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The Houdini of the Vilna Ghetto

(The Article) Jeffrey Meyers - Abraham Sutzkever (1913-2010), the leading modern Yiddish poet, lived in Nazi-occupied Vilna, Lithuania, until the liquidation of the ghetto in September 1943. In March 1944, Sutzkever, considered a cultural treasure, was helped by the influential Soviet-Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg and flown to Russia in a dramatic rescue. His journal was published as From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg. Sutzkever had many amazing escapes from death. He hid in a coffin, in a common grave and in a lime pit. He jumped out of a high window. He hid in the sewers. He gave brief journalistic accounts of horrific events that he actually experienced or heard from eye-witnesses. Nazi doctors drew blood from Jewish children for transfusions to Germans and "extracted the most delicate facial skin for use in cosmetic surgeries on wounded and burned German soldiers." Sutzkever took an active part in sabotage campaigns. Resistance fighters stole bullets, pistols, rifles, machine guns and gunpowder to make bombs from German factories, bunkers and armored cars. They blew up a train and killed 200 soldiers, blew up a bridge and killed another 200. Torn between overwhelming sorrow and a burning desire for revenge, Sutzkever had the chance to smuggle a gun into the Nuremberg trial and execute Hermann Goering. But as a Russian citizen he would have antagonized the Americans, who would not have believed he acted on his own. He was forbidden to exact revenge, and Goering took poison before he could be hanged.
2022-01-27 00:00:00
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