Poet, resistance fighter, communist, Avrom Sutzkever reported on the destruction and resistance of the Wilno ghetto from 1941. His diary and his poems, written at the time or later, are the work of a “ capital witness » of the disaster.
Avrom Sutzkever (1913-2010), whose birth centenary is being celebrated this year, is known as one of the most important Yiddish poets of XXe century. But he was also, during the Second World War, an actor in Jewish life in Vilnius and an exemplary figure in several respects. Member of the FPOUnited organization of the resistance of the Wilno ghetto (name of the city chosen by the translator Gilles Rozier) and Papir brigade who organized the rescue of the collections of part of the YIVO and from several places, he fought both for the city’s Jewish community and for its culture. A miraculous survivor, he then became a “ capital witness » of the disaster.
This diary, as Annette Wieviorka explains in the preface, was originally written as part of the Black book, which was to be used to denounce Nazi crimes committed on Soviet territory. Designed by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vassili Grossman as part of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee founded in 1942, the black book was finally banned by Stalinist censorship in 1947 and was not published. Sutzkever’s diary was written in Moscow, where the poet was able to take refuge after the liberation of Wilno in 1944-1945. Following the abandonment of Black book, Sutzkever published his newspaper successively in several countries: in Paris, landmanshaft from Vilnius in 1946, published by Der Emes (The truth) in Moscow the same year and, finally, to the editions IKUF from Buenos Aires the following year. If the first of these editions testifies to an anchoring of identity, the two others clearly mark, as already his links with Ehrenburg who had ordered the newspaper, Sutzkever’s membership in communist circles.
Crimes and resistance in the Wilno ghetto
Like many documents from this period, produced under similar circumstances, it is a diary written a posteriori, very shortly after the events. Divided into four parts, dealing successively with the start of the German occupation, the establishment of the ghetto, the organization of the Resistance and the extermination, it follows both a chronological and thematic progression.
Combining first-hand testimony – concern for the fate of his mother constitutes a common thread in the story – and reported episodes, Sutzkever relates the major stages of the persecution of the Jews in Wilno: the diary begins on June 22, 1941, during the German invasion. Almost immediately, many Jews were sent to Lukishki prison and executed, at the same time as the first ordinances appeared and anti-Jewish propaganda took over the newspapers. The port of the star, a blue armband featuring a white Star of David », is made compulsory on July 8. Sutzkever, like most Jews, is hiding to escape the so-called khapunes, THE “ catchers » and who invaded the city.
The same month, on August 31, the first executions took place in the pits of Ponar reported through the words of a survivor. The ghetto is set up from October ; the author reports on the humiliations committed by the Germans and their local collaborators, at the same time as the survival strategies of the Jews and his own to have housing – his changes of hiding place punctuate the story – food, clothing, and even access to culture.
Sutzkever finally relates the liquidation of the ghetto and the fate of those who remained and were deported to Majdanek or to camps in Latvia. Interweaving the voices of third parties, he explains in detail how the corpses of the ghetto and surrounding camps were burned in Ponar. Sutzkever, who had remained hidden in the forest around Wilno, with other members of the Resistance, went to the scene himself on July 18, 1944 and described the horror at the scene of one of the worst massacres of the catastrophe, where he himself lost his loved ones, before returning to “ its » city in ruins.
Sutzkever’s participation in key moments of this history makes his testimony exceptional: close to the greatest intellectuals of Wilno (like Prilutski, founder of the folkist party and great Yiddish linguist, or Haïm Grade, writer and poet, member with Sutzkever of the literary avant-garde movement Young Vilne before the war), he reports on the structures put in place by the Jewish community in the ghetto: creation of an educational system, a mutual aid structure and a Constituent Assembly of the Union of Writers and Artists of the Wilno ghetto, created in 1942, in which he sat. This official role, linked to his communist commitment and his links with the Soviet regime, was later criticized by some. If he helped to save it, this commitment also explains certain silences or biases of the newspaper (on the role of non-communist organizations, in particular), linked undoubtedly more to the circumstances of its writing than to the deep convictions of the poet.
While the Nazis were pillaging the city’s cultural riches, Sutzkever took part in saving some of the most precious books, as well as clandestine archives exfiltrated from the ghetto, under the name of Papir brigade, with the poet Shmerke Kaczerginski, who before the war was also part of Young Vilne and will be his comrade in the armed resistance. The importance of this task, comparable in certain aspects to that carried out by Emmanuel Ringelblum and the collective Oyneg Shabes in the Warsaw ghetto, gives all the more value to this diary because, unlike what happened in Warsaw, there are few documents on the history of the Wilno ghetto.
At the same time, Sutzkever’s role in the ghetto resistance – the FPOthen the brigade Nekome-nemer, with whom he participated in the liberation of the city on July 13, 1944 – gives rise to a detailed description of the organization and its main members, most of whom have disappeared, to whom the poet pays tribute. Various letters and documents are reproduced, including the words of the partisan anthem, which after the war became the emblematic song of the Yiddish community in the diaspora, thus making it possible to trace its origins.
Poetry, lifeline
Sutzkever survived by hiding in the ghetto, then miraculously escaping death several times, before hiding in the forest with the partisans. Throughout this period, he never stopped writing poetry: “ Avrom Sutzkever’s survival is inseparable from his identity as a poet », explains Gilles Rozier, translator of this edition, in his preface. Sutzkever recounts in his diary how he saved his poem Sibir (Siberia) at the time of entering the ghetto, writes the cycle “ Swamp Face » in a hiding place, as well as many other poems which he took care to safeguard. Inseparably, the relationship with the Yiddish language, the language of writing poetry and newspapers, is at the foundation of its identity and its belonging to a community, like a bulwark against “ the language that stained Europe “.
The diary and poems about the ghetto, written at the time or later, “ thus constitute two literary monuments which respond to each other “. These testimonies should have been completed by another: Sutzkever, aware of his unique position as a surviving Yiddish poet, wanted to testify in this language at the Nuremberg trials, where he had also been recommended by Ehrenburg. This was refused to him, and it is ultimately the rest of his poetic work which seems to realize this wish. After the war, the poet, after a brief visit to Paris, settled in Israel where he lived until his death and where he promoted Yiddish culture, notably through the magazine “ Di Goldene Keyt », which he founded and directed until 1995.
Within the abundant number of publications of works and testimonies on the genocide of the Jews during the Second World War, a renewed specific interest in the fate of the Jews of central and eastern Europe seems to be emerging, in particular for writings in Yiddish or relating to this history. The recent publications of Leib Rochman’s novel and Samuel Kassow’s essay on the archives of the Warsaw ghetto, both of which have received a wider public and critical response than that of the circle of specialists, are tangible signs of this.
The publication of this journal follows in such a wake. By the stature of its author and the quality of its critical apparatus, which allows it to be recontextualized, The Wilno Ghetto constitutes a fascinating document for both the historian and the general public.