with wife Freydke. In 1933, he became part of the writers’ and artists’ group Yung-Vilne, along with fellow poets Shmerke Kaczerginski, Chaim Grade, and Leyzer Volf.[4]
He married Freydke in 1939, a day before the start of World War II.[5]
In 1941, following the Nazi occupation of Vilnius, Sutzkever and his wife were sent to the Vilna Ghetto. Sutzkever and his friends hid a diary by Theodor Herzl, drawings by Marc Chagall and Alexander Bogen, and other treasured works behind plaster and brick walls in the ghetto.[4] His mother and newborn son were murdered by the Nazis.[4] On September 12, 1943, he and his wife escaped to the forests, and together with fellow Yiddish poet Shmerke Kaczerginski, he fought the occupying forces as a partisan.[6] Sutzkever joined a Jewish unit and was smuggled into the Soviet Union.[4]
Sutzkever's 1943 narrative poem, Kol Nidre, reached the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in Moscow, whose members included Ilya Ehrenburg and Solomon Mikhoels, as well as the exiled future president of Soviet Lithuania, Justas Paleckis. They implored the Kremlin to rescue him. So an aircraft located Sutzkever and Freydke in March 1944, and flew them to Moscow, where their daughter, Rina, was born.[7]
10:22
Sutzkever testifies before the International Military Tribunal, 27 February 1946
In February 1946, he was called up as a witness at the Nuremberg trials, testifying against Franz Murer, the murderer of his mother and son. After a brief sojourn in Poland and Paris, he emigrated to Mandatory Palestine, arriving in Tel Aviv in 1947.[7]
In 1947, his family arrived in Tel Aviv. Within two years, Sutzkever founded Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain).[7]
Sutzkever was a keen traveller, touring South American jungles and African savannahs, where the sight of elephants and the song of a Basotho chief inspired more Yiddish verse.[7]
Belatedly, in 1985 Sutzkever became the first Yiddish writer to win the prestigious Israel Prize for his literature. An English compendium appeared in 1991.[7]
Freydke died in 2003. Rina and another daughter, Mira, survive him, along with two grandchildren.[7]
Abraham Sutzkever died on January 20, 2010, in Tel Aviv at the age of 96.[8][9]
Literary career
Sutzkever wrote poetry from an early age, initially in Hebrew. He published his first poem in Bin, the Jewish scouts magazine. Sutzkever was among the Modernist writers and artists of the Yung Vilne ("Young Vilna") group in the early 1930s. In 1937, his first volume of Yiddish poetry, Lider (Songs), was published by the Yiddish PEN International Club;[4] a second, Valdiks (Of the Forest; 1940), appeared after he moved from Warsaw, during the interval of Lithuanian autonomy.[3]
In Moscow, he wrote a chronicle of his experiences in the Vilna ghetto (Fun vilner geto,1946), a poetry collection Lider fun geto (1946; “Songs from the Ghetto”) and began Geheymshtot ("Secret City",1948), an epic poem about Jews hiding in the sewers of Vilna.[4][10]
Works
Di festung (1945; “The Fortress”)
About a Herring (1946)[11][12]
Yidishe gas (1948; “Jewish Street”)
Sibir (1953; "Siberia")
In midber Sinai (1957; "In the Sinai Desert")
Di fidlroyz (1974; "The Fiddle Rose: Poems 1970–1972")
Griner akvaryum (1975; “Green Aquarium”)
Fun alte un yunge ksav-yadn (1982; "Laughter Beneath the Forest: Poems from Old and New Manuscripts")[10]
In 1949, Sutzkever founded the Yiddish literary quarterly Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain), Israel's only Yiddish literary quarterly, which he edited until its demise in 1995. Sutzkever resuscitated the careers of Yiddish writers from Europe, the Americas, the Soviet Union and Israel. Official Zionism, however, dismissed Yiddish as a defeatist diaspora argot. "They will not uproot my tongue," he retorted. "I shall wake all generations with my roar."[7]
Sutzkever's poetry was translated into Hebrew by Nathan Alterman, Avraham Shlonsky and Leah Goldberg. In the 1930s, his work was translated into Russian by Boris Pasternak.[13]
Works in English translation
Siberia: A Poem, translated by Jacob Sonntag in 1961, part of the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works.[14]
Burnt Pearls : Ghetto Poems of Abraham Sutzkever, translated from the Yiddish by Seymour Mayne; introduction by Ruth R. Wisse. Oakville, Ont.: Mosaic Press, 1981. ISBN 0-88962-142-X
The Fiddle Rose: Poems, 1970-1972, Abraham Sutzkever; selected and translated by Ruth Whitman; drawings by Marc Chagall; introduction by Ruth R. Wisse. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990. ISBN 0-8143-2001-5
A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, translated from the Yiddish by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav; with an introduction by Benjamin Harshav. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. ISBN 0-520-06539-5
Laughter Beneath the Forest : Poems from Old and Recent Manuscripts by Abraham Sutzkever; translated from the Yiddish by Barnett Zumoff; with an introductory essay by Emanuel S. Goldsmith. Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing, 1996. ISBN 0-88125-555-6
Sutzkever Essential Prose; translated from the Yiddish by Zackary Sholem Berger (A Yiddish Book Center Translation); with an introduction by Heather Valencia. Amherst, MA: White Goat Press, 2020. ISBN 978-1-7343872-6-1
Awards and recognition
In 1969, Surzkever was awarded the Itzik Manger Prize for Yiddish literature.[15]
In 1985, Sutzkever was awarded the Israel Prize for Yiddish literature.[16] Sutkever's poems have been translated into 30 languages.[17]
Recordings
Hilda Bronstein, A Vogn Shikh, lyrics by Avrom Sutzkever, music by Tomas Novotny Yiddish Songs Old and New, ARC Records
Karsten Troyke, Leg den Kopf auf meine Knie, lyrics by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, Itzik Manger and Abraham Sutzkever, music by Karsten Troyke
Abraham Sutzkever, The Poetry of Abraham Sutzkever (Vilno Poet): Read in Yiddish, produced by Ruth Wise on Folkways Records
Compositions
"The Twin-Sisters" - "Der Tsvilingl", music by Daniel Galay, text by Avrum Sutzkever. Narrator (Yiddish) Michael Ben-Avraham, The Israeli String Quartet for Contemporary Music (Violin, Viola, Cello), percussion, piano. First performance: Tel-Aviv 2/10/2003 on the 90th birthday of Avrum Sutzkever.
"The Seed of Dream",[18] music by Lori Laitman,[19] based on poems by Abraham Sutzkever as translated by C.K. Williams and Leonard Wolf. Commissioned by The Music of Remembrance[20] organization in Seattle. First performed in May 2005 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle by baritone Erich Parce, pianist Mina Miller, and cellist Amos Yang. Recent performance on January 28, 2008, by the Chamber Music Society of Southwest Florida[21] by mezzo-soprano Janelle McCoy,[22] cellist Adam Satinsky[23] and pianist Bella Gutshtein of the Russian Music Salon.
Sutzkever's poem "Poezye" was set to music by composer Alex Weiser as a part of his song cycle "and all the days were purple."[24]
See also
List of Israel Prize recipients
Alexander Bogen
Paper Brigade “Walk through Words as through a Minefield”
The death of Avraham Sutzkever in Tel Aviv on January 20, 2010 symbolizes the end of an era in modern Yiddish culture, in which he played a central role over many years of extremely full and rich artistic work. Like many of his generation, the Holocaust was for him the profound rupture that split his life into “before” and “after”. He experienced it at firsthand and it left its impression on his writing and his cultural activity.
Sutzkever was born in 1913 in the town of Smorgon on the cultural border of Jewish Lithuania. During World War I his family was deported from the war zones by the Russian authorities, together with masses of Jews. They wound up in Siberia, where he spent his childhood in exceptional surroundings and landscapes for one who would in time come to be a Yiddish poet. After his father’s death in 1920, the family settled in Vilna — the city where Sutzkever grew to adulthood and began to write; the city that served for all his life as his cultural reference point. His first poems, in the early 1930s, were written in the context of his tense relations with the other members of the “Young Vilna” (Yung Vilne) group of writers and artists, which included Sutzkever, Chaim Grade, Leyzer Wolf, Shmerke Kaczerginski and others. The writings of most of the group’s members showed clear signs of the radical tendencies that characterized a large part of Polish Jewish youth in those days, while Sutzkever’s poetry distanced itself from the immediate political and social context. The values of late Romanticism are clearly evident in the thematic focuses of his poetry — the centrality of the world of nature, the desire to become one with it, the shaping of the figure of the poet full of optimism and youthful energy and the wish to shape his future in a blend of reason and emotion.
Sutzkever was able to publish two books of poetry before the Holocaust — the second bore a title that can be construed as a clear declaration of intent: Valdiks (“Sylvan”),1. which appeared in Vilna in 1940, in that short and very turbulent period in which the city became Lithuanian, before the Soviets returned and took it over. Anyone reading the book today cannot but reflect on the dramatic difference between the poetic world created in it, which is entirely a hymn to nature, and the fate already awaiting the author and most of his readers and which overtook them only several months after the book appeared. In time, after the Holocaust, Sutzkever collected his poems from 1939–1941 in one of his books in a section called very appositely “Fun antlofenem indsl” (“From the Island that Fled”).2
In the first days after the German attack on the USSR, Sutzkever and his wife Freydke (Freda) joined the thousands of refugees trying to flee to territories still under Soviet rule, but because of the Germans’ rapid advance, their escape route was blocked and they returned to Vilna. At that crucial moment the “Young Vilna” group was broken up, and its members went their different ways: Chaim Grade and Leyzer Wolf managed to escape, but Wolf died of hunger and disease in the Soviet Union in 1943. Conversely, Avraham Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski shared the fate of the Jews of Vilna, were interned in the ghetto and endured all its sufferings. Sutzkever managed to survive through various murder actions. In late 1941, he hid for several weeks in the cellar of a stranger, a woman who gave shelter to the uninvited and completely unknown Jewish man who knocked on her door. However, such a hiding place could serve only for a short time and ultimately Sutzkever returned to the ghetto. In the first months of the ghetto’s existence Sutzkever underwent extremely traumatic personal events: his wife gave birth in the ghetto hospital, but the Nazis did not allow Jewish women to give birth and the baby was murdered. Shortly afterwards the poet’s mother was also murdered in one of the actions.
Throughout his experience of the Holocaust, from the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Vilna, in the ghetto, and until its destruction, Sutzkever continued to write poetry. The first series of his poems from these years, “Penimer in zumpn” (“Faces in Swamps”), was written in hiding in the first days of the Nazi occupation, in June-July 1941; the last poems from the ghetto period were written shortly before its liquidation, in September 1943. There are also poems that Sutzkever began to write in the ghetto and completed subsequently.
Naturally, it was impossible even to think about publishing the poems in the Vilna ghetto. Publication became possible only when Sutzkever reached Moscow in 1944. There is more than one version of many of the poems that Sutzkever wrote in the Holocaust period, inter alia because he copied them several times in the hope that at least one of the copies would survive. In several cases Sutzkever reedited the poems that he had written during the Holocaust, wishing to give them a more definite stylistic form or to adapt them to poetic norms that he learned after the liberation. Hence there are poems written by Sutzkever whose first handwritten version has a more modern and liberated style than the version that was published. Most of the poems written by Sutzkever during the Holocaust were collected into two anthologies that appeared in New York immediately after the Holocaust — Di festung (“The Fortress”) and Lider fun geto (“Poems from the Ghetto”),3 although several of them were published for the first time only many years later.
During the Holocaust Sutzkever’s poetry underwent a most significant transformation: the poet’s personal voice that characterized his first period remained prominent, but in the ghetto conditions it became the voice of the individual confronting the dread of destruction and extermination, to which was added a new voice, the public voice. Sutzkever devoted several of his poems to the heroes of the armed and spiritual resistance with whom he was personally acquainted — Yitzhak Wittenberg, Commander of the FPO (Fareynikte Partizaner organizatsye; United Partisan Organization); the teacher Mira (Mira Bernstein, a well-known teacher in the Vilna Ghetto); the intellectual Zelig Kalmanovich, to whom the series of poems “Der novi” (“The Prophet”) is dedicated; and the woman who rescued him when he fled the ghetto. In several of his poems he called for open armed resistance, such as “A nem ton dos ayzn” (“Take Hold of the Iron”) that was read out at a public event in the ghetto marking May 1 (1943). His poem “Unter dayne vayse shtern” (“Under Your White Stars”) was set to music immediately after it was written, was sung by many during the last months before the liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto, and after the Holocaust was one of the representative texts that best expresses its horrors. Alongside the short lyric poem Sutzkever also wrote narrative poems, two of which survived in their entirety. One is “Dos keyverkind” (“The Grave-Child”) that bears the date “Vilna ghetto, April 12, 1942”, and is devoted to the painful subject that was also a fresh wound in the poet’s heart — birth in the impossible conditions of the Holocaust, a birth that was evidence of the vital forces challenging the rule of death. A year later Sutzkever completed the poem “Kol nidrey”, that describes the unexpected meeting in the ghetto between a Red Army soldier captured by the Germans and his father whom he had not seen for many years.
When Sutzkever collected his Holocaust period poems and his later poems on the Holocaust many years afterwards into an anthology called Lider fun yam-hamoves (“Poems from the Sea of Death”),4 he wrote in the preface: “When the very sun became like ashes — I believed with perfect faith: as long as poetry does not abandon me, lead will not destroy me; as long as I live my life as a poet in the valley of the shadow of death, my sufferings will merit tikkun and redemption.”
The speaker in Sutzkever’s Holocaust poems is indeed in many cases a writer who sees in his poetry a shelter and shield against the death stalking him — a new expression, in most extreme conditions of existence, of the romantic ideal as regards the poet withstanding all obstacles. In all these poems the Germans are barely mentioned explicitly by name; the poet avoids mention of them by various rhetorical means, since the true and important self-examination in his poetry is conducted with himself and those who share his destiny. Thus for instance in his poem “Ikh lig in an orn” (“I am Lying in a Coffin”) written in August 1941, the speaker in the poem is released if only for a moment from the horror of the destruction with which he is menaced through his poetic imagination that connects between the poles of death and birth, stagnation and movement, imprisonment and release:
איך ליג אין אַן אָרון,
ווי אין הילצערנע קליידער,
איך ליג.
זאָל זייַן, ס׳איז אַ שיפֿ ל
אויף שטורמישע כוואַליעס,
זאָל זײַן, ס׳איז אַ וויג.
I am lying in this coffin,
As I would lie
In stiff wooden clothing.
This could be a small boat
On dangerous waves
This could be a cradle.5
At the same time, his poem “Under Your White Stars” is a more multifaceted expression of facing death. The poem opens precisely with the expression of the inmost desire to attain eternal peace, although the poet speaks of it indirectly and his wish merges with the yearning for purification. In the poem the speaker becomes dramatically a “broken string” that nonetheless continues the creative act. Here too the identity of the enemy is not explicit, as if it should not be mentioned. Yet, the poet is clearly aware of the danger from within. His feverish search for a fitting addressee for his words and poetry contrasts completely with the “murderous calm” characterizing his immediate surroundings.
Two-thirds of Vilna’s Jews were murdered in the first months of the Nazi occupation, and nonetheless a kind of pseudo-“normality” prevailed in the ghetto from 1942 until shortly before its liquidation. In this period Sutzkever was active in the cultural life organized in the shadow of extermination. In January 1942 the first soiree of the ghetto theater was held; Sutzkever helped to select the literary texts read out there. The initiative to create a ghetto theater initially aroused acute opposition; some saw it as a desecration of the respect due the dead and also as a means for the Judenrat to blunt the public’s alertness. However, in time the opponents realized that these soirees truly helped to keep up the spirits of the Jews. Sutzkever was also active in the ghetto “youth club”, where he conducted a literary study group, read modern Yiddish poetry with the youngsters and even organized an exhibition in memory of Yehoash, the poet who translated the Bible into Yiddish and with whose works Sutzkever closely identified.
The creation of the “Association of Writers and Artists” was one of the cultural initiatives that developed in the ghetto. At one of the literary evenings that it organized, Sutzkever read the poem “Dos keyverkind.” Herman Kruk, the director of the main library in the ghetto, described the impression that the poem made on its listeners.
After the author read the work, it was a long time before anyone said anything. The proximity of the dramatic events, the form of the work, and its sublimity had such an effect that everyone kept their mouths shut…. This is, I think, the first sublime evening of great creative excitement.6
That year Sutzkever received a prize from the Vilna Ghetto Association of Writers and Artists for the poem — the first literary prize that he received in his life, and in the ghetto of all places.
After the occupation of Vilna one of the goals that the Nazis set themselves was to collect the Jewish books and cultural treasures in order to classify them — most were destined for destruction and a few were sent to Germany to the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage (Institute for the Investigation of the Jewish Question). For this the Nazis recruited a group to work in the YIVO (the Institute for Jewish Research established in Vilna in 1925) building, which was outside the ghetto. The group, including Avraham Sutzkever, Shmerke Kaczerginski, Różka Korczak and others, was ordered to classify the materials from the Institute library and from other libraries. However, they set themselves a goal opposite that of their oppressors — they sought to save everything possible from the Jewish cultural treasures. Some of the material was concealed in various hiding places in the ghetto, some was deposited with non-Jews and some was hidden in the YIVO building itself. The work group also included members of the ghetto underground and because they went to work daily outside the ghetto, they could smuggle in weapons and printed training material that they acquired by chance on assembly of improvised combat means. The ghetto residents mockingly called this group Di papirene brigade (“The Paper Brigade”), since the place and nature of their work did not allow them to smuggle food into the ghetto — the main task undertaken by anyone working outside the ghetto — but the group members’ main concern was spiritual resistance against the oppressor.
In September 1943, as tension increased with expectation of the liquidation of the ghetto, Sutzkever, his wife and Shmerke Kaczerginski with a group of FPO members, managed to flee to the forest and join a Soviet partisan unit. The status of the Jewish soldiers in this unit was extremely difficult and paved with obstacles, but ultimately they found their place in it. Sutzkever’s reputation had preceded him to the Soviet capital after a copy of the poem “Kol nidrey” was smuggled out of the ghetto and read out at a special evening held there. When it became known in Moscow that he had escaped from the ghetto and was in the forest with the partisans, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee activists used their influence to smuggle him out from behind enemy lines and bring him to a safe haven. As it turned out, Sutzkever’s abovementioned belief that poetry has the power to save the writer from destruction and death, to which he adhered even in the most difficult times, was validated in most exceptional conditions.
Sutzkever was flown to Moscow and was among the speakers at the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee meeting in April 1944, where he described the Holocaust of the Jews of Vilna and the struggle of the partisans in the forest. Ilya Ehrenburg devoted an article to him in Pravda. This exceptional event aroused great excitement among Soviet and world Jewry, particularly in light of the general Soviet policy of concealing both the dimensions of the Holocaust and the part of the Jews in combating the Nazis. After publication of the article, Sutzkever received hundreds of letters from all corners of the Soviet Union; he was contacted by refugees from Vilna who sought information on their relatives and recounted their fate in the war period — fighting in the ranks of the Red Army, the lives of refugees in this vast country, the unclear news on the Holocaust, the faint hope that any of their relatives had survived.
While in Moscow, Sutzkever mobilized for the task of documenting the destruction of Vilna Jewry. His book on the Vilna ghetto, written in 1945, was the first important work on the subject, even though it did not deviate from Soviet norms since it was slated for publication in the Soviet Union. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee sent copies for publication overseas and the book therefore appeared in Paris before its publication in Moscow. Immediately afterwards the book was also published in Buenos Aires and it appeared in installments in two
daily Yiddish newspapers in New York. This extensive publication of the book shows the desire of the Jewish public, certainly the Yiddishspeaking public, so soon after the Holocaust, to read testimonies on what had happened. The writing and testimonies on the Holocaust of Vilna Jewry by Różka Korczak, Shmerke Kaczerginski and Mark Dworżecki appeared parallel to Sutzkever’s book or immediately after it.
As soon as Vilna was liberated, Sutzkever returned, hoping to participate in rebuilding Jewish life in the city and retrieving the Jewish cultural treasures from their hiding places. However, the attitude of the Soviet authorities to these efforts generally was either passive or hostile. The prominent figures among the survivors, such as Abba Kovner, Avraham Sutzkever and others, quickly understood that they had to change their goal and direct their efforts to organizing the survivors to leave Soviet-controlled areas and to smuggling the rescued cultural treasures outside the USSR. Sutzkever himself understood that he had to take a decision in this spirit. However, prior to this he was charged with an unexpected mission by the Soviet authorities — to testify at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremburg as one of the witnesses for the prosecution and the first Jew among them. In February 1946, Sutzkever gave his testimony, recounting in detail the extermination of Vilna Jewry and several of the acts of murder that he had personally witnessed and the humiliation that he himself had undergone.
Soon afterwards Sutzkever left the Soviet Union and made his way gradually to Palestine, arriving in 1947. In this period of his wanderings Sutzkever concentrated on writing a large epic poem, “Geheymshtot” (“Secret Town”), which recounts the fate of ten survivors who hide in the sewers of Vilna after the liquidation of the ghetto and attempt to create an illusion of normality in these impossible conditions after the destruction of their entire world. The meticulous formal structure of the poem, its language and rich and skilled stanzas show the poet’s desire to produce an artistic commemoration of the Holocaust and to set at its center the wish to cling to life and to give new meaning to the existence of the survivors.
From his immigration to Israel and during the long years of his life Sutzkever contended with the memory of the Holocaust in many and varied ways. As the editor of the most prestigious Yiddish literary journal in Israel and the world, the quarterly Di goldene keyt, which he
founded and edited from 1949 onwards, he was aware of the centrality of the subject of the Holocaust in the world of Yiddish writers. In the issues of Di goldene keyt Sutzkever also published works written during the Holocaust period for the first time, such as Yitzhak Katznelson’s play “By the Rivers of Babylon”, as well as poetry and prose written by survivors — Ka-tzetnik, Leib Rochman, Yeshayahu Spiegel and others — and also the works of Yiddish writers who witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust from afar. As a writer, Sutzkever himself ceaselessly sought new artistic ways to contend with the most complex subject of all. In his first book of poetry in Israel, In fayer-vogn (In the Chariot of Fire),7 he devoted a separate section to the Holocaust with this significant title “Di karsh fun dermonung” (“The Cherry of Remembrance”). This title shows the conspicuous change of emphasis in his lyrical world — the Holocaust experiences would no longer offer him events for immediate and direct processing, but a field in which the power of memory is constantly increasing. The section opens with the poem “Oytoportret” (“Self-Portrait”); its focus is the figure of the survivor returning to the city where he grew up, which now for him is a space empty of people where he undertakes a painful examination of his past:
אָ מאָל, ווען איך בין אין אַ קעלער געלעגן,
בײַנאַנד מיט אַ מת ווי אַ בויגן פּאַפּיר,
באַלויכטן מיט פֿאספֿאָרנעם שניי פֿונעם באַלקן —
פֿאַרשריבן האָב איך מיט אַ שטיקעלע קויל
אַ ליד אויף פּאַפּירענעם לײַב פֿון מײַן שכן.
Once, as I lay in a cellar,
With a corpse like a sheet of paper,
Lit from the ceiling by phosphorescent snow —
I wrote with a piece of coal
A poem on the paper corpse of my neighbor.
Now, there is not even a corpse, —
Disgraced whiteness,
Draped with soot.8
The traumatic experience that flickers in the survivor’s consciousness questions the morality of writing poetry during the Holocaust: is the person writing poetry “on the corpse” preserving his memory or disregarding it? Does the poet who likens the corpse to “white paper” not sin in making the dead into “material” for his writing? Sutzkever now deals indirectly with the shred of faith that he clutched at in the ghetto period: that poetry would save him from death. From a slightly distant emotional perspective he now sees the other side of this belief — the moral price paid by the poet who writes “on” the corpses.
In the early 1950s Sutzkever wrote a series of modern prose pieces called griner akvarium (Green Aquarium), the result of this confrontation with the new face of the Holocaust revealed from the perspective of years to one who had personally experienced it — the artistic possibilities and the ethical dangers in the wish for distancing and aestheticization: “Walk through words as through a minefield: one false step, one false move, and all the words you strung in a lifetime on your veins will be blown apart with you.”9
The speaker appearing at the beginning of the series lives in a dual consciousness — his wish to abolish the border between the living and the dead conflicts with his painful awareness that the border between the worlds is nonetheless impassable. With the passage of time the memory of the Holocaust became an increasingly central element in Sutzkever’s creative world as a poet wishing to bridge between classicism and modernism. This remembrance flickered as an omnipotent presence in extremely unexpected ways and circumstances and gave the apparently normal present a startlingly strange dimension. The work of art cannot free itself of this, even if it so wishes:
דער שמייכל פֿון מײַדאַנעק פֿאַלט
אויף חתונות און בריתן.
אין אָפּערע.
טעאַטער.
הינטער די קוליסן.
אין קנייטשן פֿ ון דײַן ברויט־און־זאָלץ,
געזאַלצענעם געוויסן.
דער גרינער שמייכל פֿאַלט
אויף דײַן עלעגיע, דײַן באַלאַדע
און אויף אַ ליאַדע
ציטערקלאַנג באַזונדער.
The smile of Maidanek falls
On wedding and bris.
In opera.
Theater.
In the wings.
In creases of your bread and salt,
Salty conscience.
The green smile falls,
On your elegy, your ballad
On every
Tremor of a sound.10
Sutzkever’s wonderful ability to renew and expand the borders of his poetic world reached its climax in the series “Poems from My Diary,” that he wrote over approximately a decade, 1974–1985. The poems have as title only the year in which they were written and this gives the entire series the nature of a continuous text in which the memory of the Holocaust is surprisingly and at the same time naturally present.
ס׳געהערט צו מיר די אָפּגעהאָקטע האָנט, וואָס קריק מיט יאָרן
געפֿונען האָב איך זי אין גאָרטן צווישן פּאָמידאָרן.
און ווײַל זי איז אַ מענערהאַנט וואָס האָט קיין בעל־הבית ניט
געהערט זי מיר. אַ דריטע האַנט. איך שרײַב אָן איר קיין אות ניט.
- - -
ס׳געהערט צו מיר די אָפּגעהאַקטע האַנט וואָס האָט געצערטלט
קאָן זײַן, אַ יונגע פֿרוי, ווען מ’האָט איר בעל־הבית צעפֿערטלט.
און איך האָב זי געפֿונען ווען דער מאַן האָט זי פֿאַרלאָרן
סעפּטעמבער נײַנצן איין און פֿערציק צווישן פּאָמידאָרן.
The chopped-off hand belongs to me, my catch
Of years ago in a tomato patch.
A human hand, no owner anywhere,
I made it mine.
My third hand,
Without it,
I can write no lime.
- - -
To me belongs the chopped-off hand that used to stroke
Perhaps a woman’s hair, before it’s owner broke.
I found it where he lost it. It was without a scratch —
September nineteen forty-one, in a tomato patch.
(Translated into English by Benjamin Harshav)12
In many ways, this poem is a summary of Sutzkever’s entire work and his different portrayals of the Holocaust in it. The world of nature that played such an important role in the early period of his writing is expressed now in a new way. This is a domesticated and processed nature in which a human hand planted a “tomato plot”, with its glaring red color. Anyone reading the poem in Yiddish may also remember that devout Jews sometimes doubted the kashrut of tomatoes because they reminded them of blood. In such a seemingly idyllic vegetable plot, the poet discovers only part of the corpse of the anonymous, nameless, faceless slain man, evidence of the atrocity perpetrated precisely in September, the most beautiful month of the year in Eastern Europe. Not only is the murderer not mentioned by name, but the poem only alludes to the nature of his acts. In this late poem, Sutzkever makes absolutely no attempt to restore the destroyed world with its great cultural wealth, and here he abandons the wish that was so characteristic of post-Holocaust Yiddish culture. However, it is clear to him that this is a world whose integrity was irremediably destroyed, and the poet’s writing is nourished only by the scattered parts surviving from it. The poems in the “Poems from My Diary” series, as noted, bear only the years in which they were written as titles, and these determine their order. This poem was included in the section “1981” and it makes brief mention of the bloody events that occurred forty years previously: the first mass murders, in fact, their remnants. The subject of discussion forty years later is the tension between the consuming power of time that threatens to blur and negate the memory of the atrocity, and the poet’s ever continuing steadfastness in preserving the memory of the slain. They are the source of his work, even if their features have been obscured beyond recognition. Over the years Sutzkever maintained his power and ability to renew his poetry also in face of the sad reality of the ever shrinking number of readers in the original language. In this way his place was established as the most important Yiddish writer of the post-Holocaust generation and as one of the exemplary figures of modern Jewish culture. **** Sutzkever, Avrom
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(1913–2010), Yiddish poet. Born in Smorgon’, a small industrial city southeast of Vilna, Avrom Sutzkever spent his early childhood in Omsk, Siberia, where his parents took refuge from the invading German armies during World War I. Following the death of his father, Sutzkever’s mother, Rayne, resettled the family in Vilna in 1921. Sutzkever attended local heders and the Polish Jewish high school Herzliah, audited university classes in Polish literature, and was introduced by a friend to Russian poetry. His earliest poems were written in Hebrew.
Sutzkever published his first piece in the magazine of the Jewish scouting organization, Bin. In 1933, he became part of the writers’ and artists’ group Yung-Vilne, along with fellow poets Shmerke Kaczerginski, Chaim Grade, and Leyzer Volf. He also moved to Warsaw that year. His maiden volume, Lider (Poems), was published by the Yiddish PEN Club (1937); a second, Valdiks (Of the Forest; 1940), during the interval of Lithuanian autonomy.
Jews sorting books and other documents in the YIVO building, where the Nazis established a sorting center for Jewish cultural treasures looted from YIVO and other Jewish institutions, Vilna, ca. 1942. Members of this sorting team risked their lives to smuggle out and hide materials, some of which were recovered after the war. (YIVO)
After the German invasion in June 1941, Sutzkever and his wife, Freydke, whom he had married in 1939, were herded into the ghetto with other Vilna Jews. Under cover of forced labor, Sutzkever smuggled arms into the ghetto and concealed rare Jewish books and manuscripts from the YIVO collection, which he unearthed after the war. Writing poetry under aggravated conditions, he described several brushes with death, the murders of his mother and his newborn son, the cultural and underground resistance, and ghetto events and personalities. His long poem “Dos keyver-kind” (The Grave Child) was awarded a literary prize by the Ghetto Writers Union in 1942, and his poem “Unter dayne vayse shtern” (Beneath the Whiteness of Your Stars) was set to music by Avreml Brudno. The Sutzkevers escaped in September 1943 with a unit of the Federated Partisan Organization (FPO) and joined a Jewish partisan group under Soviet command in the Naroch forest.
Admiration for his poems smuggled from the ghetto by a Lithuanian courier prompted the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR to airlift Sutzkever to Moscow, where he served as a witness-survivor of the destruction of Polish Jewry. He became a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and participated in its April 1944 rally. Ilya Ehrenburg’s profile of the poet in Pravda (29 April 1944) was one of the first official Soviet notices of the Holocaust. In Moscow, Sutzkever participated in the work of Ehrenburg’s literary commission for the preparation of the Black Book. He also wrote a prose account titled Fun vilner geto (Of the Vilna Ghetto), parts of an ode of parting called “Tsu Poyln” (To Poland), and much of Geheymshtot (Secret City), an epic poem chronicling the attempt of 10 Jews to survive destruction in the sewers of Vilna.
Sutzkever befriended members of the Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia and testified on behalf of Russian Jewry at the Nuremberg Trials. With a newborn daughter, Rina, the Sutzkevers returned to Poland in 1946, then on to Paris and Palestine in 1947. In Tel Aviv, he founded the literary quarterly Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain), remaining its editor until its closing in 1995.
Sutzkever’s postwar poetry and editorial influence are credited with stimulating a revival of Yiddish creativity in Israel and beyond. His poetry transposes the “bones of Joseph” from Europe to the Land of Israel: the poet responds to the natural landscape of his new surroundings, simultaneously becoming the repository of Jewish longing. Contrary to the intimacy of most of his verse, Sutzkever also assumed a public role, bringing to far-flung Jewish communities the message that Yiddish language and culture would continue to thrive. A trip to South Africa inspired the poetic cycle Helfandn bay nakht (Elephants at Night; 1955), which combines images of Africa with themes of Europe. The two-volume Poetishe verk (Collected Poems; 1963), culled from twelve books of poems, was followed by eight additional books of poetry and three of poetic stories that “stretch the art of Yiddish storytelling to unsettling limits” (David G. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Yiddish Art of Storytelling, 1995, pp. 318–319).
In his earliest works, Sutzkever fashioned his childhood into a poetic myth of origins in which a new Siberian “Abraham” discovers his affinity with the creative forces of nature. While not explicitly religious, the poet claims, “In everything, I come upon a splinter / of infinity” (1938). Though he was mistrusted by local critics before the war because he seemed not to write with a sense of social urgency, Sutzkever’s insistence on the immutable power of poetry proved invaluable in the ghetto as a means of expressing the transcendent essence of temporal events. The dead mother assures her son, “If you remain / I will still be alive / as the pit of the plum / contains in itself the tree / the nest and the bird / and all else besides” (“Mayn mame” [My Mother]; 1942). Poetry thus assumes the task of preserving the entire culture that went into its creation. Of Sutzkever’s wartime virtuosity, fellow poet Jacob Glatstein wrote, “A sadistic impulse of fate had ordered the slave of perfection to give form to the bloodiest chaos of all times” (In tokh genumen; 1947).
Sutzkever emerged as a “national poet,” addressing large historical subjects in works of epic scale while creating deeply personal, sometimes idiosyncratic, contemplative verse. The series Lider fun togbukh (Poems from a Diary; 1974–1981), which is considered his masterpiece, fuses philosophical reflection, autobiography, and observation into a modern Psalter. Through formal elegance and masterful rhyming, it conveys his image of an organic universe that reintegrates what history has torn apart, including those murdered in Europe from those who carry their memory. Sutzkever’s works have been translated into English, Swedish, French, Hebrew, Polish, and other languages. Benjamin Harshav ranks him as “one of the great poets of the twentieth century” (Harshav, 1991, p. 3). **** Sutzkever, Avrom
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Suggested Reading
Author
(1913–2010), Yiddish poet. Born in Smorgon’, a small industrial city southeast of Vilna, Avrom Sutzkever spent his early childhood in Omsk, Siberia, where his parents took refuge from the invading German armies during World War I. Following the death of his father, Sutzkever’s mother, Rayne, resettled the family in Vilna in 1921. Sutzkever attended local heders and the Polish Jewish high school Herzliah, audited university classes in Polish literature, and was introduced by a friend to Russian poetry. His earliest poems were written in Hebrew.
Sutzkever published his first piece in the magazine of the Jewish scouting organization, Bin. In 1933, he became part of the writers’ and artists’ group Yung-Vilne, along with fellow poets Shmerke Kaczerginski, Chaim Grade, and Leyzer Volf. He also moved to Warsaw that year. His maiden volume, Lider (Poems), was published by the Yiddish PEN Club (1937); a second, Valdiks (Of the Forest; 1940), during the interval of Lithuanian autonomy.
Jews sorting books and other documents in the YIVO building, where the Nazis established a sorting center for Jewish cultural treasures looted from YIVO and other Jewish institutions, Vilna, ca. 1942. Members of this sorting team risked their lives to smuggle out and hide materials, some of which were recovered after the war. (YIVO)
After the German invasion in June 1941, Sutzkever and his wife, Freydke, whom he had married in 1939, were herded into the ghetto with other Vilna Jews. Under cover of forced labor, Sutzkever smuggled arms into the ghetto and concealed rare Jewish books and manuscripts from the YIVO collection, which he unearthed after the war. Writing poetry under aggravated conditions, he described several brushes with death, the murders of his mother and his newborn son, the cultural and underground resistance, and ghetto events and personalities. His long poem “Dos keyver-kind” (The Grave Child) was awarded a literary prize by the Ghetto Writers Union in 1942, and his poem “Unter dayne vayse shtern” (Beneath the Whiteness of Your Stars) was set to music by Avreml Brudno. The Sutzkevers escaped in September 1943 with a unit of the Federated Partisan Organization (FPO) and joined a Jewish partisan group under Soviet command in the Naroch forest.
Admiration for his poems smuggled from the ghetto by a Lithuanian courier prompted the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR to airlift Sutzkever to Moscow, where he served as a witness-survivor of the destruction of Polish Jewry. He became a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and participated in its April 1944 rally. Ilya Ehrenburg’s profile of the poet in Pravda (29 April 1944) was one of the first official Soviet notices of the Holocaust. In Moscow, Sutzkever participated in the work of Ehrenburg’s literary commission for the preparation of the Black Book. He also wrote a prose account titled Fun vilner geto (Of the Vilna Ghetto), parts of an ode of parting called “Tsu Poyln” (To Poland), and much of Geheymshtot (Secret City), an epic poem chronicling the attempt of 10 Jews to survive destruction in the sewers of Vilna.
Sutzkever befriended members of the Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia and testified on behalf of Russian Jewry at the Nuremberg Trials. With a newborn daughter, Rina, the Sutzkevers returned to Poland in 1946, then on to Paris and Palestine in 1947. In Tel Aviv, he founded the literary quarterly Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain), remaining its editor until its closing in 1995.
Sutzkever’s postwar poetry and editorial influence are credited with stimulating a revival of Yiddish creativity in Israel and beyond. His poetry transposes the “bones of Joseph” from Europe to the Land of Israel: the poet responds to the natural landscape of his new surroundings, simultaneously becoming the repository of Jewish longing. Contrary to the intimacy of most of his verse, Sutzkever also assumed a public role, bringing to far-flung Jewish communities the message that Yiddish language and culture would continue to thrive. A trip to South Africa inspired the poetic cycle Helfandn bay nakht (Elephants at Night; 1955), which combines images of Africa with themes of Europe. The two-volume Poetishe verk (Collected Poems; 1963), culled from twelve books of poems, was followed by eight additional books of poetry and three of poetic stories that “stretch the art of Yiddish storytelling to unsettling limits” (David G. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Yiddish Art of Storytelling, 1995, pp. 318–319).
In his earliest works, Sutzkever fashioned his childhood into a poetic myth of origins in which a new Siberian “Abraham” discovers his affinity with the creative forces of nature. While not explicitly religious, the poet claims, “In everything, I come upon a splinter / of infinity” (1938). Though he was mistrusted by local critics before the war because he seemed not to write with a sense of social urgency, Sutzkever’s insistence on the immutable power of poetry proved invaluable in the ghetto as a means of expressing the transcendent essence of temporal events. The dead mother assures her son, “If you remain / I will still be alive / as the pit of the plum / contains in itself the tree / the nest and the bird / and all else besides” (“Mayn mame” [My Mother]; 1942). Poetry thus assumes the task of preserving the entire culture that went into its creation. Of Sutzkever’s wartime virtuosity, fellow poet Jacob Glatstein wrote, “A sadistic impulse of fate had ordered the slave of perfection to give form to the bloodiest chaos of all times” (In tokh genumen; 1947).
Sutzkever emerged as a “national poet,” addressing large historical subjects in works of epic scale while creating deeply personal, sometimes idiosyncratic, contemplative verse. The series Lider fun togbukh (Poems from a Diary; 1974–1981), which is considered his masterpiece, fuses philosophical reflection, autobiography, and observation into a modern Psalter. Through formal elegance and masterful rhyming, it conveys his image of an organic universe that reintegrates what history has torn apart, including those murdered in Europe from those who carry their memory. Sutzkever’s works have been translated into English, Swedish, French, Hebrew, Polish, and other languages. Benjamin Harshav ranks him as “one of the great poets of the twentieth century” (Harshav, 1991, p. 3). *** Sutzkever, Avrom
ContentsHide
Suggested Reading
Author
(1913–2010), Yiddish poet. Born in Smorgon’, a small industrial city southeast of Vilna, Avrom Sutzkever spent his early childhood in Omsk, Siberia, where his parents took refuge from the invading German armies during World War I. Following the death of his father, Sutzkever’s mother, Rayne, resettled the family in Vilna in 1921. Sutzkever attended local heders and the Polish Jewish high school Herzliah, audited university classes in Polish literature, and was introduced by a friend to Russian poetry. His earliest poems were written in Hebrew.
Sutzkever published his first piece in the magazine of the Jewish scouting organization, Bin. In 1933, he became part of the writers’ and artists’ group Yung-Vilne, along with fellow poets Shmerke Kaczerginski, Chaim Grade, and Leyzer Volf. He also moved to Warsaw that year. His maiden volume, Lider (Poems), was published by the Yiddish PEN Club (1937); a second, Valdiks (Of the Forest; 1940), during the interval of Lithuanian autonomy.
Jews sorting books and other documents in the YIVO building, where the Nazis established a sorting center for Jewish cultural treasures looted from YIVO and other Jewish institutions, Vilna, ca. 1942. Members of this sorting team risked their lives to smuggle out and hide materials, some of which were recovered after the war. (YIVO)
After the German invasion in June 1941, Sutzkever and his wife, Freydke, whom he had married in 1939, were herded into the ghetto with other Vilna Jews. Under cover of forced labor, Sutzkever smuggled arms into the ghetto and concealed rare Jewish books and manuscripts from the YIVO collection, which he unearthed after the war. Writing poetry under aggravated conditions, he described several brushes with death, the murders of his mother and his newborn son, the cultural and underground resistance, and ghetto events and personalities. His long poem “Dos keyver-kind” (The Grave Child) was awarded a literary prize by the Ghetto Writers Union in 1942, and his poem “Unter dayne vayse shtern” (Beneath the Whiteness of Your Stars) was set to music by Avreml Brudno. The Sutzkevers escaped in September 1943 with a unit of the Federated Partisan Organization (FPO) and joined a Jewish partisan group under Soviet command in the Naroch forest.
Admiration for his poems smuggled from the ghetto by a Lithuanian courier prompted the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR to airlift Sutzkever to Moscow, where he served as a witness-survivor of the destruction of Polish Jewry. He became a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and participated in its April 1944 rally. Ilya Ehrenburg’s profile of the poet in Pravda (29 April 1944) was one of the first official Soviet notices of the Holocaust. In Moscow, Sutzkever participated in the work of Ehrenburg’s literary commission for the preparation of the Black Book. He also wrote a prose account titled Fun vilner geto (Of the Vilna Ghetto), parts of an ode of parting called “Tsu Poyln” (To Poland), and much of Geheymshtot (Secret City), an epic poem chronicling the attempt of 10 Jews to survive destruction in the sewers of Vilna.
Sutzkever befriended members of the Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia and testified on behalf of Russian Jewry at the Nuremberg Trials. With a newborn daughter, Rina, the Sutzkevers returned to Poland in 1946, then on to Paris and Palestine in 1947. In Tel Aviv, he founded the literary quarterly Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain), remaining its editor until its closing in 1995.
Sutzkever’s postwar poetry and editorial influence are credited with stimulating a revival of Yiddish creativity in Israel and beyond. His poetry transposes the “bones of Joseph” from Europe to the Land of Israel: the poet responds to the natural landscape of his new surroundings, simultaneously becoming the repository of Jewish longing. Contrary to the intimacy of most of his verse, Sutzkever also assumed a public role, bringing to far-flung Jewish communities the message that Yiddish language and culture would continue to thrive. A trip to South Africa inspired the poetic cycle Helfandn bay nakht (Elephants at Night; 1955), which combines images of Africa with themes of Europe. The two-volume Poetishe verk (Collected Poems; 1963), culled from twelve books of poems, was followed by eight additional books of poetry and three of poetic stories that “stretch the art of Yiddish storytelling to unsettling limits” (David G. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Yiddish Art of Storytelling, 1995, pp. 318–319).
In his earliest works, Sutzkever fashioned his childhood into a poetic myth of origins in which a new Siberian “Abraham” discovers his affinity with the creative forces of nature. While not explicitly religious, the poet claims, “In everything, I come upon a splinter / of infinity” (1938). Though he was mistrusted by local critics before the war because he seemed not to write with a sense of social urgency, Sutzkever’s insistence on the immutable power of poetry proved invaluable in the ghetto as a means of expressing the transcendent essence of temporal events. The dead mother assures her son, “If you remain / I will still be alive / as the pit of the plum / contains in itself the tree / the nest and the bird / and all else besides” (“Mayn mame” [My Mother]; 1942). Poetry thus assumes the task of preserving the entire culture that went into its creation. Of Sutzkever’s wartime virtuosity, fellow poet Jacob Glatstein wrote, “A sadistic impulse of fate had ordered the slave of perfection to give form to the bloodiest chaos of all times” (In tokh genumen; 1947).
Sutzkever emerged as a “national poet,” addressing large historical subjects in works of epic scale while creating deeply personal, sometimes idiosyncratic, contemplative verse. The series Lider fun togbukh (Poems from a Diary; 1974–1981), which is considered his masterpiece, fuses philosophical reflection, autobiography, and observation into a modern Psalter. Through formal elegance and masterful rhyming, it conveys his image of an organic universe that reintegrates what history has torn apart, including those murdered in Europe from those who carry their memory. Sutzkever’s works have been translated into English, Swedish, French, Hebrew, Polish, and other languages. Benjamin Harshav ranks him as “one of the great poets of the twentieth century” (Harshav, 1991, p. 3). **** The Vilna Ghetto[a] was a World War II Jewish ghetto established and operated by Nazi Germany in the city of Vilnius in the modern country of Lithuania, at the time part of the Nazi-administered Reichskommissariat Ostland.[1]
During the approximately two years of its existence starvation, disease, street executions, maltreatment, and deportations to concentration and extermination camps reduced the ghetto's population from an estimated 40,000 to zero.
Only several hundred people managed to survive, mostly by hiding in the forests surrounding the city, joining Soviet partisans,[2][3] or sheltering with sympathetic locals.
Contents
1 Background
2 1941: Establishment of the ghetto
3 1942: Quiet period
3.1 Health care
3.2 Cultural life
3.3 Resistance
4 1943: Liquidation
5 Post-war
6 People of the Vilna Ghetto
7 See also
8 Notes
9 References
10 Bibliography
11 External links
Background
Before the German-Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, Wilno (Vilna in Yiddish) was the capital of the Wilno Voivodship in the Second Polish Republic. The predominant languages of the city were Polish and to a lesser extent, Yiddish. The Lithuanian-speaking population at the time was a small minority, at about 6% of the city's population according to contemporary Lithuanian sources.[4] By 1931, the city had 195,000 inhabitants, making it the fifth largest city in Poland with varied industries and new factories,[5] as well as a well respected university.[6]
Lithuanian Nazi policeman with Jewish prisoners, July 1941
Wilno was a predominantly Polish and Jewish city since the Polish-Lithuanian borders were delineated in 1922 by the League of Nations in the aftermath of Żeligowski's Mutiny.[7] After the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, Joseph Stalin transferred Wilno to Lithuania in October, according to the Soviet–Lithuanian Mutual Assistance Treaty. Some two years later, on 26 June 1941, the German Army entered Vilna, followed by the Einsatzkommando death squad Einsatzgruppe B. Local Lithuanian leaders advocated ethnic cleansing of Jews and Poles. Throughout the summer, German troops and their Lithuanian collaborators killed more than 21,000 Jews living in Vilnius, in a mass extermination program.[citation needed]
The Jewish population of Vilnius on the eve of the Holocaust was at least 60,000, some estimates say 80,000,[8] including refugees from German-occupied Poland to the west, minus a small number who managed to flee onward to the Soviet Union. The kidnapping and mass murder of Jews in the city commenced before the ghetto was set up by the advancing German forces, resulting in an execution of approximately 21,000 victims prior to 6 September 1941. The Lithuanian kidnappers were known in Yiddish as hapunes, meaning grabbers or snatchers.[citation needed]
1941: Establishment of the ghetto
Map of Vilna Ghetto (small ghetto, in olive-green)
In order to pacify the predominantly poorer Jewish quarter in the Vilnius Old Town and force the rest of the more affluent Jewish residents into the new German-envisioned ghetto, the Nazis staged – as a pretext – the Great Provocation incident on 31 August 1941, led by SS Einsatzkommando 9 Oberscharführer Horst Schweinberger under orders from Gebietskommissar of the Vilnius municipality Hans Christian Hingst and Franz Murer,[9] Hingst's deputy for Jewish affairs under "provisional directives" of Reichskommissar Hinrich Lohse.[citation needed]
Murer, Hingst, and Vilnius mayor Karolis Dabulevičius selected the site for the future ghetto and staged a distant sniping at German soldiers in front of a cinema, from a window on the corner of Stiklių (Glezer, meaning Szklana in Polish) and Didžioji (Wielka, Great Street in Polish, hence the name for the event) streets, by two Lithuanians in civilian clothes who had broken into an apartment belonging to Jews. The Lithuanians fled the apartment, then returned with awaiting German soldiers, captured two Jews, accused them of firing on the German soldiers, beat them and then shot them on the spot. Stiklių and Mėsinių (Jatkowa) streets were ransacked by the local militia, and Jews were beaten up. At night, in "retaliation", all Jews were driven out of the neighborhood the Nazis had selected as the future ghetto territory, street by street, and the next day the women and children on remaining streets were seized while the men were at work. Men at workplaces were also seized. Jews were taken to Lukiškės Prison, then to Paneriai, also known as Ponary (or Ponar), where they were murdered between 1 September and 3 September. 5,000 to 10,000 people were murdered,[10] including ten members of the Judenrat. The objective was to clear an area for the establishment of a ghetto to imprison all the Jews of Vilnius and its suburbs.[9]
The area designated for the ghetto was the old Jewish quarter in the center of the city. While Vilna never had a ghetto per se except for some very limited restrictions on the movement and settlement of Jews during the Middle Ages, the area chosen by the Nazis for their ghetto was predominantly and historically inhabited by Jews. The Nazis split the area into two Jewish quarters (Large Ghetto and Small Ghetto),[11] with a non-ghetto corridor running down Deutschegasse (Niemiecka or Vokiečių) Street.[citation needed]
On 6–7 September 1941, the Nazis herded the remaining 20,000 Jews into the two ghettos by evicting them from their homes, during which 3,700 were killed. Converts, "half-Jews" and spouses of Jews were also forced into the ghetto. The move to the ghetto was extremely hurried and difficult, and Jews were not allowed to use transportation, being able to take only what they were physically able to carry.[citation needed]
The first Aktion was called the Gelb Schein (yellow pass) Aktion as the Germans delivered 3,000 passes to workers and their families and let 12,000 people on the ghetto. Between 25 and 27 October 1941, 3,781 people who did not have this pass were killed in Ponary.[12]
The two-ghetto arrangement made it easier for the Nazis to control what the victims knew of their fate beforehand, facilitating the Nazis' goal of total extermination. A two-ghetto model was also used in Warsaw. Like the other Jewish ghettos Nazi Germany set up during World War II, the Vilnius Ghetto was created both to dehumanise the people and to exploit its inmates as slave labor. Conditions were intended to be extremely poor and crowded, subjecting inhabitants to unsanitary conditions, disease and daily death.[citation needed]
1942: Quiet period
Health care
Jewish Vilna was known for its distinguished medical tradition, which inmates of the ghetto managed to maintain to some degree during the Holocaust.[13] As with most ghettos established by the Germans, a sign was put right outside in front stating: "Achtung! Seuchengefahr" ("Attention! Danger of Infection"). Mortality rates did, indeed, increase in the Vilna Ghetto as compared with before the war. However, due largely to the efforts of the ghetto's Health Department, the Vilna Ghetto had no major epidemics despite malnourishment, cold, and overcrowding.[14] According to Dr. Lazar Epstein, head of Sanitary-Epidemiological Section of the ghetto's Health Department, the inmates of the ghetto, left to their own devices, could have lived a very long time, certainly to the end of the war, despite the numerous privations.[14]
Cultural life
The Vilna Ghetto was called "Yerushalayim of the Ghettos" because it was known for its intellectual and cultural spirit. Before the war, Vilnius had been known as "Yerushalayim d'Lita"[15] (Yiddish: Jerusalem of Lithuania) for the same reason. The center of cultural life in the ghetto was the Mefitze Haskole Library, which was called the "House of Culture". It contained a library of 45,000 volumes,[16] reading hall, archive, statistical bureau, room for scientific work, museum, book kiosk, post office, and sports ground. Groups, such as the Literary and Artistic Union and the Brit Ivrit Union, organized events commemorating Yiddish and Hebrew authors and put on plays in these languages. The popular Yiddish magazine Folksgezunt was continued in the ghetto and its essays were presented in public lectures. Yitskhok Rudashevski (1927–1943), a young teen who wrote a diary of his life in the ghetto during 1941 to 1943, mentions a number of these events and his participation in them. He was murdered in the liquidation of 1943, probably at Paneriai. His diary was discovered in 1944 by his cousin.[citation needed]
The Vilna Ghetto was well known for its theatrical productions during World War II.[17] Jacob Gens, the head of Jewish police and the ruler of the Vilna Ghetto, was given the responsibility for the starting of this theatre.[17] Performances included poetry readings by Jewish authors, dramatizations of short stories, and new work by the young people of the ghetto.[17]
The Ghetto Theatre was a great source of revenue and had a calming effect on the public. A total of 111 performances had been given by January 10, 1943, with a total of 34,804 tickets sold. The theatre was renovated to accommodate a larger audience and be better-looking to public eye.[17] The theatre permitted the inhabitants to display their power through plays and songs; for instance, one of the songs that was sung was called "Endurance".[17]
The last theatrical production, Der Mabl (The Flood), was produced by the Swedish dramatist Henning Berger and opened in the summer of 1943, in the last week of the Ghetto's existence.[17] The play, set in an American saloon during a flood, featured a group of people who banded together during a time of danger and need.[17]
Resistance
Abba Kovner (center, standing) with FPO members
The Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye (FPO), or United Partisan Organization, was formed on 21 January 1942 in the ghetto. It took for its motto "We will not go like sheep to the slaughter," proposed by Abba Kovner.[18] This was one of the first resistance organizations established in a Nazi ghetto. Unlike in other ghettos, the resistance movement in the Vilna Ghetto was not run by ghetto officials. Jacob Gens, appointed head of the ghetto by the Nazis but originally chief of police, ostensibly cooperated with German officials in stopping armed struggle. The FPO represented the full spectrum of political persuasions and parties in Jewish life. It was led by Yitzhak Wittenberg, Josef Glazman, and Kovner. The purposes of the FPO were to establish a means for the self-defence of the ghetto population, to sabotage German industrial and military activities, and to support the broader struggle of partisans and Red Army operatives against German forces. Poet Hirsh Glick, a ghetto inmate who later died after being deported to Estonia, penned the words for what became the famous Partisan Hymn, Zog nit keyn mol.[citation needed]
Reichskommissariat Ostland ghettos (marked with red-and-gold stars)
In early 1943, the Germans caught a member of the Communist underground, who, under torture, revealed some contacts; the Judenrat, in response to German threats, tried to turn Wittenberg, head of the FPO, over to the Gestapo. The Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye organized an uprising and was able to rescue him after he was seized in the apartment of Jacob Gens in a fight with Jewish ghetto police.[19] Gens brought in heavies, the leaders of the work brigades, and effectively turned the majority of the population against the resistance members, claiming they were provoking the Germans and asking rhetorically whether it was worth sacrificing tens of thousands for the sake of one man. Ghetto prisoners assembled and demanded the FPO give Wittenberg up. Ultimately, Wittenberg himself made the decision to submit to Nazi demands. He was taken to Gestapo headquarters in Vilnius and was reportedly found dead in his cell the next morning. Most people believed he had committed suicide. The rumour was that Gens had slipped him a cyanide pill in their final meeting.[citation needed]
The FPO was demoralized by this chain of events and began to pursue a policy of sending young people out to the forest to join other Jewish partisans. This was controversial as well because the Germans applied a policy of 'collective responsibility' under which all family members of anyone who had joined the partisans were executed. In the Vilna Ghetto, a 'family' often included a non-relation who registered as a member of the family in order to receive housing and a pitiful food ration.[citation needed]
When the Germans came to liquidate the ghetto in September 1943, members of the FPO went on alert. Gens took control of the liquidation in order to keep the Nazi forces out of the ghetto and away from a partisan ambush, but helped fill the quota of Jews with those who could fight but were not necessarily part of the resistance. The FPO fled to the forest and fought with the partisans.[citation needed]
1943: Liquidation
From the establishment of the ghetto until January 1942, task groups of German and Lithuanian Einsatzgruppen regularly carried out the surprise operations called Aktionen, often on Jewish holidays. The ghetto residents were rounded up and deported, usually for subsequent executions. In the Aktion on Yom Kippur of 1 October 1941, the Germans ordered the Judenrat to lead the arrests leading to the death of 1,983 people;[10] residents found by the Jewish police lacking work permits were arrested and transferred to German custody. The same month the Germans liquidated the Small Ghetto, where they had relocated 'unproductive' individuals (i.e., who were old, ill, or otherwise considered unfit for labour); most of the prisoners were taken to Ponary and shot. About 20,000 Jews, including 8,000 without papers, remained in the Large Ghetto.[20] The period between January 1942 and March 1943 was known as the time of ghetto "stabilization"; the Aktionen ceased and some semblance of normal life resumed. The quiet period continued until 6 August, when the Germans commenced the deportation of 7,130 Jews to Estonia on the order of Heinrich Himmler; this was finished on 5 September. Following an order of Rudolf Neugebauer, the head of the Vilnius Gestapo,[21] the ghetto was liquidated on 23–24 September 1943 [22] under the command of Oberscharführer Bruno Kittel. The majority of the remaining residents were sent to the Vaivara concentration camp in Estonia,[23] killed in the forest of Paneriai, or sent to the death camps in German-occupied Poland.[citation needed]
A small group of Jews remained in Vilna after the liquidation of the Ghetto, primarily at the Kailis and HKP 562 forced labour camps.[22] Inmates of HKP 562 repaired automobiles for the German Army; the camp was commanded by the Wehrmacht Major Karl Plagge who, with the cooperation of his officers and men, was able to shield the Jewish auto-workers from much of the abuse slave laborers were ordinarily subjected to. When the Red Army approached Vilna and the SS came to take over the camp, Plagge gave his workers a covert warning; some workers escaped, others hid in hiding places they had prepared with Plagge's knowledge, from which they subsequently escaped.[24] Two-hundred and fifty Jews at HKP 562 survived the war. They represent the single largest group of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in Vilnius.[citation needed]
A monument in memory of the Jews of Vilnius who were murdered in the Holocaust. In Kiryat Shaul cemetery in Tel Aviv
Post-war
Among all the European Jewish communities during WWII, the Lithuanian one was the most affected by the Holocaust. Rising to 265,000 individuals in June 1941, it was decimated and lost 254,000, or 95%, of its members during the Nazi occupation of Lithuania.[25] The Green House Museum,[26] a branch of the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, reminds visitors of massive collaboration, presenting documents and testimonials. Rachel Kostanian was awarded the Order of Merits from Germany for this achievement in 2021.[citation needed]
Joshua Sobol's 1984 play Ghetto recounts the last days of the Vilna Ghetto theatre company.[27]
In 2021 a virtual 360-degree tour about the former Vilnius Ghetto was created to present arts, education and creative endeavours within the Ghetto in horrifying circumstances.[28]
Straszuna Street (the Polish name), now Žemaitijos Street, in the former Ghetto
Straszuna Street (the Polish name), now Žemaitijos Street, in the former Ghetto
Holocaust memorial, Subačiaus Street, near site of HKP 562 forced-labor camp
Holocaust memorial, Subačiaus Street, near site of HKP 562 forced-labor camp
People of the Vilna Ghetto
Jacob Gens (1903–1943), head of police of the ghetto
Josef Glazman (1913–1943), ghetto resistance fighter
Hirsh Glick (1922–1944), ghetto resistance fighter
Bruno Kittel (1922–?), SS-Oberscharführer, brought in to liquidate the ghetto after Murer
Abba Kovner (1918–1987), ghetto resistance fighter
Herman Kruk (1897–1944), librarian, and a diarist of the ghetto
Ljuba Lewicka (1909–1943), singer [29]
Franz Murer (1912–1994), SS-Oberscharführer, the 'Butcher of Vilnius'
Rudolf Neugebauer (1912–1944), SS-Hauptsturmführer
Adrian von Renteln (1897–?), Generalkommissar of Lithuania, involved in the liquidation of the ghetto
Yitskhok Rudashevski (1927–1943), writer of a diary in the ghetto
Abraham Sutzkever (1913–2010), poet, book smuggler, ghetto resistance fighter
Martin Weiss (1903–1984), SS-Hauptscharführer
Yitzhak Wittenberg (1907–1943), ghetto resistance fighter
See also
History of the Jews in Lithuania
Jewish response to The Forty Days of Musa Dagh
Karl Plagge (1897–1957), Major, in charge of HKP 562 forced labor camp
List of Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland ***** In Spring 1943 Partisan activity in Lithuania increased. Following the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943 the Germans became aware of the possibility of armed Jewish resistance in the ghettos. On the 21st of June 1943 authority over the ghettos of Lithuania was transferred from the German Civil Administration to the SS.
In March 1943, during the distribution of the new scheins, rumours spread through the ghetto about the final liquidation of the work camps and small ghettos in the Vilna region, Oszmiana, Swienciany, Michaliszki and Sol, over which Gens was in charge. Simultaneously there was a large aktion in the Grodno Ghetto. The Germans promised Gens that the Jews of the small ghettos would be resettled in Vilna and Grodno. Gens and groups of police from the ghetto left to organise the resettlement. About 3,000 people were sent from the small ghettos to the Vilna Ghetto and to the work camps, but about 3,800 people were sent to Ponary by train, where they were murdered. News of the murder spread through the ghetto, bringing fear and despair. The synagogues filled with prayers and the religious Jews declared a Yom Kippur Katan (Minor Day of Atonement).
From the end of June until the beginning of July 1943 the Sicherheitspolizei (SiPO - security police) of Vilna, under the leadership of Bruno Kittel, liquidated the work camps in the Vilna region, Biala Waka, Kene, Bezdany and Nowa Wilejka, because of the prisoners' links to the partisans and because of cases of escape. Although Gens claimed that the Germans needed a working ghetto which was beneficial to the Germans and that working for the Germans was the only possible means of survival, there was a growing sense that the end of the ghetto was near.
On the 21st of June 1943 the SS Chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the liquidation of the ghettos in Ostland and that the Jews be sent to concentration camps.
On the 6th of August Jews who worked outside the ghetto were kidnapped. Many of them resisted but about 1,000 of them were sent by train to Estonia. Gens promised the public that they had been taken to work in Estonia and not to be murdered. On the 24th of August a second transport, of approximately 1,500 men, women and children, was sent to Estonia.
On the 1st of September towards dawn, the ghetto was surrounded by German and Estonian security forces and leaving for work was forbidden. Estonian soldiers began arresting men and removing them from the ghetto. The Germans demanded 3,000 men and 2,000 women for deportation to Estonia. People began hiding in melinas. The FPO issued a call-up order for all members of the movement. About 100 members of the underground who had amassed around the weapon stores were surrounded by Germans and Estonians before they managed to arm themselves and were removed from the ghetto. A number of them managed to escape and to remain in the ghetto. The FPO concentrated their remaining forces in Strashun Street. The FPO published a notice calling the Jews to resist but the ghetto inhabitants did not respond. Yechiel Scheinbaum, in command of the force on Strashun Street, opened fire on the Germans and was killed in an exchange of fire. Gens wanted to avoid a battle and agreed with the security forces that the ghetto management would supply the quota of Jews without the entrance of the Germans to the ghetto.
The aktion continued until the 4th of September 1943, following which the FPO abandoned the idea of an uprising and began sending their members to the Rudniki and Narocz forests. On the 14th of September Gens was murdered in the courtyard of the Gestapo headquarters in Vilna. On the 23rd – 24th of September the Vilna Ghetto was liquidated. Over 4,000 women, children and elderly were sent to the death camps in Poland where they were murdered. Hundreds of sick and elderly were taken to Ponary and murdered. About 3,700 men and women were sent to the concentration camps in Estonia and Latvia. In Vilna about 2,500 Jews remained in the work camps Kailis and HKP under the command of the Wehrmacht captain Karl Plagge and in the military hospital and the factories of the SiPO. Over 1,000 people hid in melinas in the ghetto and the majority were caught over the course of the following months. Hundreds of underground fighters left for the forests. On the 23rd of September the final group of FPO members, 80 - 100 fighters led by Abba Kovner, left the ghetto. Members of the organisation established a number of partisan units in the forest. They worked in partnership with the Red Army in the battles to liberate Vilna in July 1944. ****
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