Avraham Sutzkever (right) and his friend Shmerke Kaczerginski sit on a terrace within the Vilna ghetto.

Photo Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of the Sutzkever Family

 

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.

 

Date: 1943

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