Avraham Sutzkever (right) and his friend Shmerke Kaczerginski sit on a terrace within the Vilna ghetto.
Overview
- Caption
- Avraham Sutzkever (right) and his friend Shmerke Kaczerginski sit on a terrace within the Vilna ghetto.
- Date
-
1943
- Locale
- Vilnius, Lithuania
- Variant Locale
- Lithuania
Wilno
Wilna
Vilna - Photo Credit
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of the Sutzkever Family
Rights & Restrictions
- Photo Source
-
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial MuseumProvenance: Hadass Kalderon
Keywords & Subjects
Administrative Notes
- Biography
- Abraham (Avram) Sutzkever was born on July 15, 1913 in Smorgon, Belarus to Hertz and Rayne (nee Feinberg) Sutzkever. During WWI, the family was deported with other Jews from the war zone by the Russian authorities, and settled in Omsk, Siberia. After his father’s death there, his mother moved the family to Vilnius, Lithuania in 1921. Vilnius was a Jewish cultural and intellection center and the site of both the Mefitze Haskole Library and the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO). Abraham flourished in this atmosphere. He attended a Polish Jewish high school, and in 1933 joined a writers and artists group, Yung-Vilne (Young Vilna), where he met fellow writers and poets. He then moved to Warsaw, where his first volume of Yiddish poems, "Lider," was published in 1937. In 1939, he married Freydke, and the couple moved back to Vilnius where his second volume, "Valdiks," was published in 1940.
In 1941, German forces entered Vilnius, followed by Einsatzgruppen mobile killing squads. In the first months of the occupation, tens of thousands of Jews were killed. Abraham and Freyde initially tried to flee east to areas still under Soviet rule, but were blocked and forced into the newly-formed ghetto. There, in the ghetto hospital, Freydke gave birth to their first child, a son. Nazi policy did not allow Jewish women to give birth, and the baby was killed. Abraham’s mother was killed not long after in one of the many aktions that took place until the end of the year. In January 1942, the aktions stopped, and Vilnius entered a more stable period. Throughout, Abraham continued to write and to actively participate in the cultural life of the ghetto, including a ghetto theater and a youth club literary study group
In 1942, Nazi officials began plans to loot Jewish cultural property in Lithuania, and established a sorting office to review material from YIVO and other sources to either be sent to the "Institute for Study of the Jewish Question" in Frankfurt or to be destroyed. Jewish ghetto inmates, including Abraham, were tasked with sorting these works, which included such items as the diaries of Theodore Herzl and and letters by Sholem Aleichem. Rather than comply, a group which came to be known as the Paper Brigade was formed, headed by Zelig Kalmanowitz, Dr. Hermann Kruk, and Chaikel Lunski. worked to smuggle the material out and hide it in various locations throughout the ghetto. After the war, these works were retrieved, and the bulk of it sent to the United States, where YIVO established a new headquarters.
In the summer of 1943, just before the final liquidation of the ghetto, Abraham and Freydke managed to escape and join the partisan units under Soviet command in the Naroch Forest. In time, all-Jewish units were formed, and Abraham joined one which was under the command of Moshe Judka Rudnitski, whith whom he participated in several missions. While he fought with the partisans, his poem "Kol Nidrei," which described the killings in Ponary reached Russia. It was read aloud at the Central House of Writers in Moscow, and so moved the audience that a public appeal grew to save him. Soviet authorities authorized his resuce, but the first plane to try to reach him in the forest crashed. From the metal fragments of the plane, they made a suitcase, which Sutzkever filled with his poems and the other works he had brought from the ghetto. A second plane arrived in March 1944, this time successfully transporting him and Freydke to Moscow. There, he continued to write, including a chronicle of his experiences in the Vilna ghetto, and a poem detailing the experiences of a group of Jews trying to survive in the sewers of Vilna. The couple spent the remainder of the war in Russia.
In July 1944, Vilnius was captured from the Germans by the Soviet and Polish armies, allowing Avraham and Freydke to return. They initially hoped to recover the hidden cultural material and participate in the rebuilding of Vilna, but the political climate under the Soviets was not conducive to this, and they focused instead on helping to smuggle the material out. In 1946, Avraham was asked to testify about Nazi atrocities that he had witnessed in Lithuania at the Nurmeberg war crimes trIals. After brief stays in Poland and Paris, they immigrated to Palestine in 1947. There, he began a literary career and continued his advocacy for the Yiddish language. He founded the literary quarterly "Di Goldene Keyt," and encouraged Jewish communities to foster the Yiddish language and traditions. In the 1970s, he published what many consider to be his greatest work, the series "Lider Fun Toghukh." In 1985, he was awarded the Israel Prize. He died January 20, 2010, preceded in death by Freydke in 2002. They are survived by two daughters.
- Record last modified:
- 2021-03-09 00:00:00
- This page:
- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1185098
