From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg: Memoir and Testimony 9780228010432

Table of contents :
Cover
FROM THE VILNA GHETTO TO NUREMBERG
Title
Copyright
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Maps
VILNA GHETTO
Translator’s Introduction
Part I In German Claws
Part II Behind the Gates
Part III The Partisan Organization
Part IV On Smoking Ashes
THE MOSCOW YEARS (1944–1946)
Editor’s Introduction
Part I Testimony at Nuremberg
Nuremberg: Diary Notes
Testimony at the Nuremberg Trials
Part II Three Reminiscences
Editor’s Introduction
Ilya Ehrenburg
Peretz Markish and His Circle
With Shloyme Mikhoels
Afterword: “Written in Moscow, Summer 1944”
Vilna Ghetto Chronology
List of Place Names in Vilna
Notes
Further Reading
Index

Citation preview

FROM THE VILNA GHETTO TO NUREMBERG

FROM THE VILNA GHETTO TO NUREMBERG Memoir and Testimony

abraham sutzkever Edited and translated by Justin D. Cammy Afterword by Justin D. Cammy and Avraham Novershtern

A Yiddish Book Center Translation McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021 IsbN 978-0-2280-0892-7 (cloth) IsbN 978-0-2280-0899-6 (paper) IsbN 978-0-2280-1043-2 (ePDF) IsbN 978-0-2280-1044-9 (ePub) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2021 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Translation of this volume was made possible in part by a Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellowship. McGill-Queen’s University Press is grateful for the financial support of the Yiddish Book Center towards the publication of this work.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg : memoir and testimony / Abraham Sutzkever ; edited and translated by Justin D. Cammy ; afterword by Justin D. Cammy and Avraham Novershtern. Other titles: Fun Ṿilner geṭo. English Names: Sutzkever, Abraham, 1913-2010, author. | Cammy, Justin Daniel, translator, editor. Description: “A Yiddish Book Center Translation.” | Translation of: Fun Ṿilner geṭo. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210237988 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210238151 | IsbN 9780228008996 (paper) | IsbN 9780228008927 (cloth) | IsbN 9780228010432 (ePDF) | IsbN 9780228010449 (ePub) Subjects: LCsh: Sutzkever, Abraham, 1913-2010. | LCsh: Jews – Persecutions – Lithuania – Vilnius. | LCsh: Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) – Lithuania – Vilnius – Personal narratives. | LCsh: World War, 1939-1945 – Underground movements – Lithuania – Vilnius. | LCsh: World War, 1939-1945 – Lithuania – Vilnius – Personal narratives, Jewish. | LCsh: Vilnius (Lithuania) – Ethnic relations. | LCGFt: Autobiographies. Classification: LCC Ds135.L52 v557813 2021 | DDC 940.53/18094793 – dc23 This book was designed and typeset by Peggy & Co. Design in 11/14 Minion 3.

Contents

Illustrations follow pages Acknowledgments Maps

218, 301

vii

xi

vILNa Ghetto Translator’s Introduction 3 Part I In German Claws 7 Part II Behind the Gates 40 Part III The Partisan Organization Part IV On Smoking Ashes 186

135

the mosCow Ye ars (1944–1946) Editor’s Introduction 233 Part I Testimony at Nuremberg 235 Nuremberg: Diary Notes 237 Testimony at the Nuremberg Trials 253 Part II Three Reminiscences 263 Editor’s Introduction 265 Ilya Ehrenburg 268 Peretz Markish and His Circle 285 With Shloyme Mikhoels 292 Afterword: “Written in Moscow, Summer 1944” Justin D. Cammy and Avraham Novershtern

319

vi

CoNteNts

Vilna Ghetto Chronology

375

List of Place Names in Vilna Notes

387

Further Reading Index

455

451

383

Acknowledgments

I begin by thanking Rina Sutzkever for permission to translate this volume, and Hadas Kalderon for graciously sharing photographs from the Sutzkever family archive and encouraging its publication. Where it is available, I have provided archival information on the location of photographs. Those with no citation were scanned from Sutzkever’s Vilna Ghetto (Paris, 1946), by permission of the family. I am deeply appreciative to the International Center for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem for awarding me a research fellowship allowing me to initiate research on this project. A translation fellowship from the Yiddish Book Center provided a collegial framework to progress in the translation. I thank the Committee on Faculty Compensation and Development at Smith College for its support of my research, especially its assistance for research trips to Jerusalem and Vilnius. Both the Littauer fund of the Program in Jewish Studies at Smith College and the Yiddish Book Center’s translation program under the directorship of Madeleine Cohen provided support that enabled the volume to include photographs and remain affordable to readers. When I started to translate Vilna Ghetto into English, Avraham Novershtern invited me to partner with him on an introduction to a new Hebrew translation. I reworked our introduction here into an expanded Afterword for an English-language readership. Avraham encouraged me to consult his Hebrew notes, which were helpful in guiding some of my own biographical entries. I appreciated this opportunity to work with one of Sutzkever’s most notable interpreters. I thank my dear friend Abby Wisse Schachter for undertaking an initial translation of that Hebrew introduction. I am equally grateful for conversations and advice regarding this project with Hannah Pollin-Galay. Her articles on Sutzkever’s activities

viii

Acknowledgments

in Moscow and post-liberation Vilnius are the most valuable analyses of this moment in Sutzkever’s creative life. I thank Dovid Braun, Marc Caplan, Sam Kassow, Dov-Ber Kerler, and Rebecca Margolis for their timely assistance with specific Yiddish questions. Joanna Caravita, Tom Roberts, and Joel Westerdale provided assistance when I had questions about Hebrew, Russian, or German. Heather Valencia generously allowed me to quote from a long speech and some poems that appear in her translation of Sutzkever’s Still My Word Sings: Poems. Barbara Harshav was equally generous in allowing me to quote from the translations that she and Benjamin Harshav included in A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose. I appreciate even the briefest conversations and exchanges over the years with Solon Beinfeld, Krzysztof Czyzewski, Lois Dubin, David Fishman, Sergey Glebov, Stefanie Halpern, Mikhail Krutikov, Cecile Kuznitz, Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, Lara Lempert, Ilya Lempertas, Ilona Murauskaite, Shimon Redlich, David Roskies, Gilles Rozier, Jan Schwarz, Rimantas Stankevicius, Karolina Szymaniak, Abby Weaver, Keith Weiser, and Christa Whitney. Emily Bell, Sadie Gold-Shapiro, Teddy Schneider, and Sofia Sheri – former students of Yiddish at Smith College – joined me in a reading and translation workshop of this text. Our conversations about the challenges of this work sharpened my own thinking and approach. I am appreciative of the work of Smith College students Jessica Buslewicz, who provided assistance on the notes and proofreading, and Hannah Dillahunt, who produced the maps for this volume under the supervision of the Spatial Analysis Lab. Jonathan Cartledge of our Imaging Center provided scans of various images. My colleague Ernest Benz reviewed the manuscript at several critical moments to provide the careful eye of an historian. My deep thanks to Richard Ratzlaff, my editor at McGill-Queen’s University Press, and his colleagues for their enthusiastic support and careful guidance of this volume. John Parry, the volume’s copy-editor, offered key suggestions, and Heather Dubnick provided timely assistance with the index. I first read Sutzkever in an undergraduate seminar with Ruth Wisse at McGill University. She is not only the most formidable teacher I ever encountered, but also a loyal friend. Since my journey with Sutzkever

Acknowledgments

ix

began at McGill it is personally meaningful that this volume is now available to a global English-reading public through its imprint and by a Canadian press. My habit was to translate during the early morning hours. Whether I found myself working at home in Northampton, Massachusetts, in Vilnius, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, or at Camp Yavneh in New Hampshire I found the dark quiet better focused me on Sutzkever’s narrative of horrors and heroism. And with each sunrise, my gratitude for Rachel and our three children was renewed. Tel Aviv July 2021

Map created by Hannah Dillahunt

V I L N A G H ET TO

Translator’s Introduction

Two Yiddish editions of Abraham Sutzkever’s Vilna Ghetto were published in early 1946. One appeared in Moscow under the title From the Vilna Ghetto, and the other in Paris as Vilna Ghetto: 1941–1944. Sutzkever was originally commissioned to write about his wartime experiences in the Vilna ghetto by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, both of whom were members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JaFC) and editors of The Black Book of Soviet Jewry (often simply The Black Book).1 I based my initial draft translation on the Moscow edition, and then cross-checked it against the Paris edition for textual variants. As editor, I took the liberty of synthesizing the two into this single English volume in order to provide the fullest text possible. In cases where a phrase, sentence, paragraph, or more differs between the two editions, I placed the textual variant between two single asterisks (*) for segments that appear in the Moscow but not in the Paris edition, and between two double asterisks (**) for materials in the Paris text but not the Moscow. I have also noted places where the two versions organize the narrative differently. In transliterating from Yiddish, I follow mainly the system established by YIvo (Yiddish Scientific Institute), as adapted by Isaac Bleaman in “Guidelines for Yiddish in Bibliographies: A Supplement to YIvo Transliteration,” in In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (2 July 2019), even though some names and words would have been pronounced differently in Lithuanian Yiddish. Street names in Vilna (Vilne in Yiddish, Wilno in Polish, Vilnius in Lithuanian) and place names in eastern Europe pose a distinct challenge for Yiddish translators. Sutzkever was born at a time (1913) when Vilna was a provincial tsarist city, came of age as a writer when Wilno was part of interwar Poland, and spent the war years in Vilnius,

4

vILNa Ghetto

which was under the control of, in rapid succession, the Red Army, independent Lithuania, the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, and Nazi Germany before it was liberated by the Red Army in July 1944. Each ruling power imposed its own street names, and the Jews often referred to certain streets and areas by their own, unofficial Yiddish names, even when official maps changed. Since Sutzkever wrote this book for a Yiddish-speaking readership at a moment in history when Yiddish place names had, quite literally, been wiped off the map, I sought to produce a translation that respected the city’s Yiddish toponymy. It is important to remember that Jewish geography is not only about a material space but also reflects political and psychic claims and conditions registered in language. In order to provide a sense of the way Sutzkever and his fellow townspeople navigated, and then reconstructed Yiddish Vilna, l elected to retain Sutzkever’s Yiddish names for most streets, neighbourhoods, and regional locations. Although some scholars and translators have used the official pre-war Polish names when writing about wartime Vilna, I find such usages anachronistic for a period after Polish control. Moreover, Sutzkever’s Yiddish place names remind us of how he consciously deployed them to claim urban space for Jewish collective memory, in which Vilna had played a towering and central role for centuries, as his book makes so poignantly clear. An obvious exception to use of Yiddish names: I refer to the city at the centre of this memoir as Vilna instead of Vilne (as it was called in Yiddish), or Vilnius, as it is known today  – Vilna is predominant in Jewish scholarship. For places named for well-known European figures and some locations, a direct English translation of the Yiddish seemed appropriate. An appendix lists place names with their Polish and Lithuanian equivalents. I also included a chronology of the Vilna ghetto to assist readers as they make their way through Sutzkever’s text. How also to refer to the dozens of individuals Sutzkever mentions in his volume? I usually transliterate their names according to YIvo rules of transcription rather than polonizing or anglicizing them (for instance, “Noyekh Prilutski” instead of “Noah Prylucki,” and “Yankev Vigodski” instead of “Jacob Wygodzki”). My decision to retain Yiddish names for both places and people reflected and aided my effort to reconstruct, in some small way, the Yiddish environment of Vilna Jewry and Sutzkever’s visceral

traNsLator’s INtroDuCtIoN

5

memoryscape. Wherever possible I provide a short biographical note (in the endnotes) the first time an individual is mentioned in the text. In some cases where Sutzkever also composed a poem (either during the war or in its aftermath) about an event or person mentioned in the memoir, I include reference to it for the benefit of readers. Sutzkever also recognized that the German occupation of Vilna (1941–44) introduced new terms to Yiddish, such as khapunes for the Jew-snatchers who seized Jews off the streets, malines for makeshift Jewish hideouts in secret rooms or in hastily hewn cellars and caves, and provokatsyes for major assault operations against the Jewish population.2 At one point in the memoir Sutzkever notes that a secret language for smuggling emerged in the ghetto and provides several examples. The event we now refer to as the Holocaust demanded that its many victims adapt their spoken Yiddish to new circumstances, and my translation aims to underscore this. Jewish tradition also includes a wide body of specific terms for rituals, texts, holidays, customs, occupations, and sites. I often leave these words in the text so readers may wrestle with language as part of their broader interpretive encounter with this civilization. Overall, I felt it critical that my translation help preserve an experience lived in and through Yiddish. Previous translations of Sutzkever’s memoir of the Vilna ghetto have appeared in Hebrew (1947, 2016), French (1950, 2013), Russian (2008), German (2009), and Lithuanian (2011). This is the first translation into English, and the only one that attempts to provide a full rendering of both versions published in 1946. Some readers will find it beneficial to consult the Afterword before they begin their reading of Sutzkever. It provides important context for Sutzkever’s wartime experiences and writing. I elected to include an Afterword rather than an Introduction so that readers who prefer first to encounter primary sources without scholarly mediation would have that opportunity. My hope is that this volume with be of service not only to scholars and students of the Holocaust, but also to visitors to Vilnius. When I first experienced the city with a group of Yiddish scholars shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and then with my own students two decades later, we spent hours standing in decaying courtyards and in front of abandoned buildings reading poetry, singing songs, and exploring Yiddish and Hebrew texts written there. We did this because they

6

vILNa Ghetto

were our remaining connections to a community that had once been a cultural capital of the Jewish world. Sutzkever’s account provides us with a reminder of the ways in which the tourist-thronged streets of this charming European capital are saturated with layers of memory that remain unknown to most residents and visitors. May this translation play at least a small part in revealing that which remains concealed. JC

Part I In German Claws In the City and On the Road When I turned on the radio the morning of 22 June [1941],1 a hysterical German scream leapt out at me like a pack of lizards. From the clamour I realized that the German army had crossed the border. I darted outside, eager for a familiar face. I came across Noyekh Prilutski,2 professor of Yiddish studies at Vilnius University. He was absorbed in his research on Yiddish phonetics. “Hitler began to dig his own grave with the first bomb dropped on Russian territory,” Prilutski prophesied, but he had no advice about what we ought to do. He turned back to his work. Firefighters rushed through the streets. A fire was burning next to the Green Bridge. I turned towards Mother’s home, which was located just beyond the bridge. She was relieved to see me. She showered me with kisses and tried to assure me that everything would be all right. She prepared a sorrel soup for me and added in some cream … The bombs fell relentlessly. Across the Viliye River a gas reservoir was on fire. The smell made it all the way to our little room and tore at our throats. “Mom, we have to save ourselves!” Mother stroked my hair, kissed my forehead, and with a painful expression I will never forget told me: “I’m not going anywhere. But you are my life. Go and save yourself. You have your entire life ahead of you!” I went to see Dovid Umru, editor of the local Yiddish newspaper, Emes (Truth).3 We sat down and planned our escape. Close to midnight a blinding light illuminated the room. Airplanes were dropping flares in the night sky. We saw German paratroopers landing in the vicinity of the Hill of Three Crosses through the window.

8

vILNa Ghetto

Enemy aircraft flew low over the city. At the intersection of Glezer and Breyte Streets a brick building collapsed. Sixty people were trapped beneath the rubble. More homes were destroyed on Portove Street. Smoke from the fires spread through the city. People grabbed whatever possessions they could carry and tried to escape. The noise in the distance warned that the Germans were closing in and that they would soon subject Vilna to their will. We ran as fast as we could – a group of writers, friends, and acquaintances. I abandoned my apartment. The only valuables I managed to take with me were the freshly printed pages of my poem “Sibir” [Siberia].4 My wife5 grabbed the diary that she had been filling for ten years. We followed Subotsh Street in the direction of Minsk. We approached a caravan of Jews. The wagons were stuffed with pillows and women. We learned from one of the draymen that he was fleeing with his family from the “Cheap Houses.”6 He knew a peasant in the village of Slobode. They would live out the war with him there. He would return once the Germans were repelled. The highway grew more congested by the minute. Young people, adults, and even the aged, streamed eastward, towards the Soviet interior. We were fleeing the plague, but the plague was close behind … German airplanes were like swarms of locusts. They targeted individuals from the air. Our group was separated in the scramble. Umru and his wife were lost in the confusion. I was left holding their feverish child. I wanted to step into a roadside hut to find some water for the child, but they were all empty. The peasants had fled too. Night. We slept in the forest. Red Army soldiers warned us to hide because German troops disguised in Red Army fatigues had parachuted behind enemy lines and were quickly approaching. My friend’s child started to cry. He missed his mother. He was hungry. My heart was breaking. I gathered a few berries in the moonlight and gave them to him. He was not going to die in my arms. • The Germans overtook us near Oshmene. In the distance we could hear the rumble of tanks. Peasants told us the entire area was swarming with Germans. Where could we turn? And I was still carrying a child!

IN GermaN CLaws

9

Villages were aflame. Airplanes buzzed overhead. We saw many Soviet planes among them. They were battling the German Luftwaffe just below the clouds. Several crashed nearby, enveloped in smoke. Not far from Vilna I found the father of the child I had been carrying all this time. I returned the baby to him, relieved that I had been able to keep him alive. We spent the night in a peasant woman’s barn. Through the sparks we could see Nay-Vileyke in flames. At night motorcycles pulled up to the barn. I overheard the language that was defiling Europe. German police were searching the village. They called out to our peasant woman and asked whether she was hiding any Jews. My friends were asleep. I was the only one awake. Our lives depended on her response. She replied in her native language: “No, there is nobody here.” And the police continued on their way. Tanks, tanks, tanks. The entire Oshmene highway was a chain of tanks. The clamour was deafening. We held out for half a day. In the end we tore ourselves away. We backtracked along the same road on which we had fled. We washed ourselves in the Vilenke River. We tore up our identity papers and documents in case we were searched. My wife kissed her diary and, page by page, abandoned it to the river. • I was back in the city. There was barely a Jew on the streets. A few elderly Jews with bowed heads shuffled along the walls. Most of the population had shuttered itself at home. New and sinister types appeared all over town wearing white armbands and carrying small rifles over their shoulders. Among them was a student I recognized from Vilnius University. The White Armbands7 were leading some twenty people at gunpoint near Castle Hill. Among them was Zalmen Shapiro, a pharmacist from Vilkomirer Street. They were all being forced up the hill. Near the Green Bridge I heard a salvo of bullets from the vicinity of Castle Hill. I turned around and saw a swastika fluttering above Gediminas Castle. I did not return to my apartment at Subotsh Street 6, where I had left all my belongings. I headed to my mother’s at Vilkomirer Street 14, where I had lived previously for twenty years. When I reached her she was in tears. Yesterday someone had told her that he had seen me dead, torn apart by a bomb.

10

vILNa Ghetto

Evil Decrees and Patches The next morning a neighbour came from town to tell us that Jews were being kidnapped for forced labour. These Jews, the ones who were caught, were being allowed to go home at night and were given papers to indicate that they had already been “seized.” The neighbour then added that the Germans had taken some two hundred people hostage, Jews and Poles, in Lukishki Prison. The hostages would pay with their lives at the first sign of “trouble” from the local population. That same night, shots rang out until early dawn from the prison opposite my window, which was located on the far side of the Viliye River. Who was firing, and at whom? Nobody knew. The incident repeated itself for several more days. Later it was revealed that the same evening the hostages were brought to the prison, they were executed in groups in the prison courtyard. The shootings at Lukishki Prison did not stop. Neither did the random snatching of people off the street. Every police station received orders to arrest fifty Jews a day. And not for normal work, but for a secret purpose to which we were not privy. Khapunes – that’s how Jews referred to their abductors – swarmed through the streets checking people’s identities, frisking them, and conducting random searches. They stopped everyone. If a Jew did not have a document attesting to the fact that he was a worker, or if his document was slightly torn or creased, he was sent to Lukishki Prison. The fascist police confiscated the merchandise from Jewish-owned shops and expelled the Jews from all workshops and factories. In the course of a single hour all “non-Aryans” were driven from Kiev Street, Chopin Street, and Groys-Stefn Street, and their apartments sealed. An entire community was expelled from the area. The first orders were posted: Jews may not use the telephone. Jews have no right to travel by train. Jews may not enter public institutions (baths, hospitals, cinemas, cafés). Jews must turn over their bicycles and radios to the authorities. All Jews are expelled from the university.

IN GermaN CLaws

11

A familiar statement appeared all over town: Eintritt für Juden verboten [Entry forbidden to Jews]. Terrifying articles about Jews appeared in the local newspapers. The full poison of German propaganda, perfected over recent years, infected the local press with the collaboration of fascist agents  – GermanLithuanian nationalists. On 4 July the following announcement was published in the papers and posted on city walls: “Pursuant to the German military orders of 3 July 1941 we announce that all Jews, regardless of gender or age, must wear a patch measuring ten by ten centimeters on their chest and on their back. The patch must contain a yellow circle on it with the letter ‘J’ in the centre. A sample is now on display at all police stations. The order takes effect on 8 July 1941. Severe punishment for those who disobey. Military Governor of Vilna, Zehnpfennig.”8 A few days later, Stadtkommandant Neumann issued a new ordinance about the patches: they should not be yellow, and they should not be worn on the chest and back. Instead Jews must wear a blue armband with a white star of David. The new order was cancelled a day later. Once again we were ordered to wear yellow patches on our chests and on our backs. The Germans aimed to insult, humiliate, and confuse the Jewish population with these decrees in order to have a “legal” pretext to accumulate additional victims. Jews were unable, even incapable, of keeping up with these ever-changing orders. The punishment for not wearing the required patch was immediate arrest. The patches were not the end of it. Yet another new edict: “Jews are forbidden to make contact with or to speak with non-Jews. As of today Jews do not have the right to sell any of their possessions, which are property of the German Reich and are only temporarily at the disposition of their former owners. Accordingly, Jews are barred from the market. Those disobeying orders will be shot.” On 2 August Hingst9 took up his position as Gebietskommissar, governor of the Vilna district. That same day he put on a show of his power. Two large pogroms broke out on Shpitol and Novigorod Streets. They were conducted by the mass murderers Schweinberger10 and Weiss.11 In addition, Hingst imposed a huge tax on the Jewish community.

12

vILNa Ghetto

One edict led to another: Jews may be in the city only until six o’clock in the evening. Jews are forbidden from walking on the sidewalk. They may walk only in the gutters and only in single file, like geese. Jews are barred from Mickiewicz, Zavalne, Breyte, and Shlos Streets, from Cathedral Square, and from the area of the train station. Jews attempted to circumvent these orders. Since they were not permitted to go to the market, they either risked going there without wearing the required patch in an attempt to pass as non-Jews, or non-Jewish neighbours would purchase food on their behalf and bring it home to them. Jews came up with a solution for not being allowed on the streets: they breached courtyards and cut new byways between them. They detoured through dozens of blocks to get to their destination.

Khapunes The Gestapo officer Schweinberger worked efficiently. He established his headquarters at Vilner Street 12. He enlisted Lithuanian fascists from the Ypatingasis būrys,12 or as they were colloquially known the Ypatinga [Special Squad], and divided them into two: the job of the first group was to capture Jews, and the job of the second was to execute those who had been snatched. • The khapunes [Jew-snatchers] took over the streets. Their first task was to search for Jewish men and drag them off to forced labour. But labour wasn’t really the ultimate goal. It was a good way, perfectly conceived, to fool and mislead the Jewish population. At first, nobody laid a finger on the Jewish workers. To the contrary, they received papers indicating that they were employed. Those in possession of such papers were not supposed to be arrested. Soon, the Jewish population was divided between those who were working and those who were holed up in “malines,” the term used in the ghetto to refer to a makeshift hideout. Jews who were discovered by the Jew-snatchers were ordered to pack a towel and a bar

IN GermaN CLaws

13

of soap and were taken to Lukishki Prison. Schweinberger awaited them there. Nobody escaped his clutches. There was a file of index cards at the headquarters of the Ypatinga on Vilner Street 12 of all those snatched, that is to say all those kidnapped off the streets and sent to Lukishki Prison. The cards included several columns: the first and surname of the detainee, date of birth, and the name of the person who had caught him. On the backside the group’s Secretary Norvaiša wrote the letter “L” or “P” in red pencil. An “L” meant that the victim was in the Lukishki Prison. A “P” indicated that the prisoner had already been shipped to Ponar, the parkland execution site on the outskirts of town. For every Jew caught and designated for extermination, the kidnapper was paid ten rubles. Many Jew-snatchers benefitted from the help of assistants in hunting Jews. Most of the time these were young boys. They sniffed out the spots where Jews were most likely to hide. People were no less terrified of them than they were of adults. These khapunes not only captured Jews to send them to their deaths. They also enjoyed humiliating them. In their glory days, on the eve of the establishment of the ghetto, they would barge into Jewish study houses and drag off worshippers who were still in their prayer shawls and phylacteries. Consider the following case: during one raid Gershn Shmukler hid in a closet. A Jew-snatcher discovered him and dragged him into the courtyard. He attempted to ransom himself. Since he did not have enough money, he pleaded with his captor whom he had known as a fellow student at the university: “Tear out my gold teeth, just let me live …” The student’s “conscience” was awakened. He extracted Shmukler’s teeth on the spot and let the man go.

The First Judenrat13 On 4 July [1941] a taxi arrived in the courtyard of the Great Synagogue. Two Germans with rifles strung across their shoulders demanded to see the rabbi of Vilna. The chief sexton, Khayim-Meyer Gordon, a tall, handsome man with a white beard, appeared. “Are you the rabbi of Vilna?” one of the Germans asked him at rifle-point. Gordon explained that he was only a sexton and that the chief rabbi, Rubinstein, was in the United States and the deputy chief rabbi, Khayim-Oyzer Grodzenski,14 was dead.

14

vILNa Ghetto

“In that case,” the Germans informed the sexton, “you are now the chief rabbi. You have until tomorrow to establish a Judenrat.” A meeting was called of the Vilna communal leadership, chaired by the well-respected Dr Gershuni,15 who was already quite advanced in age. Gershuni declared that those gathered would serve on the Judenrat, and that refusal was not an option. He compared their task to an act of martyrdom, or kidesh hashem.  Then he burst into bitter tears. Sixteen people were selected for the Judenrat. They included Dr Yankev Vigodski,16 Rabbi Shum, Eliezer Kruk, attorney Pinkhes Kon,17 Mme Dr ShabadGavronski, Saul Trotski, and the banker Langbort. The engineer Saul Trotski was appointed head of the Judenrat.18 The Judenrat established itself at Strashun Street 6, in the building of the former Mefitsey-Haskole Library.19 The first task that fell to the Judenrat was to collect all the gold and valuables from the Jewish community. • As soon as the Germans entered Vilna, Dr Yankev Vigodski, who had long served as the well-respected head of the Vilna Jewish community, summoned his waning energies. At eighty-five years old he was fated to witness the swastika flying over his hometown. He was already quite ill, and could barely walk. When the new masters unleashed their murderous campaign against the Jewish population, dozens, even hundreds of people flocked to Vigodski. This one had a son who had been snatched away, another a father. Could he help them, could he save them? A feeble Vigodski rose from his bed, dressed in black clothes upon which the required patches had been sewn, took his cane, and went off to find Murer,20 the Nazi in charge of Jewish affairs, in an effort to convince him to cancel the evil decrees. The shturmist [stormtrooper] posted by the door did not allow him through. He was ordered to wait in the stairwell. Murer appeared an hour later. The old man approached him, introduced himself, and informed the new master of the great injustices being committed against the Jews. Murer did not respond with a single word. He slid a white glove over his hand and tossed Vigodski down the stairs.

IN GermaN CLaws

15

The old man struggled to his feet. He wiped away the blood, and followed the cobblestones home along with his fellow Jews. He walked down Mickiewicz Street. However, the law forbidding Jews from taking main streets had just come into effect. A Jew-snatcher immediately spotted Dr Yankev Vigodski, and he was snatched from the street. By chance a non-Jewish professor witnessed the scene. He ransomed the old man and brought him home. The elderly community leader did not leave his apartment again until the day a car arrived at his door. He was torn from his bed and dragged to Lukishki Prison. My wife saw him in prison. Schweinberger tortured him for a month. Corpses were placed in his cell. Jews who had been snatched in various assaults, known in Yiddish as provokatsyes,21 came to the old man in the hope of some consolation. Vigodski raised the morale of the condemned. He advised them to tear up any money they had with them and to toss it in the latrine, and to do the same with gold and jewellery, so that valuables would not fall into the hands of the murderers. **He said that death had to be welcomed with equanimity, just as our ancestors had sanctified God’s holy name.**

The Axe My mother momentarily forgot the German regulations and stepped on the sidewalk. A stormtrooper grabbed her by the hair and struck her face with his whip. When she fell to the ground, lying in her own blood in the gutter, he burst out in thunderous laughter and left. A neighbour brought her home. I washed off her blood, and for the first time I felt the spark of vengeance ignite within me. Suddenly, I heard footsteps in the entryway. I hid in the dark little room that served as our kitchen. Two Jew-snatchers entered. I was standing in the tiny room, glued to the wall, and heard them speaking. Since ours was a poor home, they were not looking for gold. They were sniffing out people. Seeing there were none present, one of them said: “We should check carefully. The Zhids know how to hide themselves well.” I heard the door of the dark little room open and someone with an electric lamp entered. I took hold of an axe next to the broken oven. I

16

vILNa Ghetto

promised myself that if the Jew-snatcher caught a glimpse of me and tried to arrest me I would split open his head. He entered. I made out a black hat and a face with a thin beard. He walked along the walls holding the lamp, peeking into every corner. The Jew-snatcher moved deeper into the room. I could hear his breath. He was standing with his back to me. The axe was planted firmly in my palm, awaiting the moment to fulfil my oath. I was waiting for him to turn and notice me. *A powerful desire for revenge arose within me at that moment. I had never experienced such a strong compulsion. I waited for him to turn his head. I wanted to avenge my bloodied mother.* The Jew-snatcher focused his light in every direction, but he never thought to turn around, and he left the room.

My First Maline I was terrified of the Jew-snatchers and stormtroopers who were raiding Jewish homes. I spent day and night in my little room at Vilkomirer 14 covered in rags, thinking about where and how to devise myself a maline – a word that quickly became popular in the ghetto. It meant a place where one could hide from the khapunes, the Jew-snatchers. My apartment was a wooden garret located on the second floor. It was wide open and undoubtedly would have been a target of searches. The Jew-snatchers were skilled at sniffing out Jews. Recently they had come with axes and search dogs. The only possible hiding place was in the chimney of the broken stove in the kitchen. At night, I carefully removed a few bricks and slid myself into its upper reaches. The moon lit the way for me. For three nights I contorted myself into the chimney until my lungs were poisoned with soot. One day, it occurred to me that there must be an open space under the metal roof, beneath the window. If I could make an opening and carefully conceal it, it would be possible to crawl up and actually “live” there. At the entrance, by our apartment door, there was a dark niche where we used to store wood. I tore off one of its planks and made an opening in the metal roof. The maline was little more than crawl space. There was only enough room for me to lie down, and it was barely possible to turn onto my back. Crawling in feet first, I could replace the wooden plank behind me and secure it from the inside with the help of wire, so that nobody could enter. That’s how I remained in my maline for seven weeks. I pierced a

IN GermaN CLaws

17

tiny hole in the metal roof, and in that needle of light, a needle-shine, I wrote my poetic cycle “Faces in Swamps.”22 I burned myself whenever my body came into contact with the metal roof, which overheated in the hot July sun. I could barely wait for nightfall. My wife, who moved through town without the required patches, made her way there at dusk. She slid a slice of bread underneath the plank for me. I did not dare open the maline because the Jew-snatchers could burst in at any moment. • Since the apartment below us was empty (the sons had been snatched, and their aged mother was dead), Nikolai Ptashek, a long-time employee of the Vilna municipality, took up residence there. His presence aroused the fear of the remaining Jewish residents. **He had a habit of cleaning his gun on the front steps in the evening.** One day he bragged to his neighbours that he had just returned from the town of Podbrozh, where he personally shot fifty Jews. We took him at his word. He scattered the belongings he had stolen all over the courtyard. My hiding spot was just above his bed. One little movement on my part, even the smallest rustle, might be overheard in his room. Someone suggested to him that since Reyne’s son – that is to say, me – had not yet been dragged down the stairs and snatched, it must be because he was in hiding. Ptashek paid a visit to Mother upstairs. During that entire period I roasted in my hideout. I never left it, even at night. I knew that were I to fall into the hands of those scoundrels it would be the end of me. I fell ill while in hiding. But I decided not to move. Mother whispered to me through a crack, begging me to leave so that I could take in some fresh air and allow my feverish body to recover. I allowed myself to be convinced only once. I slid out of my hiding place and found myself at home. It was a Friday night. Mother had already lit the Sabbath candles. The scent of lilac wafted through the window like an omen of peace. I partially undressed in order to wash myself. Ptashek entered at that very moment. He pretended not to see me. He asked my mother whether she liked her apartment and said he wanted to move up a floor because the noise in the apartment below prevented him from sleeping. He said that soon enough all the Jews would be driven into the ghetto and he would take possession of

18

vILNa Ghetto

the dwelling. My mother was in the middle of blessing the candles and paid no attention to his prattle. He politely took his leave and closed the door. I immediately sensed that Ptashek planned to seize me. Before I could put on my shirt I heard a commotion. Ptashek, accompanied by a stormtrooper, burst into the apartment. I cannot explain how I managed to elude them. With lightning speed I jumped into the hallway and returned to my hideout.

The German Idea of Entertainment Remaining in my hideout at Mother’s house was now out of the question. I decided to escape by sneaking back into town. I knew that at the top of the road, next to the Sheskin Hills, Jews were working in a munitions depot. I decided to remove my patches and make my way there, with the objective of slipping into the columns of Jews as they were marched back to the city. I wrote my will in case I was captured, and tossed it into the hideout where I had lain for seven weeks consumed by fever. On the night of 5 August 1941, I snuck into a neighbouring courtyard, where I hid in an attic, and at daylight I walked down the sidewalk towards the Sheskin Hills without wearing any of the required patches. It was a big mistake. **Having spent so much time under a sheet-metal roof in the dark, I had lost track of time.** It was a Sunday, and on Sundays Jews were not taken to forced labour. Near the Purte brickyard, a drunk stormtrooper stopped me and demanded my papers. Seeing that I was cornered, I told him that I was a Jew and that I had forgotten to affix the required patches. “You are fortunate to have come across me and not one of my colleagues,” he said, pointing in the other direction. “They would have sliced off your ears. You see, I won’t harm you. I’ll let you go later tonight, but now you’re going to come with me so that you can perform in a circus.” I desperately looked for a way to save myself. I removed the watch from my wrist and handed it to him as a way of begging for my freedom. The stormtrooper exploded in laughter. He stuck his hand in his pocket and pulled out a dozen watches, as though they were for sale. “In Ponevezh, a Jew offered me a brand-new two-storey house, on the condition that I shoot him quickly. I demanded a pocket watch from

IN GermaN CLaws

19

another Jew in exchange for his life, but he did not want to part with it … But you,” he said, rattling the watches together, “I will not lay a finger on you. I swear on Hitler! All you need to do is perform in my circus, nothing more.” I could not understand what the stormtrooper meant. I had only one wish: that he would not drag me to Lukishki Prison. I had heard about the torture administered by Schweinberger there, and I was more terrified of that than of being shot. I considered running away. But the stormtrooper was accompanied by a shaggy black dog. He might chase me down, catch me, and then matters could be even worse. I decided to flee only if I was certain that the stormtrooper was taking me to my death. At that moment, two of his colleagues approached. They were guiding two Jews sporting the yellow patch. They were overjoyed to see that their colleague was not empty-handed. “March!” One of the newcomers blew his whistle and showed us the way. The three of them followed behind us, pushing us along like sheep. Their dog ran ahead, like the Angel of Death. We trudged on until we arrived at Vilkomirer Street and the Alter-kloyz, The Old Prayer House.23 On the way, I snatched a glance at my two companions. The first was Kasel, the eighty-year-old rabbi of our street. We referred to him as “the old man.” He barely reached my shoulders and had snow-white hair. His long black kaftan made him look even tinier. He reminded me of a child disguised as an old man. I found it strange that he was walking without a cane. I suddenly realized that one of the stormtroopers who was driving him along was playing with a cane. I discreetly turned around and confirmed my suspicion: it was the rabbi’s. *The stormtrooper was making sure that his victim did not attempt to flee.* The second among us was a young boy, Moyshke. I also knew him from our street. He walked with his head bowed, staring at the ground, and his face was feverish with red blotches. The boy’s terror was the exact opposite of the old man’s calm. Death was inevitable for Kasel, whereas Moyshke could not yet accept it. We had no idea where they were taking us. The petrified boy kept shooting looks at the rabbi and me, as if his destiny was hidden in us. A crowd awaited us next to the Alter-kloyz. The Germans had gathered them for the spectacle before our arrival. The stormtrooper who was playing with the old man’s cane lined the three of us up against the wall of the synagogue and ordered us to get undressed. It was only then

20

vILNa Ghetto

that I became aware that a Torah scroll had been completely unfurled down the length of the road. It was covered with tire tracks. In addition to the unfurled scroll on the road there was also a pile of Torah scrolls next to the building: their silver-embroidered velour covers were covered with blood. And next to it, planks stacked in the form of a pyre. “Get undressed!” “They’re going to burn us alive,” I thought at that moment. I looked at the old man, and his expression calmed my fears. The young boy was sobbing: “Mommy!” The stormtrooper removed his revolver and repeated his order: “Get undressed!” But this time his voice was not as calm. He was barking so ferociously that a spectator fainted out of terror. The stormtrooper ignited the woodpile with a match. The rabbi was the first to undress. In the glow of the growing bonfire his shrunken body looked like a memorial candle, crooked and yellow. After him it was my turn. My hands, not fully conscious of the command, removed my light summer clothing. The boy disrobed last. He held his clothes in his hands, like snakes, not knowing what to do with them. The SS officer ordered us to make a pile of our clothes, which he covered with the rabbi’s tales-kotn, his fringed undergarment. We were ordered to dance around the pyre and sing. Sing in Russian. The rabbi knew no Russian. He remained silent. A second SS man, the one who had jangled all the watches, ran over and pushed the rabbi towards the fire. The rabbi shut his eyes. I could not bear to watch. The smoke enveloped him. The smell of burnt hair filled the air. For the first time, he allowed a terror-filled “oh!” to escape his lips. They beat us and ordered us to tear the Torah scrolls and toss them into the flames. The Germans shoved the first scroll into the hands of the naked old man. The parchment was stiff. The scroll fell out of his arms and blanketed the flames. At first, the fire calmed, darkened. But then the flames tore through the parchment, spurting and crackling as they reached the height of the setting sun. The boy cried hot tears as he covered his head with his hands so that his hair would not catch fire. The master of ceremonies ordered us to get dressed. We dressed. The sun had set. The stormtroopers left, seemingly very pleased with themselves. The rabbi entered the ruined kloyz and began to pray. The boy fled. I also entered the building, lay down in a corner, and awaited the next day.24

IN GermaN CLaws

21

Heads25 For several weeks I hid in Soltanishok, a suburb of Vilna, in the home of Bastatski, a famous revolutionary who fell in Spain in 1936. From this temporary new home, I went to work at the munitions depot in the Sheskin Hills, together with surviving members of the Bastatski family. Were it not for this warm family who generously took me in I would not have survived for long. I needed to go to work to receive a permit from the Labour Department. In those days it was the only means to escape the raids. The Bastatskis risked their lives for me because it was forbidden to take in anyone who was unregistered. And a Jew who was found in any home other than his own would not walk out of the police station alive. At the munitions depot, work consisted of collecting bullets, grenades, and bombs that the Red Army had failed to destroy before its hasty retreat from the city. I worked there with Leyb Shriftzetser,26 a beloved actor. He was malnourished and had a yellow pallor, like someone suffering from typhus fever. We tried to spare him the most difficult tasks, giving him our portion of soup and buying apples for him from local peasants. He refused to eat these apples himself. He took his old penknife, cut the apples into narrow slices, and filled the lining of his coat with them so that the guards who controlled the roads would not find them. He took the apples home for his sick daughter. “I’m playing my final role,” he confided to me. The actor Leyb Shriftzetser, who had portrayed characters from the stories of Sholem Aleichem for his entire career, was now performing in the comedy Menakhem-Mendl under the Swastika.27 Among my other workmates was Hofmekler, who had conducted the philharmonic orchestra on local radio. When he was walking home in a column of forced labourers someone denounced him as having once worked on the radio. He was immediately sent to prison. Morale was low among the forced labourers. The Germans, who were at the gates of Leningrad, boasted in their papers that tomorrow, or at the very most in a couple of days, that city would fall. The Germans purposely paraded columns of captured Red Army soldiers, starved and half-naked, through the streets of Vilna to show the local population who was victorious. Once, about two weeks before the Jews were driven into the ghetto, a peasant woman passed by the barbed wire of our workplace in

22

vILNa Ghetto

Burbishok. She pointed and told me that over there, where the sand was yellow, fifty Jews were buried. The Germans had decapitated them. She was an accidental witness. She had been out grazing her goat not far from here, the same goat with her today. The Germans had brought a group of handcuffed young Jews to the spot and chopped off their heads with an axe. I recounted the story to Kaplan-Kaplanski,28 the brigadier, or foreman, of our labour brigade. He did not believe a word of it. “Peasants like to spin yarns,” he said, dismissing the entire tale with a wave of his hand. At noon, when the overseers were gone, I took a shovel and began digging in the sand. Less than a half-metre down the shovel hit something hard. I cleared the sand, and the shovel froze in my hands. One headless body was piled atop another. Their necks were still pink and fresh. A yellow patch peered out at me from one of their backs like a blind eye. I dug no further. I would not reach a deeper truth. I removed the yellow patch from the victim and held it tightly in my fist.

In a Coffin The searches began in Soltanishok. There was nowhere left for me to hide. My work card was worthless. Several men from the Bastatski family had not returned from work. Why would the Jew-snatchers exhaust themselves hunting their prey house by house when they could more easily catch them at a single work camp? I had planned to join a group of Jews in a labour camp assigned to dig up peat. There were camps of this sort in Reshe, Byalovake, and elsewhere. Pinkhes Kon, the head of the first Judenrat,29 told my wife that it was more advisable for me to make my way to Kene to work on the estate of a local landowner. Even landowners were given permission to take advantage of Jews. Yoysef Teper,30 the director of the Peretz Gymnasium in Vilna, was already in hiding there. There was a sense that the further one was from the city, the deeper in the forests, the less likely one was to encounter the murderous violence. I went to Strashun Street 6, to the courtyard of the Judenrat offices, to join a group that was leaving for Kene. Pinkhes Kon noticed me from his office window and invited me in. His face was yellow and wrinkled, like the patch sewn on his chest. He had just returned from a meeting with Murer. Everything that had come to pass was merely an overture. There would be more assaults on the local population. There would be

IN GermaN CLaws

23

a ghetto. Jewish blood would turn Vilna red. Yet Kon was certain of one thing: Germany would suffer total defeat. I told Kon that I had decided to take his advice: I could not bear the faces of our assassins. I could not look on as they trampled on us. His voice was subdued and cold as he told me that there was nowhere to run. He had learned a half-hour earlier that yesterday they had shot all the workers, including Teper. **Only one had managed to escape: Shmerke Kaczerginski.31** And that’s only part of the story. I learned through acquaintances that Dovid Umru had been snatched by the khapunes. *People had seen members of the Yung-Vilne literary group – Moyshe Levin, Shimshn Kahan, and Bentsye Mikhtom – being led to Ponar.32 Yisroel Rabon,33 the Yiddish writer from Łódź, was shot on the outskirts of town. My friend Kozhen,34 the Warsaw artist, was also no longer alive.* The Gestapo arrested Moyshe Shalit,35 the long-time president of the Union of Yiddish Writers in Vilna. Maurice Lampe, the actor who starred in Sholem Aleichem’s The Great Windfall just a few hours before the outbreak of war, had managed to hide in his hotel until now. But the Jew-snatchers were made aware of him, and he was dragged off to the same place as all the others. I asked Kon for his advice. What should I do? He told me that Murer had ordered that fifty Jews be held permanently in the courtyard of the Judenrat. He told me that if there were only forty-nine I could stay. We counted. There were exactly fifty. Kon sought a solution. He wanted to save my life. But he could not send one of them away in exchange for me and put them at the mercy of the Jew-snatchers. I saw him struggling, and I told him that I would find myself a hiding spot here and that nobody would notice me. The courtyard was quiet. Prayers could be heard from the open windows of the Mefitsey-Haskole Library. A group of Jews was sitting on the stairs down below. Among them was a student from the Kleyn-Stefn Street yeshiva, a palm-reader, a fortune-teller. The Jews pushed closer to him, wanting to hear his words. Dusk arrived. I sought out a hiding place. The Burial Society was located in the same courtyard. Some coffins had been left in a corner. I crawled into one of the coffins, closed the lid over my head, lay down, and inhaled the stuffy air. That’s how I composed my poem “I Lie in a Coffin.”36 •

24

vILNa Ghetto

The next morning, when I stepped out of the coffin, the courtyard was packed. Jews had assembled there and arranged themselves into work brigades, each with its own foreman. They set out for work. For the first time in two months I saw familiar faces. There was Yankev Beregolski,37 the actor from Baku, who arrived in Vilna a few days before the war to perform in the theatre. The yellow patch on his chest was somewhat larger than everyone else’s. It tore at your eyes. He joylessly informed us that his wife had given birth to a son. The actor Blyakher38 was very preoccupied. He had managed to extract six permits from his platoon sergeant and distributed them among his friends. I met up with Khayim Semyatitski,39 the religious poet of the volume Drops of Dew, who took up smoking on the Sabbath once he witnessed how they were slaughtering us. Mrs Shalit came to the Judenrat in an attempt to get some information about her husband, the president of the Union of Yiddish Writers in Vilna, who had been dragged away. Mothers accompanied their sons and blessed them before their departure. I came across a sick and tearful Paula,40 wife of Noyekh Prilutski. She was struggling to save her husband. She had even paid a visit to speak to Neugebauer,41 chief of the Gestapo, in person. He promised her three times that the Germans were taking special care of scholars. Paula was hopeful, even though she no longer had the energy to hope. A cart entered the Judenrat courtyard at that very moment. The dark undertaker with his yellow patch told those around him that ZalmenBer, the gravedigger of the Jewish cemetery in Zaretshe, had been in hiding with his family in the attic above the building used for the purification of bodies. Someone had betrayed them. Last night stormtroopers had arrived, discovered his hideout, and accused them of having lit fires at night to attract enemy aircraft. Zalmen-Ber’s family consisted of three women and four children, two of whom were babies. They protested that they had no matches, that the children did not smoke … Nothing helped. The stormtroopers gave shovels to the men and ordered them to dig their own graves. They smashed the babies against tree trunks in front of their mothers. The men and women were buried alive. The only one to survive was Zalman-Ber. He had managed to conceal himself among the headstones, then dig himself a grave in which to hide. The undertaker had not yet finished his sad story when a young man ran in and recounted the following story with tears in his eyes:

IN GermaN CLaws

25

He had been walking with a group on the highway to Polotsk, where they were repairing the road. At the edge of the woods42 they witnessed a horrifying scene: five young Jews were tied to five different trees, hands behind their backs. Their bodies were covered in wounds. They had undoubtedly been flogged. It seemed to him that at least one of them might still be alive. He wanted to free them, to detach them from the trees, but nobody in his group had a knife. He had come to plead of us: “Run to the forest to save our brothers!” I decided not to go to work. Death knew no boundaries. I slipped through city streets, all the way to my in-laws on Dominikaner Street.

Booze and Blood Motl Gdud, born in Vilna in 1922, recounted the following:43 July 1941. I had gone with my father to work at the airport in Porubanek. We had permits designed to prevent our arrest, and we were happy for the opportunity to leave our maline. When I was returning from work with a friend, a taxi overtook us on Baksht Street, and three German officers ordered us to get in. On the way they gathered six more Jews and took us all to the Bernardine Gardens. There were about five hundred other Jews already there. We were held until nightfall, under close police watch. Exhausted from a hot day of work at Porubanek, I dozed off among a heap of Jews. When I opened my eyes, the sun had set. Opposite me there was a “Black Crow,” a gleaming truck with little windows covered in bars. The back door was open, and a German wearing an officer’s cap decorated with a skull lowered its metal steps. We were ordered to get into the truck one by one. The officer was counting. When thirty-five people had entered, he raised his hand and the thirty-sixth, who was standing on the steps, was pushed away. The officer locked everyone in from the outside and proceeded to sit in the front cab, next to the driver. The truck was as black inside as it was outside. There were no seats, except those for the six guards. We were forbidden to speak. We were not allowed to cry. The guards beat us at the slightest movement, stabbing with their bayonets. After a ten-minute drive,

26

vILNa Ghetto

the “Crow” came to a stop. The officer unbolted the door. The six guards jumped outside and stood to the side. I saw a barbed-wire fence and a wooden gate. A big, glistening placard was fastened to the gate: “Attention! Danger of Death! Mines!” The guards got out, and we were driven a bit farther. The door was no longer locked. When it stopped a second time, Schweinberger approached the door. When he pointed at someone with his finger, that person had to get out. I was the seventh he pointed at. From the open door I saw that they were shooting my acquaintances. We had to get undressed next to a trench that led to a large common grave. When someone was totally naked, Schweinberger led him to the pit and shot him in the neck with his revolver. I wanted a swift death. I ran naked towards the pit and heard the death rattles of the wounded. A revolver shot rang out, and I fell on my back. The bullet missed me. I heard Schweinberger speaking to the soldiers who were present. He was teaching them how to kill. A few minutes later, I felt the weight of a gasping body on top of me, and a stream of blood dripped into my mouth. I heard the man’s death throes and suffering. That is when I lost consciousness. When I awoke, the sun was high in the sky. Its light was able to pass through the dried blood that covered my eyes. There was no more shooting. I felt a refreshing breeze. A short while later, I heard the rattle of a machine-gun. Guards were riddling the pit with bullets, and I was lightly wounded. When the shots ceased for a second time, the shooters, some in uniform and others in civilian clothing, sat on the edge of the mass grave and drank vodka. When they left they were totally drunk. A few guards remained on a nearby hill. When everything was quiet, I lifted myself out of the pit, naked, and crawled amid the wild grass and bushes until I arrived at the barbed-wire fence. I could see the “Crow” in the distance, which had just returned stuffed with more people. A Pole took me in. He dressed my wound and provided me with clothes. I passed the night with him, he provided me with milk, and the next day I returned to the city. When I recounted my experiences at Ponar, even my own father did not want to believe me.

IN GermaN CLaws

27

Ponar Ponar is a resort area near Vilna, seven kilometres from town on the highway to Grodno. The Viliye River winds to the right and flows behind the hills. The region is known for its beautiful scenery. Adam Mickiewicz44 wrote poems about it. During his stay in Vilna, Napoleon remarked that he readily would have taken Ponar back to France with him. The precise spot was situated to the right of the rail line from Vilna to Warsaw, at kilometre 10 from Vilna. There were deep pits located there, previously dug for military purposes, and two smaller pits lined with rocks and cement.45 The Germans discovered the place soon after they arrived. It was tailor-made for their gruesome plans: on the right, a road up which they could transport their future victims by truck; on the left, the Vilna– Warsaw rail line. When this death factory was ready and the word “Ponar” became a terrifying curse, the Germans printed a map of the region on which the name “Ponar” was not mentioned. The place appeared only in green.

The First, or Great Assault 31 August 1941. The German officer Schweinberger, accompanied by Weiss, Hering, 46 and a battalion of riflemen, surrounded the streets of the Jewish quarter: Yidishe, Yatkever, Strashun, Glezer, Gaon, Dominikaner, Lidske, and Daytshe. Schweinberger ran from courtyard to courtyard, cracking his whip and ordering residents to hurry up and appear downstairs in ten minutes. We were allowed to bring down a single bag with our most precious belongings. Those who were not there on time would be shot on the spot. I was sleeping. The cracking of a whip cut my sleep short. I jumped from my bed and I saw Schweinberger before me, accompanied by a little dog. Schweinberger was running through the building and threatening its occupants with his whip in order to drive them down into the courtyard. His face is burned into my mind. I went down to the courtyard. Men with bundles in their hands were standing alongside their wives and children, waiting for salvation. Everyone said that we were being taken to a ghetto. But nobody believed it. When someone dared to suggest that we would be brought elsewhere, he was cursed out.

28

vILNa Ghetto

I tried to escape. I slid into an empty apartment, broke a window, and jumped down to the street below. A police officer saw me and aimed his gun at me. I returned to the courtyard and mixed in with my neighbours. I looked for my wife. She was not to be found. Had she managed to escape? Nobody knew. Twenty policemen entered the courtyard. The commander ordered us to arrange ourselves in rows of four. Schweinberger started to speak. He said that we were being taken to the ghetto, and that we should remain calm and obey orders. He took out a pack of cigarettes and offered them to us. The twenty riflemen, their bayonets extended, guided us through the gate of the courtyard. It was midnight. In front and behind me, groups of Jews plodded along, emerging from other streets and courtyards. When we came to Zavalne Street, close to Lukishki Prison, we knew for certain that we were not being guided toward a ghetto. Women started to cry and to tear at their hair. The sleeping children in their arms awoke in terror and clung to their mothers’ necks. At the corner of Portove, we met up with another group. I caught a glimpse of my wife among them. I wanted to run to her. If we were destined to die, at least let it be together. A gleaming bayonet blocked my way. We were close to the prison. I do not know how, but I managed to escape. All I remember is that in my mind everything was suddenly bright, like a clap of lightning. I ran without a plan, without thinking. It felt as if I were breaking through walls and slicing through barricades. I returned to my senses on the banks of the Viliye. It was dawn. On the other riverbank, just across from me, I recognized my courtyard. Mother was there. Maybe she could see me through the window. Perhaps she was calling out for help: “A stormtrooper is slaughtering me!” • The next day, 1 September 1941, placards were posted throughout Vilna signed by Vilna District Commissioner Hingst: “On 31 August 1941, a German soldier was shot. We managed to arrest the murderers. They were Jews. *The Jews will pay dearly for this crime.*” That same day they decreed that Jews would no longer be permitted on city streets later than three o’clock in the afternoon. From that hour they were obliged to remain at home. They were not allowed in apartment courtyards, on rooftops, or anywhere else.

IN GermaN CLaws

29

Hingst also ordered the Jews to bring all of their gold, silver, and jewellery to local police stations. A Jew was forbidden from possessing more than three hundred Soviet rubles, or thirty marks, equivalent to two kilograms of bread that we were not permitted to buy in any case.

In Lukishki Prison47 Nobody knew where those who had been captured had disappeared. They had been taken to “register for work” at Lukishki Prison. A number of Jews who could no longer bear the stress of the roundups voluntarily went to register themselves there. Better to lug rocks, they thought, than to lie in a pit and fade away bit by bit. In fact, they rotted away in prison. My wife, who had the misfortune to find herself in Lukishki Prison during the Great Provocation, told me after her liberation what she had witnessed: As soon as we arrived at the Lukishki Market, even before reaching the prison, we were handed over to a police unit dressed in civilian clothing. We were forced to march between two rows of murderers and receive their initial greetings. I was met with a blow to the skull. A number of children and the aged never made it to the prison. They collapsed in the marketplace. The others dragged themselves through the iron blows. Women trampled children. Children lingered around their trampled mothers. We finally arrived at the prison. As soon as we passed through the entrance gate, we were ordered to put aside the bundles we had been carrying, along with our coats and outerwear. Then, the doors were opened and we were kicked into large rooms that were already stuffed with prisoners. We lay down one on top of another. There was no air. It was impossible to move, or even to take a step. The next evening, Schweinberger arrived, sleeves rolled up like a butcher, whip in hand. He placed himself in the middle of the room, standing atop a woman who had collapsed, and ordered us to turn around and face the wall. He said: ‘I will torture to death anyone who turns their head!’ He was cracking his whip wildly and shouting orders: ‘On your feet! Sit! Stand! Sit!’ A woman hanged herself with her baby’s swaddling cloths. People fainted, like moths around a fire. They awaited death like a

30

vILNa Ghetto

special redemption. But Schweinberger did not want to privilege us with an easy death. He allowed us to rot in the cells for more than a week. He visited the cells every night to repeat his exercise routine. Those who did not get up or who sat down before his command were immediately torn with lashes. *I recognized the actors Khash and Kadish among those being tortured.* On the sixth day, the guards removed those who had been stabbed, suffocated, or tortured to death. They dragged them with iron hooks through long hallways smeared with blood and tossed them into the room housing the communal latrine. The guards demanded a high price to allow us to relieve ourselves, no less than one thousand rubles per visit. Later, the price edged up to ten gold rubles. Water was not free, either. The tiniest sip cost one a watch or an expensive ring. Several Jews from other neighbourhoods who had managed to escape the assault tried to bribe the Germans to save their wives and children from prison. Wagner, the Oberleutnant of the Burbishok munitions depot, managed to ransom eight Jews from prison through a substantial contribution of gold. He entered the cells with Schweinberger’s agreement and called out eight names. When he called out the name “Goldberg,” I recognized it as the name of a woman from Kalvaryer Street 60 who had died already as a result of Schweinberger’s blows. So I screamed out in despair: “That’s me!” The Oberleutnant screamed: “Schneller! Los! [Faster! Go!]” Schweinberger accompanied us to the gate at gunpoint. He proclaimed, “I am all-knowing. If you whisper even a single word of what you have witnessed, you will envy your brothers here.” He pointed at the prison. While leaving the prison, a woman’s shawl caught on one of Schweinberger’s coat buttons. The murderer stopped her and returned her to prison.

Home Again with Mother Where was I to go? I lay on the banks of the Viliye, half-naked, pretending to take in the sun so as not to attract any attention. When night came, I crossed the river, barefoot, and made my way to Mother. The

IN GermaN CLaws

31

belongings stolen by Ptashek were still scattered in the courtyard. Shirts and blouses, inflated by the breeze, looked like ghosts. The sparkle in her eye had been wiped away by her tears. She was certain that I had been killed. Every time she heard a shot ring out from the prison, she imagined it was for me. I was updated on what happened to my acquaintances and neighbours. This one had been snatched, that one had been shot. Yesterday the stormtroopers got their hands on the old cantor from Skapovker courtyard. They ordered him to dig a deep hole, and then they forced him into the hole and filled it with earth all the way to his neck. They ordered his daughters to undress and to dance naked around their father. At dawn, I took leave of Mother. I skirted down the bank of the Viliye all the way to Soltanishok and the Bastatski family.

Roma48 I stumbled upon a band of Roma near the Soltanishok Gardens. An older man with a child on his shoulders was at the head. He was gently goading his horse. A Romani woman was playing with her glass necklace and singing a sentimental song. At first, I envied this free tribe. They were not forced to wear the yellow patches. While I was contemplating these passers-by, someone hopped off the wagon, ran to greet me, and in clear Yiddish asked: “Do you recognize me?” I was astonished. At first, I thought it was the brother of Maria Kviek,49 the Romani singer whom I had once known. But where would he have learned Yiddish? The mystery was soon revealed. The Romani introduced himself: “I’m Khayim Gordon, don’t you recognize me?” Suddenly, it all came back. Twenty years earlier we had been students together at the Beys-Yehude school. I remembered that as children we used to call him Khayim the Gypsy. But what was he doing with this band of Roma? It was a simple story. When the Germans occupied Vilna, Khayim happened to be in the neighbouring village of Dolnye. The previous Saturday, police had encircled the village and deported all the Jews to Velitshan. That day the Jews of Kene, Andrelishok, Mednik, Lavarishok, Shumsk, Sorok-Tatar, Dolnye, and Nay-Vileyke met the same fate. Spades were shoved into the men’s hands, and they were ordered to dig a long,

32

vILNa Ghetto

L-shaped trench. The women and children were kept separate. They dug until nightfall. When the sun set, as soon as the trench was ready, a group of local fascists appeared from the surrounding forest and fired on the men, taking them by surprise. They were so disoriented that nobody thought to escape. They fell in the trench, spades still in hand. Everything happened so quickly that they did not see death coming. Gordon was behind a tree at that very moment. He felt the bullets whiz past his ears. He too was confused, unable to understand what was happening. But the blood streaming onto the yellow sand awakened his senses. He ran into a field of rye and hid. The next morning, from between the stalks, he saw the Gestapo officer Weiss arrive with a band of Roma. He ordered them to toss those who had been slaughtered into the pits. When Weiss left, Gordon emerged from the stalks and begged the Roma to take him with them. The oldest, whose name was Fedor, looked him over and told him to get into the wagon. He smacked his children who wanted to take the clothing from the bodies. He confessed to Khayim: “Tomorrow or the day after, the same thing will happen to me.” Khayim proposed that I stay with him. He told me that Fedor was a gem of a man, that he would not oppose it. In order to compensate for my paleness, he would smear my face in dog fat, and I would appear to have duskier skin, like him. Nobody would recognize me. I thanked the man but turned down his kind offer. “I cannot abandon those I love. I do not know what happened to my wife. Yesterday, I left her at the prison gate.” Khayim took leave of me. He rejoined the band of travellers who were waiting for him in front of the church across from us.

Among Friends I once again found myself with the Bastatski family. I had nowhere else to go. In the days that had passed, the family had shrunk. Three men were missing. They never returned from work. In the morning, the remaining men of the family, two sons and a cousin, went off to work, as they did every day. I went with them. Staying at home put me at risk of being discovered by the Jew-snatchers. Going to work did not present greater security. Many groups were taken directly from work to prison.

IN GermaN CLaws

33

Half the people were missing from our workplace. They lived on Jewish streets and had been seized during roundups of the Great Provocation. Those who remained behind continued to come to work. We traded with the peasants, we bargained hard over a ruble, and imagined that we had staved off the Angel of Death for a few days. At noon, Feldwebel Herder, a former actor, appeared. He summoned all his slave labourers around him. He spoke for almost an hour. He wanted to convince us of his good intentions and earnestness. He told us with a fair degree of sentimentality that, when he had been young, his best friend was a Jew and that he rejected the Nuremberg Laws 50 even though he had been a Nazi Party member since 1926. Finally, he asked everyone whose brothers, sisters, or close family members had been taken to Lukishki Prison to raise their hands. He would personally free them. Even in wartime, one needed to preserve one’s moral sensibilities … He, Feldwebel Herder, would not permit such an outrage; it was imperative to report such matters to Berlin. Everyone raised a hand. This one for his missing brother, that one for his wife, and that one for a close relative. Others raised a hand out of uncertainty: they had not been home for several days and could not possibly confirm their dear ones’ whereabouts. Kaplan-Kaplanski, the foreman of our labour brigade, compiled a handwritten list of all the names of the missing siblings and relatives. Feldwebel Herder whispered something into his ear and left in his car. Kaplanski informed us that Feldwebel had demanded three gold Cyma watches, a Persian wool coat for his wife, five pairs of shoes and boots, champagne, and butter, because he had no time to procure them himself. The faster we were able to meet his request, the faster he would bring the list to the prison to rescue the detainees. By the next day, the gifts were ready. Feldwebel Herder came by taxi to scoop them up. Only later did we learn that he departed for Kovno an hour later.

The End of the First Judenrat I was told the following by workers coming from Vilna: On 1 September 1941 Burakas, one of the heads of the local Lithuanian Ypatinga, came to the Judenrat and ordered it to procure ten carts and horses by nine o’clock the following morning and deliver them to the

34

vILNa Ghetto

Ypatinga headquarters at Vilner Street 12. If the carts were not there on time, the Judenrat would regret it. Burakas was well aware that all the horses and carts belonging to Jews had already been confiscated. The Judenrat understood that this was a ruse and that Burakas was aware that it was in no position to fulfil his order. Pinkhes Kon did not want to play into his hands. He managed to acquire carts from non-Jewish coachmen and deliver them to the Ypatinga. But Burakas refused the gift. “Too late,” he said. “It’s already ten minutes past nine.” Schweinberger, accompanied by two armed men, arrived at the Judenrat around eleven that same morning. He lined up everyone against a wall and screamed: “Who among you is the one who received this order?” Pinkhes Kon stepped forward and announced: “It was me.” “Are you not capable of following orders?” Schweinberger asked, mixing his words with a lash at Kon. “You have a short memory. I am going to take a personal interest in you to help you better remember.” He picked out sixteen people, among whom were Pinkhes Kon, Rabbi Kats, Krasner, who was president of the Mefitsey-Haskole Library, Saul Trotski, and others who happened to be there. He grouped them in pairs, and Schweinberger’s subordinates led them to prison at the point of their bayonets. The Germans then sealed the door of the Judenrat with a lock.

A Morbid Joke On 6 September, at six in the morning, while I and the entire Bastatski family were still sleeping, we heard a whistle and the wild clopping of horses’ hooves. I dashed to the window and saw the local police raiding the streets like locusts. We got dressed quickly. We watched from the window, preparing for the worst. The streets were sealed. Only those with proper papers were permitted to pass. We did not know what awaited us, but everyone felt that matters had taken a turn for the worse. Suddenly, we heard the sound of breaking glass. Directly across from our window, a policeman put an axe through the front door of a neighbouring Jewish home. Apparently it was locked, and he demanded that its occupants open the door. When the door opened, he ordered its occupants to get out. **When an old couple came down the stairs locked in an embrace, he pointed them towards one of his assistants, who would tell them where to go.**

IN GermaN CLaws

35

“Why are we waiting at home? The police will surely search here soon. And nobody knows where they are taking us. It is better to flee!” said Shmerl, a member of the family. “Let’s head to our workplace, in the Sheskin Hills – it’s not far, maybe a half-kilometre away. Perhaps we could find our German there, Feldwebel Herder (or, as he was colloquially known, “The Consumptive”).51 He received so many gifts yesterday, and he promised to defend his Jews. Maybe he will protect us now.” Three of us – Shmerl, his cousin the student, and I – left for work, as usual. We avoided the main road, passing through a maze of courtyards and gardens, until we reached the hills. The police were not looking for us. We made our way through tall tomato stalks onto the road leading to the Sheskin Hills. But a man on horseback caught us. He came galloping up the dusty roads, overtook us, and ordered us to halt. The horseman did not say another word. He made us understand that we were to follow him. When we arrived at a stream he turned us over to someone else who wore a helmet and pointed his rifle at us. *“Bid your poems farewell,” I thought to myself, just as a new lyric took shape within me …* The helmeted man ordered us to advance while smiling past his rifle. The sweat pouring down his scarlet face was the ugliest thing I had ever witnessed. A young peasant girl stumbled upon us on the hill. The man in the helmet started up with her, pinched her cheek, and told her: “You like their clothes? Come, I’ll give them to you soon.” The peasant girl did not answer him. He was offended. Other helmeted men were waiting on the other side of the hill. He ordered us to turn around and cover our eyes with our hands. I put my fingers over my eyes. I heard a bird chirping in front me, and behind me I heard the loading of bullets into rifles. From between my fingers over my eyes I saw sparks of fire – a crackle, and above the crackle – branches … I fell to the grass. The first thought that seized hold of me was: Am I really dead? When I realized that I was not, I peered over to my friends. One was on his knees and the other was not even bent over. Were we still alive? Hadn’t they shot at us? It was at that moment that I heard an explosion of laughter behind my back, and the man with the steel helmet told us through a smile: “It was a joke. Get up. I’m taking you to the ghetto.”

36

vILNa Ghetto

On the Way to the Ghetto We still did not know what to believe. We thought it might be another operation against the Jewish population. But when the man in the steel helmet brought us all the way to Vilkomirer Street, I saw other groups of Jews being pushed along as well. At the top of Vilkomirer Street, where the “big mill” had once stood, a crowd of Jews was forced into a courtyard and told to wait. For the first time in months I saw my neighbours and long-time friends. They all had been torn from their beds at dawn, and forbidden to bring anything. As soon as they had crossed the threshold of their homes, seals were put over their doors with a notice proclaiming: “German property!” **The former inhabitants wandered around the courtyard in their rags, gazing up at their confiscated homes, patiently awaiting the next tribulation. Even the buildings appeared bewildered. It was the first time in years that they were free of their occupants. They no longer contained any warmth.** The courtyard was overflowing with Jews. Newborns, the infirm, pregnant women: everyone was mixed into the cauldron. Those who had been expelled from their homes were not crying. The period preceding the establishment of the ghetto had consumed all their tears and numbed their emotions. We felt the terror of the moment. We knew that something was approaching. I remember an emaciated woman with a pallid face. She was standing next to a fence, a child in her arms, and she was looking back at her home. The child was crying. He was stretching his arms over the fence, in the direction of the watchman who was guarding the prisoners. The watchman was eating apples. He took one from his pocket and gave it to the child. The child stopped crying and busied himself with the apple. The woman tore the gift from the child’s hand and threw it back at the guard, saying: “I do not need any pity from a murderer …” A man was sitting on a rock, all hunched over, hands deep in his beard. The melody of his psalms resonated throughout the courtyard. We heard a whistle. Two officers, one German and one Lithuanian, darted into the courtyard and ordered everyone to arrange themselves in rows of four. The local officer told us that we were being taken to the ghetto.

IN GermaN CLaws

37

We set out, surrounded by police. On the way, others coming from neighbouring streets joined us. The police, accompanied by specialists in the matter, walked ahead of us, seizing those who were still at home. Many Jews who had been in hiding until now learned that we were being taken to the ghetto. They feared being left behind, alone. A rumour circulated that as soon as we were all confined to the ghetto the homes formerly occupied by Jews would be burned to the ground. That is why these people came out of hiding to join our ranks. They looked like the walking dead. A man who had come from town jumped into our group to warn us: “There are two ghettos: one on Rudnitske and the other on Yidishe Street. But not everyone is being brought there. Hundreds, even thousands of Jews from other streets are being led directly to Lukishki Prison.” I saw Mother on the balcony when I passed by my home at Vilkomirer 14. She was leaning on the railing, her thick Korbn-minkhe prayerbook tucked under her arm, a bundle resting beside her. She did not know what to do: come down to join our ranks, or wait until the police expelled her. She stood on the balcony, utterly distraught, her moist eyes seeking me out in the crowd. We saw one another. The guards would not allow me to stop. When our group arrived at the Green Bridge, I saw that a second, much larger group was coming down Kalvaryer Street. It, too, was guarded by a chain of police. On the Green Bridge we all felt as though our destiny was hanging in the balance. If we continued forward, down Vilner Street to Mickiewicz, then they were taking us to the ghetto. If they diverted us to the right, in the direction of Lukishki Prison, it was a sign that they were going to kill us all. **I was at the front of our group. The heavy autumn coat I was wearing was too hot. The coat was not mine. It had belonged to Dovid Umru. We had traded before entering Vilna. I was carrying a small bag of potatoes on my back for an old lady who would have collapsed under its weight.** When we crossed the Green Bridge my heart stopped for a moment. In what direction would they lead us? One step, five steps, ten  … We continued forward. We rushed ahead. The people behind us stepped on one another, wanting to get as far away as possible from Lukishki Prison.

38

vILNa Ghetto

I turned my head, wanting to know what was happening on the street behind us. I saw hundreds of people in a path of gleaming bayonets guided to the right – towards Lukishki Prison. People were herded into the ghetto according to a precise plan. Residents of several other streets were directly dispatched to their death rather than to the ghetto. Residents of the following streets and neighbourhoods never made it to the ghetto: Mickiewicz, Tartaki, Portove, both Pohulyanke Streets, Kalvaryer (excepting numbers 1 through 50 who were sent to the ghetto), Piromont, parts of Zverinyets, Venglove, Antokol, and so on – all together some ten thousand people.

The Gates of the Ghetto52 When we arrived at Mickiewicz Street, I witnessed a strange scene: twenty-some people, some half-naked, others in straitjackets, all of them agitated, were being marched in pairs across the bridge. A German officer, chest covered in medals, marched alongside them. They were mentally impaired Jews from the hospital in Antokol. The Germans were parading them through the city in order to show the non-Jewish population the truth about the “Jewish race.” These “crazy” Jews were placed at the front of our group. A car adorned with a large swastika and a camera operator drove in front to immortalize the moment. Groups from other streets joined our procession. There were few young men among them. The Jew-snatchers had seized them all earlier. Their ranks consisted mainly of women, children, and the aged. The sick and handicapped who had been expelled from the hospitals likewise dragged themselves along. Their blue hospital gowns added an eerie appearance to our procession. On Daytshe Street, next to Funk’s bookstore, we were blinded by two white gates: one to the left, at the intersection of Yidishe and Daytshe Streets, and the second one on the right at Gitke-Toybe’s Alley. The gates were closed. There were police everywhere. Our movement was halted. Hering, Schweinberger’s adjutant, was waiting for us by the gate. He was a lanky, blond German with a skull on his officer’s cap. He was waving his fists in every direction, like a drunk conductor, pointing to where we ought to go: right to the first ghetto, or left to the second. Daytshe Street was the border between them.53

IN GermaN CLaws

39

**When it was my turn, he looked at me like a cannibal sizing up his victim. He pointed out my spot, while his expression suggested: “I’m full today, but I will devour you another time.”** A foot shoved me past the uneven planks of the unfinished wood gate on Gitke-Toybe’s Alley, the antechamber of the first ghetto.

Part II Behind the Gates The Face of the Ghetto I swam through a raging human flood, unable to stop, unable to find the shore or solid ground. Jews dashed from courtyard to courtyard seeking a place to live, clothing and bundles stuffed in their arms. The apartment buildings were empty. Schweinberger had expelled their occupants a week earlier and sent them to prison. The non-Jewish inhabitants who found themselves within the borders of the ghetto were driven from their homes in the middle of the night. I saw the poet Leah Rudnitski.1 She was wading through the masses too. We managed to extricate ourselves from the crowd and make our way to Meyerke’s courtyard,2 where Motke Khabad3 had once lived. Leah’s first words were: “They won’t take Leningrad!” We found an apartment on Lidske Street. We were naïve to think that we would be able to catch our breath there. The apartment was empty, but the belongings of its former inhabitants were scattered on the floor. Meat was being cured in a pot on a chair, a knife was sticking out of a loaf of bread, and an unfinished glass of tea that Schweinberger interrupted the previous occupants from consuming was abandoned on a table. I stretched out on a straw bed and gathered my thoughts. Where was I? Where was my wife? Where was Mother? The day extended like a vast sea, with no shore visible in the distance. It was only three o’clock. My forehead was burning. I was feverish. I spotted a jug of water and poured it over my head. I felt better. I fell onto the straw bed and sank into sleep. In the evening the poet came to wake me. She had news about my mother. She was alive. An acquaintance had seen her in the ghetto. We went down to the street, where we met friends: Beregolski the actor

behIND the Gates

41

and Shapse Blyakher. They told us that the entire ghetto was cordoned off by gates. Even within the ghetto it was impossible to walk from one street to another. The gates within the ghetto unnerved me. I decided to make my way to Rudnitske, its main street. I lost track of my companion along the way. I managed to get from Lidske to Rudnitske by climbing over rooftops and though holes in the walls. Groups of Jews continued to flow in from throughout the city. Among them I noticed my friend Kalmanovitsh,4 the famous scholar from YIvo.5 He had grown a thick beard. The fate of the Jews was chiselled in the lines on his face. I waded through the crowd and took him by the arm. “Greetings to a fellow Jew, how are you?” Kalmanovitsh was overjoyed to see me and gave me a pat on the back: “If only for being amongst Jews, let us be thankful …” • Rudnitske Street 6, the building of the former Real-Gymnasium,6 was teaming with people. Everyone wanted an apartment surrounding this courtyard. Rumour had it that this was where the Judenrat would be located, making it the safest place in the ghetto. The crowd made it impossible to pass. They stood planted to the ground and refused to move, as if a treasure were buried beneath their feet. I noticed an old married couple. They stared out blankly from a cart. Both were paralysed. When the police had come to expel them from their apartment, they had frozen stiff in terror. A relative had put them on the cart and deposited them here. I wanted to help them. I asked if there was anything they needed. The old man’s lips twitched, and in a hushed but audible voice he answered: “Give me poison!” I recall that their family name was Baranowski. Vitalina the actress7 pulled me by the hand: “Come with me. Do you have an apartment already? I have an open spot at my place, but it won’t be free for long.” In that courtyard I found a corner for myself in an apartment belonging to the merchant Schibuk. Its owner, who had already been living there before our arrival, was not at all pleased about his new, uninvited roommates. Old Schibuk felt that nobody had the right to touch his property. His portrait hung on the wall: a well-rolled moustache on a face contemplating the world with arrogance and dignity.

42

vILNa Ghetto

It was getting dark. I ran through the courtyards and alleys in search of my family. The ghetto was larger than I had thought and included the following streets: Rudnitske, Oshmene, Shpitol, Disner, Shavler, Strashun, Lidske, and three courtyards on Karmelitn Street. This was now “our domain,” even if some of it remained inaccessible. Strashun Street was divided by a gate. Lidske Street was closed off and accessible only through attics. Jews broke through the walls of buildings at Rudnitske Street 6, 14, and 16 to access the three courtyards on Karmelitn Street. On Shpitol Street I was approached by Libe Grade, wife of the poet Chaim Grade.8 She worked as a nurse in the Jewish hospital, which was included in the ghetto. She guided me into the hospital courtyard and brought me a cup of milk. Someone who had taken poison was carried in – old Dr Gershuni. I choked on the milk. The gate that closed off Strashun Street had already been pried open. I made my way over there. In the courtyard where, until recently, the first Judenrat had been located, I came across the teacher Turbovitsh9 sitting on a pile of stones, writing in a small notebook. He was keeping a diary. I found my mother at Strashun Street 1. She was reciting her evening prayers at sunset in a decrepit apartment. Tea was warming on the stove. The neighbours were preparing for dinner. A young girl with a hand-mirror was putting on lipstick. People were laughing, crying, and darning socks. *Life goes on: the house is on fire, but the clock continues to tick.* • It was a bright night. I could not fall asleep. The woman who had told her neighbour that the first night in the ghetto is like the first night in the grave was correct. I took the stairs down to the courtyard. Heaps of people were spread out on the streets. Not everyone had managed to find a place to live, so they lay on the ground, like fish washed up on a sandy shore … I met Kalmanovitsh near Yogikhes prayer house.10 He could not sleep either and had also come out to survey the destruction. We walked together. I was afraid to speak, lest I disturb the silence. On Rudnitske Street 4, at the foot of the wooden gate, a half-naked woman was lying on a pile of rags in the throes of an epileptic seizure. The moon lit up her dishevelled hair and lent her cheeks an unnatural green hue.

behIND the Gates

43

The Second Assault and the Second Jewish Council There was news the next morning. During the night, Schweinberger’s Jew-snatchers had rounded up all the inhabitants of Lidske Street and shipped them off to Ponar. A small number of them were brought back in the morning and divided up between the two ghettos. The Germans did this to reassure us and also to sow confusion, so that nobody would know whether their loved ones had returned or not. Travel between the ghettos was forbidden. The roundup of the Lidske Street Jews was referred to as the Second Assault [provokatsye]. Altogether, some two thousand people disappeared. When a hundred of them returned, the mood improved. That same day, Murer appointed a new Judenrat. Jacob Gens, a Jew from Kovno and a former officer of the Lithuanian army, was its head.11 The other members of the Jewish Council were Anatol Frid,12 Bukhman the engineer, Milkonovitski the attorney, Fishman, and Grigory Yashunski.13 The Judenrat was responsible for keeping order in the ghetto. Gens established a local police force. He organized the ghetto administration, creating a semblance of order for these strange circumstances. He handpicked young men and had them wear blue ribbons with white stars of David on their sleeves. From that day on we were to obey their orders. To ensure our obedience, a prison was opened on Lidske Street, overseen by three police commissioners. One risked a fine or imprisonment for the smallest transgression, such as walking in the wrong direction, being out after curfew, or disturbing the peace. Even a court was created in the ghetto, with a precise code of punishments and special uniforms for the defence and prosecution. • The Judenrat was aware that it was dancing for the devil. Its members knew of the slaughter in Belorussia and that the Germans aimed to eradicate every last one of us. But Gens believed he could save some of the ghetto’s inhabitants. He was playing for time. He hoped that the front would grow nearer and the Germans would run out of time before they fulfilled their murderous plans. He believed Murer and Weiss. Weiss would visit Gens in the ghetto for lunch. The two hangmen assured

44

vILNa Ghetto

Gens that the Vilna ghetto would not be liquidated. Gens believed them, and he tried to persuade the Jews that they should work hard because the ghetto’s existence was dependent on its productivity. He established workshops and built vocational schools so that ghetto youth could learn a practical trade. The Jewish police, about whom it is impossible to say anything positive, conducted nightly raids during which they confiscated gold and valuables. This allowed Gens to bribe his Germans. On several occasions he successfully intervened to free prisoners on the eve of their execution. Gens did not understand that he was only a tool in the hands of the Gestapo. While trying to help the Jews, he actually assisted the Germans in sucking the life from the ghetto.

A Bunch of Laws The first order that Murer transmitted to the Judenrat was the following: Tomorrow morning you must hang a placard on the ghetto gate saying: “Achtung! Judenviertel, Seuchengefahr! Eintritt für Nichtjuden verboten!” [Attention! Jewish Quarter! Danger of Infection! Entry to Non-Jews Forbidden!] A second announcement on the gate warned that it was forbidden to bring food or wood into the ghetto. That same night Murer demanded that a list be compiled that included the precise number of ghetto inhabitants, their ages, their occupations, their addresses, and whether they possessed work permits. Nobody knew whether they should register. Most of those who had permits decided to do so. Those without work permits were forced into the second ghetto the next day. But when rows of women and children were led through the gate towards the second ghetto across the street, they were met by a cordon of police and never seen again. A small number of them were directed towards the second ghetto, so that those in the first ghetto would not know who was still alive and who was not. An order was given to skilled labourers residing in the second ghetto to move to the first ghetto. But they never arrived. They too were never seen again. It is impossible to provide a full inventory of all the laws and ordinances that applied to the ghetto. I will try here to provide a small number of them, so that those who were not there might be able to understand:

behIND the Gates

45

Jews are not allowed to look through windows that face outward from the ghetto. Therefore the windows must be shuttered or covered. Jews are forbidden to speak about politics. Jews are not allowed to speak German. Jews will be shot for trading or speaking with non-Jews. Jews are not allowed to have moustaches (so that they would be more identifiable if they showed up in town). Jews are forbidden to eat fat. Jewish women are not allowed to colour their hair or wear lipstick. Praying and studying are forbidden. A yellow patch must be worn by everyone, from the age of six through to the aged, whether within the ghetto or outside it. The patches must be carefully sewn with no loose ends. They must be worn on the left side of the chest and on one’s back. When a German enters the ghetto, a Jew must remove his hat. Nodding and saying hello are forbidden. It is forbidden to bring flowers into the ghetto. Jewish women are not allowed to give birth. If a woman gives birth, she and the infant will be killed. When the Gestapo officially informed Dr Sedlis,14 the director of the ghetto hospital, that a decree had come from Berlin that forbade Jewish women from giving birth, desperation beset the ghetto. What was to be done with pregnant women or with newborns? Mothers gave birth knowing that their children would be poisoned. Soon enough, the Jews found a way to bypass this law. Newborns were taken straight from the birthing table to a secret room. At night mothers silently went to nurse their children. When the babies were a bit bigger, they were registered with the ghetto administration as older than they actually were. The determination of Jewish women to give birth in the ghetto was a consolation to stand in for a murdered parent or husband, a way to ensure the survival of an entire people that was pursued until the last day of the ghetto. I will never forget the image of pale mothers with infants in their arms – born in defiance of German law, hidden in holes in the ground, in attics, and in cellars – as they were dragged through the streets to their death.

46

vILNa Ghetto

A Confusion of Colours As soon as the Germans entered Vilna, they began to round up all Jewish men. They were dispatched to various worksites, and were given shaynen [Scheinen] – work permits – by their employers so that they would not be arrested on the street. Some permits included a photograph of the Jewish worker. A permit with a photograph was highly valued. There were also permits without photographs. After the permits with photographs, they started to distribute white permits certified by the Labour Department in Vilna. These permits came with an expiration date. One was not “supposed” to shoot a Jew before that date. Those who did not possess a white permit were dragged to their death by the Jew-snatchers. Later, entire columns of workers with white permits were sent to Ponar. The permits became a way to gather Jews en masse. It was easier than hunting them down one by one. When the ghetto was established, a white permit also needed to be stamped “Skilled Worker” to be valid. This lucky stamp cost thousands at the Labour Department. But even those with the stamps were sometimes tricked and dragged off to Lukishki Prison. After the matter of the stamps came a new confusion: as word arrived that Himmler himself had decided that the Vilna ghetto would not be liquidated (or so the Germans assured us), the German Labour Department distributed three thousand yellow permits to the Judenrat in the first ghetto for skilled workers. These three thousand lucky workers were allowed to register the names of family members on their documents. Blessed was the person who received a yellow permit from the Judenrat. It was a “lebns-shayn,” a life-permit that allowed one to go on living. Or at least, that’s what the Germans said. The ghetto awaited another mass slaughter. Once again the Jews racked their brains in an attempt to evade it. People paid ten gold rubles for the yellow permits or made counterfeits in order to count themselves among the “fortunate ones.” Girls in possession of a yellow permit in the ghetto got married. It was their dowry. Mothers would say: “I watch over my child like my yellow permit.” On 24 October 1941 there was a slaughter targeting those who were not in possession of a yellow permit. Those who did have permits were ordered to go along with their families to their places of employment and wait out the massacre there.

behIND the Gates

47

In order to bring a family member through the gates of the first ghetto one needed a blue slip, in the form of a calling card, with a German stamp. Children were included up to the age of sixteen. Anyone older was not allowed to pass, and they were seized. Several days after the slaughters in the ghetto, those in possession of a yellow permit were allowed to return. On 3 November 1941, those holding yellow permits and their families were ordered to gather in the second ghetto. They waited there until 5 November. During those two days anyone in the first ghetto who did not have a yellow permit was murdered. Approximately eight thousand people were slaughtered in this operation, the Aktion15 of the Yellow Permits. When a Jew with a yellow permit went to work, he had to leave a copy of his yellow permit with his wife. If he did not she remained vulnerable to the inspectors who could send her to Ponar. The confusion over the colour of permits did not end there. Anyone who did not possess a yellow permit had to obtain a pink document that was valid only within the ghetto. It did not allow one passage through the ghetto gates. Only those with a yellow permit could leave the ghetto. There was a scramble for the pink cards. These permits were divided into two categories: family permits and protection permits. Family permits were given to family members of those already holding yellow permits. A smaller number of protection permits were allocated by the Judenrat to those who did not have a yellow permit. **They were intended for those who were unfit for work and for children.** On 21 December [1941] there was a roundup targeting those who did not have pink permits. It lasted three days. It was carried out by the local Lithuanian Ypatinga. Almost a thousand people were taken from underground caves and malines to their deaths. A new decree: holders of pink permits now also required a blue one, without which one would not be allowed to work in the city. Shortly afterwards, green papers were distributed, and all other permits were annulled. Essential workers were given permits, work booklets, and tin numbers, which they were obliged to wear around their necks. My number was 475. The list of numbers and the list of workers in possession of them were held by the Labour Department, the Office of the District Commissioner, and the Gestapo. One could not get a number unless one had a work booklet.

48

vILNa Ghetto

Even with a number, things were not easy. A lower or higher number determined the fate of ghetto inhabitants, as when in August 1943 a liquidation Aktion was initiated against those with number 10,000 or higher. Those in possession of a lower number did not have to worry at that moment. The system of different-coloured permits, numbers, and work booklets was the product of Neugebauer’s office. The colours were not chosen randomly. The German goal was to sow confusion. The coloured permits were similar to the German air raids in the first days of the war in terms of their psychological effect. The raids were carried out under the cover of darkness. A low-flying airplane would set off a whirlwind of flares in a dozen colours over a populated area. People would run in panic. It was not uncommon for people to go insane. **The Jews of the ghetto had nowhere to run.**

The Stormtroopers **In order for a Jew to have some assurance that he would not be killed before a certain date, he needed to be in possession of a white permit, that is a note from the Labour Department confirming that he worked in a German factory. The rules then changed: the white permit now needed a black stamp marked “Skilled Worker.” Without the stamp, the permit was worthless.** Only a few thousand residents of the ghetto received the providential stamp on their white permit denoting them a “Skilled Worker.” I was not in possession of such a stamp because I did not go to work. Those close to me in the ghetto advised me to work for a few days so that I could get a stamp on my white permit. I followed my friends’ advice and allowed the stormtroopers to take me to the Piromont barracks, near the old Jewish cemetery. My group of workers consisted of six men. Two stormtroopers, really still teenagers, directed us to a pile of timber and ordered us to transfer it to another courtyard. They told us that each individual Jew had to carry a log alone. It was forbidden to pair up. I gathered my strength and lifted a log onto my shoulder. I set off, afraid to look at the distance that separated me from where it needed to be deposited. When I passed the two stormtroopers, I felt a lash and heard them scream: “Laufen!” [Run!]

behIND the Gates

49

I heard my bones crunch. Blood dripped from my head and blinded me. I saw the world through the colour of blood. None the less, I ran. A crazy life force drove me onward. After I deposited my log I turned back. I wiped my blood-caked eyes with my sweat-drenched shirt. The stormtroopers were laughing. I overheard one whisper something about me to the other. When I leaned over to pick up another log, my master ordered me to carry two this time: “It’s easy, I’ll make a worker out of you yet.” He gave the same order to old Schibuk, the same Schibuk in whose home I had stayed when I first came to the ghetto. *He had screamed at me that I was damaging his flowers.* Schibuk begged the stormtroopers to spare his life. He was already seventy years old. How could he be expected to carry that much weight? But when confronted by the barrel of a gun, he managed to lift the beams. I also hoisted the logs onto both of my shoulders, wrapped my arms around them, and set off down the long path. “So long as they don’t ask me to run,” I thought to myself. But when I passed the sixteen-year-old stormtroopers, I received a second lash and then another: “Laufen!!” I felt myself struggling to keep hold of them. My shoulders were caving. Why am I running? Why am I obeying the stormtroopers? What is the meaning of this? My energy was sapped. Another moment and my heart would give out … I hurled off the logs, and I began to run. Not run, but flee. The stormtroopers were busying themselves with Schibuk. He was lying on the ground under logs of wood, gasping for breath. During my escape I fell into a lime pit. A trickle of blood dripped from my body and dissolved into the lime, turning it red. I remained there until nightfall, and then returned to the ghetto. • The story of the “Skilled Worker” stamps was not over. That same night, another announcement was dispatched to the ghetto: all holders of permits with a “Skilled Worker” stamp must assemble in their courtyards. Everyone else was to remain at home. Those who went down to the gates never returned. I did not go. The day had left its own mark.

50

vILNa Ghetto

In the Second Ghetto Everyone suspected that the Germans would not maintain two ghettos in Vilna indefinitely. But nobody knew for certain which one would survive, the first or second. It was clear that there were more skilled workers in the first ghetto, but more food was provided to the second. Families intentionally divided themselves between the two, half in the first, half in the second, so that in case one of the two ghettos was liquidated, a trace of the family would remain. At some point I learned that all the occupants of my mother’s courtyard had been transferred to the second ghetto. I decided to go there and bring my mother back with me. It was the eve of Yom Kippur [30 September] 1941. I departed for town with one labour brigade and returned with another that was spending the night in the second ghetto. **I found my mother.** She was preparing for Yom Kippur. She was wearing a dark dress that I had never really noticed. Her grey head stood out against her dark dress. I had never noticed the grey. Until then, her hair had seemed to shine, twinkling like a crown. Mother told me she did not want to return with me to the first ghetto. She had no more energy. And the holiday was about to begin. She was preparing for Kol Nidre. She advised me to return home. She thought it would be safer there, because there were elderly people and children here. She lit candles, blessed me, and left to listen to the Kol Nidre service that ushers in the Day of Atonement. • I departed and wandered through the alleys. People were rushing to various synagogues and smaller prayer houses with traditional white holiday robes tucked under their arms. A candle was burning in every little window. The Shulhoyf was full: people were pushing towards the Hasidic prayer house, towards the Great Synagogue, and especially towards the Gaon’s kloyz, as if one’s prayers would have a better chance of being heard there.16 I heard a Yiddish song emanating from the Shulhoyf and found myself drawn to the melody. It carried me up a set of stairs to a long, narrow, and windowless room where the teacher Yankev Gershteyn17 was sitting with a group of children singing Peretz’s poem: “Hope,

behIND the Gates

51

springtime is not far off.”18 Gershteyn stopped singing and embraced me warmly. “Why are you here?” “I came to hear your choir,” I answered. **I looked at the singers, and my eyes filled with tears.** He gathered the children closer and arranged them according to their voices. The room, the ghetto, the entire world resonated with the following lyrics: If a time of peace a time of love seems far off – Sooner or later that time will come. It is not a dream.19 • As soon as I managed to slip out of the second ghetto, Schweinberger arrived with the local Ypatinga and got to work. This time, he got creative. He organized the slaughter according to a precise system: he seized the inhabitants of one courtyard and left those of the neighbouring one behind. But that did not yield enough people. He had come for a specific number of heads, not one more or one less. So he entered the prayer houses and dragged some Jews who were still in their white robes and prayer shawls to their deaths. He brought mandolins along with him and ordered them to be played. On the way to the prison, eighteen-year-old Moyshe Frumkin shouted: “Don’t let them take you! Escape into the streets!” Panic ensued. Women lay on the pavement and dared not move. The elderly were petrified. Young people tried to escape. Schweinberger ordered his men to fire. Dozens were killed, and the survivors were forced to carry their bodies. Nevertheless, a good number managed to escape, including young Frumkin. The liquidation of the second ghetto took place on 28 November [actually, the last week of October, ed.] 1941.20 When there was not a single Jew remaining in the ghetto, an announcement appeared in the Polish-language Goniec Codzienny [The Daily Messenger, a newspaper overseen by the occupying German

52

vILNa Ghetto

authorities]. It informed readers that the Jews of the second ghetto had succumbed to an epidemic and that its streets were once again open to the general public.

The Night of the Yellow Permits Panic engulfed the ghetto at midnight on 23 October [1941]. A new order from the Gestapo: early the next morning all Jews in possession of a “Yellow Permit” must depart for work with their families. Twenty-three thousand Jews were still living in the first ghetto. Only three thousand of them had yellow permits. **When one included family members along with the main permit holder, the order applied to around nine thousand people.** What would happen to the others? Those with enough experience understood: those remaining in the ghetto would be slaughtered. Those who had a maline in which to hide quickly disappeared. Even those with yellow permits went into hiding. An hour after the order went into effect, at precisely one in the morning, Murer arrived and surrounded the ghetto with machine-guns. Those with a yellow permit packed their belongings and awaited dawn. I did not have a yellow permit, but my wife did. **I desperately ran through the streets. I did not want to live to see the dawning of a new day over the ghetto.** I ran to Mother’s. She had managed to escape from the second ghetto and was now living in a ruin on Strashun Street. Her tortured expression cut through me. New blood rushed to my heart. I hid her in an underground cave, covered its entryway with stones so that it would not be discovered, and ran to the gates of the ghetto with an axe. I decided to force my way out through Rudnitske Street. There was a crowd at the gate. Everyone wanted to break through and escape, even though there was not a single hideout left in town. With the axe hidden in my jacket, I managed to push my way to the gate. I took out the axe and sank it into the wood planks. Hearing the strikes, a policeman on the other side opened the gate to see what was going on. That’s how I and several others burst free. **As soon as I tore through the gate I fell to the pavement.** It was one in the morning. It was forbidden to be in the streets. I would certainly be stopped by a patrol lurking around every corner. My only hope was to make my way to a nearby church. The church door was open. I entered and closed it behind me. I climbed a spiral staircase to the bell tower.

behIND the Gates

53

Machine-guns were positioned around the ghetto. Jews were running through its streets, desperately searching for a place to hide.21

Vilna at Night How long could I hide in the church? In the morning, people would come to pray, and I would be discovered. I decided to make my way out of town to Zverinyets. I took off my shoes and tucked the axe into my belt. **I swore not to allow myself to fall into enemy hands alive.** Quietly, on my tiptoes, I slunk outside, hugging the wall. At the corner of Zavalne, I saw a Jew huddled by a gate. The window of that ghetto building faced out onto the city, and he had descended by rope to the street. He was lying there with a broken foot, and regretted what he had just done. I helped him to his feet, held him by the arm, and asked if he knew anyone in town. No, he did not know a soul. He was a refugee from Warsaw. I suggested that he come with me and told him about our destination. The refugee agreed. He told me that his name was Rozenboym. He had been a lawyer back in Warsaw. I told him to take off his shoes to avoid making noise. He hesitated, worried that he would catch a cold. I ordered him to remove his shoes. He obeyed my command. Our luck came to an end next to the Choral Synagogue on Zavalne Street. Two policemen ran towards us and barred our path at gunpoint. We had no alternative. I told them the truth: we had escaped from the ghetto. I took out the pair of boots I had brought with me from the ghetto and handed them to the older one. The gift went straight to his heart. He advised us to take Novigorod, saying we would not encounter a patrol there. While I was greasing the palm of the first policeman, Rozenboym was whispering to the second one. But the lawyer was being stubborn, refusing to give up his watch. The policeman threatened him, but nothing helped. I had to calm the man with three hundred rubles of my own. From Novigorod we turned on to Vivulski, and then took KleynPohulyanke **all the way to Zakret. My plan was to cut through the Zakret Forest and cross the Strategic Bridge22 over the Viliye River in order to reach Zverinyets.** A patrol was approaching at the top of Pohulyanke. We hid behind some trees, and the patrol did not spot us. A guard sat by the gate that led to the Zakret Forest, blocking our way. The lawyer wanted to turn back. He said that the guard would

54

vILNa Ghetto

catch us and turn us over to the Gestapo. I took out my axe, hid it behind my back, and quickly made my way towards the gate. We passed in front of the guard and slid into the forest. To this day, I do not understand why the guard did not react; he must have been dead or dead-drunk. As soon as we made it to the trees, a pack of dogs fell upon us. Their howling and barking was loud enough to rouse the dead. But the guard still did not wake up. The dogs chased us for a full kilometre. When they fell silent, the lawyer Rozenboym collapsed: he was worn out. The dogs had sent him into a panic. He was ready to dig a grave for himself on the spot and slide in. He had just one request: that I cover him well. A few moments later he returned to his senses: “Good. We managed to escape in one piece. What are we going to do when the sun rises?” “We’ll cross the bridge,” I suggested to my Warsaw acquaintance, “and we can figure things out from there. Who knows, maybe a miracle?” I spent my childhood in the Zakret Forest. I wrote my first poems under the shade of its trees. But it had changed. It was unrecognizable. I had been wandering for an hour by the banks of the Viliye and could not find the bridge. Damn it! Where had it gone? I told the lawyer to stay put and wait for me while I followed the Viliye. *It was a dark night.* A biting rain was falling. I searched everywhere, but I was unable to find the bridge … As I was wandering among the trees in search of the bridge, a beam of fire pierced the air just above my head. Rays of blinding light pursued my every move. In the moment I did not understand what was happening: it felt as if I were trapped by a dragon. Trees turned into shadows, shadows into trees, and the beast continued to pursue me. I jumped from the river bank and rolled into the Viliye’s current. The water refreshed me, and calmed me down. It was only then that I realized that the beam of fire was coming from a searchlight, seeking out any trace of me. I had entered the aerial-defence zone. **My movements must have been overheard, causing the searchlight to be turned on.** I crawled back to the sleeping lawyer and sat next to him to rest. When dawn broke, I saw the bridge. I had wasted my energy searching for it for two hours when it had been right there all along.

behIND the Gates

55

Janowa Bartoszewicz23 Having crossed the Strategic Bridge, we arrived at Zverinyets. The fellow confided to me that he knew somebody in the area, a client he had once defended. He would seek him out and hide there. But he could not arrive with a second person, that is, me; if there were two of us we would be turned away. I was not terribly surprised. I set off in search of my own luck. Since I did not know a soul there, I had to rely on fate: I would take the third road and knock on the seventh door, hoping that whoever answered would protect and rescue me. I arrived at Helene Street 21, the house of the Bartoszewicz family. A barefoot old woman opened the door. I entered, but I was tongue-tied. I could not even say “Good morning.” I sat on a bench without saying a word, and just took out my axe and put it on the table. The old woman locked the door, drew the curtain over the window, and approached me. My mood improved, and I started to tell her who I was and from where I had fled. Her cloudy eyes filled with tears. “Calm down, dear,” she said, while stroking my head, “you’ll stay with me, and I’ll hide you until the end of the war. I will prepare a bed for you in the cellar, and you can live there.” In the meantime, she put me in the attic, welcomed me with some warm milk, covered me in three fur blankets, and ordered me to rest. When I woke up, it was already evening. The diminutive old woman climbed upstairs and sat down next to me. We talked for a while. I recounted everything that had happened to me. I told her that my mother and wife were back in the ghetto, and that I did not know what had become of them. “Be patient,” she reassured me. “We’ll try to find out. Now, come with me. I brought straw down to the cellar to arrange a bed for you. I installed a small windowpane so that you’ll have some light during the day.” We went down together. The entry to the cellar was located outside. The old woman went out into the yard to confirm that nobody was passing by, then signalled to me to join her. It was warm in the cellar. I inhaled the scent of potatoes and felt a sense of home. I crawled onto the straw mattress and communed with the darkness for a long while, deep into the night. •

56

vILNa Ghetto

In the morning, Janowa – this good woman’s name – returned. My protector brought me something to eat along with a book to read. She also sent me greetings from her husband, who was a maintenance worker at the municipal electric station. When he’d returned from work the previous evening Janowa had told him about me. The old man was touched by his wife’s kindness, and had told her: “It’s very good to save a human life.” Their son, Kazimierz, also knew that I was hiding in their cellar. She sent him to find out what was happening in the ghetto. When her son returned, she told me: the ghetto was surrounded by snipers. Gunfire could be heard coming from within. Nobody was permitted to approach. Kazimierz learned from a labour brigade he encountered that holders of yellow permits and their families had indeed left that morning. Those who did not have a yellow permit remained behind. German soldiers burst into the ghetto at dawn. Kazimierz went back to the ghetto in the evening. He saw trucks leaving through the gates, and from the trucks he heard screams. • I could not lie still in the cellar. Something was pushing me to leave. How could I continue to hide and ignore what was happening to those I loved? I poured out my heart to my rescuer. I told her that my father-inlaw was working in the courtyard of the courthouse hauling rocks and bricks to build a garage. It so happened that the sister of my hostess, who lived in the countryside, regularly went there to deliver potatoes. She was supposed to come tomorrow, a Friday. Janowa would borrow her permit and go to the courtyard herself. She would attempt to find my father-in-law there. The next day her sister came. Janowa dressed in peasant clothes, borrowed her sister’s permit, and loaded herself with both potatoes and a large loaf of bread. She set off for the building housing the court, where the Gestapo had established its headquarters. Several hours later she returned overjoyed. She had found my father-in-law, sent him my greetings, and given him the bread. She learned directly from him that my wife was alive, and that for two days now they had not been allowed to return to the ghetto after work. They were taken to sleep at Lukishki Prison.

behIND the Gates

57

Janowa did not rest. My suffering was now also hers. She devoted herself to me like a mother. Every morning she went to town to get news from the ghetto. Because of me, she even asked a relative of her husband to move out. The woman had an active tongue and might reveal my whereabouts. One day, Janowa brought me a little crucifix to protect me from danger. “It won’t harm you,” she told me lovingly. “Wear it, my son …” Janowa also brought me a short note from my wife. She wrote that Mother’s hiding place had held up well. The German search dogs had not found its entrance. But there was nothing to eat in the ghetto. There was widespread hunger. Thousands of people were missing. A new slaughter was around the corner. The “fortunate ones,” holders of yellow permits, were being forced into the second ghetto, the one that had been emptied. I read the letter to Janowa. Like two strategists leaning over a map, we considered the situation: “Our first priority,” she said, “is to ensure that your family does not starve. We can work out the next step later.” She went to the city and kept a careful eye on the time when my father-inlaw re-entered the ghetto with his work group. She established with him that my wife should wait by a certain gate of the ghetto at nine o’clock. Janowa herself would be on the other side and slide a loaf of bread underneath the gate. Every night at precisely nine o’clock, Janowa was at the appointed gate, six kilometres from her home, to provide bread for my starving family. One time a policeman caught her in the act of furtively passing the bread. He threatened her, saying that if she did it again she would rot in Lukishki Prison. The next day she returned to deliver her bread to the ghetto and bring me messages. She did not rest. She tried to find a way to save my family. She worked out a plan for my wife and me to live with her sister in the countryside. She was also determined to get my mother out of the ghetto. She had discussed it already with her husband. They would board Mother in the room of the relative she had recently sent away. Since she had already registered that woman as living with her it would not arouse any suspicion. •

58

vILNa Ghetto

It started to get cold. Frost froze over my small windowpane. Janowa brought me a small lantern so that I could see in the dark, and paper so that I could write. On New Year’s Eve Janowa’s husband came down to the cellar and invited me upstairs. He prepared some hard liquor and a good meal, but, knowing that I was down in the cellar, he could not touch his food. I did not have much desire, but he insisted. I had to join them for the feast. There was a guest at the table, a relative of the old man. He had come for the holiday from Vaydulke, a small village in Lithuania. When I asked him what was happening in his village, the peasant told me: Two hundred Jews lived in the village. For years they lived as brothers with the Lithuanians. The Germans gathered the two hundred Jews and imprisoned them in the synagogue. Jonas, the village priest, decided to save the children of these unfortunate people. He managed to smuggle thirty children from the synagogue and hide them in the church. The next day, Dietrich, the German commander of the village, arrived and set fire to the synagogue by igniting a small amount of straw. It is impossible to describe the screams emanating from those being burned alive. Two peasants went insane after witnessing this horror. A third was so enraged that he screamed at the Germans: “You’re murderers, you aren’t human!” The Germans immediately shot him and tossed his body into the fire. While the bodies were still glowing in the ashes, Dietrich learned from an informant about the thirty hidden children. He ran to the church, accompanied by the police. The priest placed himself in front of the door to prevent the murderers from entering. “If you want to kill these children, I want to die alongside them.” A shot to the head killed him on the spot. The police then launched themselves at the children. They grabbed the poor things and smashed their thirty heads against the walls. • Old Janowa never stopped helping my family. In addition to bread, she smuggled meat and potatoes under the ghetto gate. I often argued with this wonderful woman: I could not allow myself to accept her tasty food

behIND the Gates

59

because I knew that she was poor and that she was taking bread out of her own mouth for me. Once, Janowa confided that she had witnessed a hanging in Cathedral Square. Three Germans had brought an older man there and publicly hanged him. On a white piece of fabric pinned to his chest they had written in black letters: “For hiding Jews.” **“They don’t scare me,” said the old woman. “To hell with them and their laws. Precisely because the Germans forbid it, I will continue to hide you.” ** I fell sick. Janowa guided me upstairs to a small side room, laid me in bed, and called a doctor for me. She arranged for the doctor to arrive at night. She told the doctor that I was her son who had just escaped from forced labour in Germany. The doctor examined me and inquired about the mood in Berlin. He was happy when I told him that people there did not support Hitler. He confirmed that my lungs were infected and prescribed medication. The doctor’s medicine helped me. I felt better. The old woman bickered with me. She did not want me to go back down to the cellar. She had concealed the little room where I was recuperating with a curtain and would not allow anyone to enter. None the less, I went back down. I feared informants. I knew that if I were denounced and discovered my protector would pay with her life. I could not remain in that cellar any longer. The desperate fate of the ghetto choked me like a noose. The thought that I had abandoned my mother to her fate weighed heavily on me, **like the wooden beams the stormtroopers had forced me to carry. I had to run back to the ghetto and ask my mother’s forgiveness.** Janowa did not want to let me leave. “Stay here,” she insisted, “I will bring your mother here.” At that moment, a neighbour noticed me. I fled from my hideout that night, and returned to the bloodstained streets of the ghetto.

Back to the Ghetto I did not recognize the ghetto. I was unfamiliar with the way it moved, with the way it behaved. Its residents appeared abnormal to me, as if an entirely different breed. I observed their pushiness, their exaggerated gestures, the full heads of grey atop young faces. I listened carefully to

60

vILNa Ghetto

their language. **I had never heard such Yiddish before in Vilna.** It was the language of life that does not want to surrender to death. I came across acquaintances. They were surprised to see me, having been certain that I had been killed at Ponar. Everyone I asked about was no longer there. *Leyb Shriftzetser could no longer bear hiding in his maline. He had voluntarily crawled out and joined the ranks of the dead. The editor Grodzenski24 was killed even earlier. Noyekh Prilutski’s wife, Paula R., was seen tossed into a truck. And Vitalina the actress was shot in the second ghetto.* I was told about the fortunate ones who died in their own beds. Malke Khayimson,25 a teacher, had been admitted to the ghetto hospital for a serious illness. She did not allow the doctors to treat her and refused all medicines. She wanted to die, and she achieved her goal. Of the twenty-three thousand souls I had left behind in the first ghetto only half remained. One could count the remaining members of entire families on the fingers of one hand. Everyone had lost someone: this one a mother, that one a child. But we went on living. We were alive, and we had hope. **I learned that the child of Dovid Umru was one of the victims.** I was told unimaginable things about the “Night of the Yellow Permits.” The Jews bickered among themselves, and did not want to go. Mme Galpern of Sadove Street 9 was arrested in her maline. Her child was still suckling at her breast. When she saw the Germans she went crazy. She grabbed her child and threw it at the assassins. Tevke Pevtz, one of Vilna’s mobsters before the war, bit a German in the throat. After killing the man, Tevke slipped on his uniform and marched out of the ghetto. As they ran through the ghetto with search dogs, the Jew-snatchers discovered a hideout. They broke through a wooden wall with an axe and penetrated inside. A moaning woman on a straw mattress was holding her newborn child, still attached to its umbilical cord. The woman asked for mercy. “Don’t touch me. Let me give birth. You are people with children.” Her plea fell on deaf ears. They tore the infant from its mother by ripping out the umbilical cord, tossed the two of them in a truck, and shipped them off to Ponar. •

behIND the Gates

61

Khiene Kats, a schoolgirl, told me: During the “Night of the Yellow Permits,” the Jew-snatchers burst into our home and ordered us to come with them. My entire family – my parents, sisters, and their children – were driven along with all the other inhabitants of the courtyard to Lukishki Prison. We were told to undress down to our undergarments. They confiscated our clothes and beat our shoulders with iron bars. That is how we slept, naked, until dawn. Weiss arrived and told us to get dressed. When we told him that the guards had confiscated our clothing, he barked: “Who dared do that? How can you go to work like this? Now I’ll have to drive you over there in trucks!” He set aside the children, and then the men. He made us get into the trucks naked, and off we went. Before the truck left, Weiss jumped in and delivered the following speech: “You must understand the following: I’m your father. I’m taking you to a factory to work. You will soon be told about the nature of your work.” He took out a small box of candies and gave one to each of us. Many of us believed his reassuring words. We stopped crying and started to dream about our future as workers. Others even began to smile. I didn’t believe a word. I knew we were departing on our last journey. But I admit that I accepted the candy. I thought: “If it’s poison, that wouldn’t be so bad. At least I won’t suffer any longer.” When we arrived at Ponar, we were whipped and driven into a trench. Weiss exploded in laughter: “You will work here!” His laugh mingled with the cawing of crows. He ordered us to toss away our undergarments and wait our turn. When someone didn’t obey quickly enough or refused to comply, Weiss took out a bayonet and threatened us: “I will poke out the eyes of whomever does not undress immediately.” He followed through on this threat with one of the women. There were several hundred women in the trench. There were only a few children among us because they had been separated from us back at the prison. Several mothers had managed to conceal their children during the selection, and they were now clinging to their mothers’ necks.

62

vILNa Ghetto

If there was crying and desperate shouts at first, people calmed down as time passed. The execution site was about two hundred paces from us. I saw them kill my father with my own eyes. They first hit him with an iron bar, then finished him off with a bullet. He fell, covered in blood, onto a pile of bodies. My sister was next to me. Moyshele, her two-year-old son, was still nursing. When the shooting ceased for a few moments I heard my sister singing. She was rocking her child and singing him a well-known lullaby: Lyulinke, mayn feygele Lyulinke, mayn kind. Kh’bob ongevoyrn aza libe Vey iz mir un vind. Hush, my little bird Hush, my child. I have lost such a love Oh, woe is me. The woman next to me still had a little food with her. She took out some bread and butter and began to eat. Others followed her lead. At sunset, our turn arrived. We were taken in groups of ten through the trenches to a huge mass grave, measuring some thirty by forty metres. The further we went, the deeper was the trench. At the place where it intersected with the mass grave, it was seven metres deep. My group was last. Weiss ran over and ordered us to get up. He was holding a sheet that he cut into ten pieces and ordered us to blindfold ourselves with the strips. I was first in line. My mother and my sister were behind me. “Hold on to one another by the waist!” Weiss ordered, and he extended a cane that I, who was first, was supposed to follow. I was stepping on bodies that were still warm. They swayed under my feet as though I was walking on a mattress. A different sound emanated from every body my foot accidentally tread upon. Suddenly I heard a scream: “Fire!” And behind me the final cry of

behIND the Gates

63

one of my sisters: “God almighty!” I felt my beloved sister fall. I remained next to her and lost consciousness. I came to my senses at dawn. I was covered by bodies sprinkled in lime. I saw my sister. Moyshele was still clinging to her breast. I managed to escape from under this heavy mass. I climbed up the trench in search of some clothes. I accidentally found my own shirt. I got dressed and picked up an old coat. Then, without having anywhere else to go, I returned to the ghetto. I remained in the ghetto hospital for a month. I had two bullets lodged in my shoulder. When I told the doctors what happened to me, they didn’t want to believe it. • **The massacres did not stop.** Nine hundred Jews who worked for the Gestapo in town lived between the walls of Strashun Street 1, 2, and 3. These workers were “protected” by Schweinberger. During the “Night of the Yellow Permits” nobody dared touch these nine hundred people. After work, they were taken to Lukishki Prison for the night. When the slaughter was over, they were returned to their buildings and to their work at the Gestapo headquarters. Every one of these nine hundred had a yellow permit. At the beginning of January 1942, the Gestapo burst into those three buildings in the middle of the night and announced that all those working for the Gestapo had to come down immediately – they were being taken to Lukishki Prison again for their own protection. The nine hundred people voluntarily strode to Lukishki Prison. Only two police officers accompanied them. Numerous inhabitants of other courtyards, hearing of their good fortune, slipped into their ranks. Of the nine hundred who left, only three hundred returned. At the prison, those who were dressed well were ordered to undress. They were left naked and froze to death in the prison courtyard. Among them was Yidl Ilyashevitsh, the former secretary of the Union of Jewish Bakers in Vilna, and also Khayes, a young intellectual *who had been on the staff at YIvo.*

64

vILNa Ghetto

Mother’s Death I went to visit my mother. She bore happy news: my wife had given birth to a child in the ghetto hospital. Mother had forgotten Murer’s edict that condemned to death any child born in the ghetto. The next day the child was no longer among the living: Murer’s orders had been carried out.26 I had not yet recovered from the loss of my child when I suffered another tragedy. I went to Mother’s, and she was nowhere to be found. I discovered that it was the work of the German agent Oberhardt.27 At night he had come to Shpitol Street 7, where my mother was then living, and dragged all its inhabitants to prison, *and from there to Ponar.*28

City and Ghetto The Germans had entered Lithuania under the pretense of being “liberators.” They published articles about the “historic brotherhood with the Lithuanian people,” and they dressed their police in Lithuanian uniforms. *In Vilna, the Germans recruited a Lithuanian administration from the ranks of the “Ypatinga,” the “Savisauga” [regional guard], and the “Šauliai ” [riflemen militia]. Its purpose was to carry out the orders of Gebietskommissar Hingst. Von Renteln, the German commissioner-general for Lithuania, established a Lithuanian “administrative council,” with Kubiliūnas29 as its chief adviser. Its purpose was to help the occupiers carry out their political goals. The Lithuanian district heads were superseded by the German district commissioners. The Lithuanian Gestapo and the leaders of all police stations consisted of Germans from the sD [Nazi Security Service].* Lithuanian hatred of Poles intensified to prove they were now in charge. A sign was placed at Green Ray café: “Für Juden und Polen, Eintritt verboten!” [Entry forbidden to Jews and Poles!] *Only the Polish-language newspaper Goniec Codzienny pretended not to notice and squawked on about the “noble” Germans.* Martin Weiss, head of the Lithuanian fascist Ypatinga, dressed his followers in old Lithuanian uniforms. At Ponar, their “work” was filmed. Later, the Germans threatened them, saying: “If you don’t follow our orders we will show the world how you killed the Jews.” Later, the films were screened in Berlin. The Lithuanian intelligentsia attempted to

behIND the Gates

65

protest the murderous behaviour of fellow Lithuanians. The protesters were shipped off to concentration camps. Vilna’s streets were renamed in German. At many hotels, restaurants, and cafés one was met with the announcement: “Nur für Deutsche” [Germans only]. The inhabitants of the beautiful apartments on Mickiewicz, Zakret, Shlos, and Pohulyanke Streets were expelled, and the apartments were turned over to the “Master Race.” All Soviet textbooks were burned. They also burned books by Lithuanian writers who had moved to the Soviet Union, such as Cvirka, Gira, Venclova, Korsakas, and Salomėja Nėris.30 They were replaced by Hitler’s Mein Kampf in Lithuanian. The walls around the gates of the ghetto were covered with photos depicting how the Jews took advantage of Lithuanians. Anti-Jewish films were screened. Emil Jannings31 played the role of a Jewish smuggler. An inflammatory exhibition was inaugurated. A prize was offered to anyone who informed on a Jew in hiding. Kovno was renamed Kauenburg. The Germans referred to the occupied Baltic states as Ostland. Ostland was to be reunited with East Prussia. The governor of these captured territories was Reichsminister Alfred Rosenberg.32 In February 1942, Lithuania was declared an “independent state.” For that privilege it paid a tribute of two hundred thousand soldiers to Germany. Lithuanian society got a taste of German politics. A resolute campaign against conscription was initiated. The Germans blamed Lithuanian intellectuals. *In Vilna’s Fascist Lithuanian newspaper the following announcement appeared: “Because of the machinations of intellectuals, mobilization in Lithuania did not succeed as planned. This is a crime against the new Europe and an injustice against the Lithuanian people. Henceforth, only enlistment into a labour brigade will be permitted. In order to avoid harsh punishment, the Lithuanian people must distance itself from its politicized intelligentsia.”* Then, an official announcement: “The university and all of its departments are hereby closed. A special envoy has been designated to handle educational matters in Lithuania. *Let us hope that following the isolation of the politicized intelligentsia the Lithuanian people will find a better example for themselves.” *

66

vILNa Ghetto

A draft for compulsory forced labour was proclaimed. The Lithuanians did not rush to sign up for these labour brigades, either. People began to hide themselves in malines. • *In spring 1943, when this conscription failed as well, arrests of Lithuanian activists began. Even the legionnaires organized by General Plechavičius to fight the partisans did not succeed. Matters escalated into open shooting between Lithuanian and German soldiers.*33 The Germans took to flattering the Poles. They led them to believe that if they behaved, Vilna would be returned to them. When they failed to draw in the Poles, mass arrests were initiated in the city. Polish neighbourhoods were sealed, and entire Polish families were shipped off to Germany. • German intimidation did not much affect the behaviour of Vilna’s general population towards the Jews. Of course, I’m not referring to the Ypatinga, or to the Lithuanian Gestapo, or to the Šauliai who struck down children and burned old people. Rather, I mean the majority of the local population, especially local intellectuals, whose tradition of humanism and civility was too deeply ingrained for them to give in to the Germans. During the first days of terror, when fascist legislation warned that so much as speaking to a Jew would be harshly punished, many Jews hid themselves in the city with their non-Jewish neighbours. The newspapers continued to threaten the peasants: “If you sell your merchandise to Jews do not count on any compassion from the authorities.” None the less, many peasants purposefully made their way to side streets to sell their goods to the neighbourhood Jews. And despite the severe deprivations to which Jews were subject, they sold their products to them at below-market prices. Many Poles and Lithuanians hid Jews in their homes. Among them, let us remember the names Julian Jankauskas,34 Janowa Bartoszewicz, Maria Abramowicz, Wiktoria Gzmilewska. The home of the latter two at Pohulyanke 16 was a refuge for dozens of Jews on the run. The journalist

behIND the Gates

67

[actually a librarian, Ona] Šimaitė established a Jewish rescue committee in town. **She was tortured for this in the cellar of the Gestapo headquarters.35** Maria Fedecka36 saved the life of Dr Sedlis and his family, as well as those of Dr Kamay and his daughter. She procured Polish papers for dozens of others whom she then sent to her acquaintances in the countryside. Professor Stakauskas saved sixteen Jews, among whom were Dr Libo and his family, and the nine-year-old artist Zalmen Bak.37 Professor Czezowski saved Professor Fessel, his wife, and his child, as well as the teacher Zlate Kaczerginski. A number of local priests also comported themselves honourably. The bishop of Vilna, Mgr Reinys, sermonized in the churches about coming to the aid of the persecuted Jews. The bishops of Ponevezh and Kovno did the same. The priest of Vaydulke was shot in front of his church for wanting to defend Jewish children, as mentioned earlier. • According to German law, couples in which one partner was Jewish or had Jewish origins going back three generations had to be separated. The Jewish partner had to move to the ghetto, while the non-Jewish partner had the right to live in the city. Children of mixed couples were considered Jews, even if the father was Jewish, and had to relocate to the ghetto. Dr Aksen, a Polish physician, married a young Jewish woman from Mikhalishok. The Gestapo arrested his wife and children and tossed them into the ghetto. Dr Aksen joined his wife: he acquired decent Yiddish in the ghetto and shared in the destiny of the ghettoized Jews. A Don Cossack who was married to a Jew also lived in the ghetto. Stasia, a long-time maidservant of the Lipkovitsh family, joined her employers in the ghetto. When the wife was killed, Stasia was like a mother to her orphaned children. The singer Ruzhinski was taken to be shot. A passerby recognized him. Ruzhinski had been an officer in the Polish army, and the passerby had served in his regiment. Seeing that his commander was being led to his death, he pleaded with the guard to liberate him. The guard allowed himself to be persuaded in exchange for a gold watch. But he said that because the Gestapo headquarters was nearby and observing the execution site from the window, he had to obey orders. He would

68

vILNa Ghetto

take the officer to the pit and shoot over his head. He was to fall in the pit and remain there until nightfall. At night he was to get up slowly and disappear from the area. That night the former soldier from Ruzhinski’s regiment came to the pit to take him to his home. Ruzhinski was grey when he exited the pit. He lived for a month with this soldier. When raids began in the area, he barely made it back to Vilna, and entered the ghetto. His Russian wife joined him there. She wanted to share his fate and wear the required patch.

The Expert in Jewish Affairs Murer, the person in charge of Jewish affairs for Gebietskommissar Hingst, the governor of the district, was just twenty-four years old. He was an officer. His father was an executioner in a distant German province. The son took up the same tradition and was not ashamed of his father. He was raised in the Hitler Youth in Nuremberg and studied “the scientific knowledge of Jews” there. *Himmler’s orders were passed to him. People used to say that there was a large plastic map on Himmler’s table. A little flag was stuck into every Jewish locale. Himmler would remove a few flags every day. That is to say, he removed a flag from those places where Jews were to be liquidated. Orders were dispatched to folks like Murer. He and his men debated how to divide the work, whether assign it to Schweinberger or to Weiss, with each responsible for executing the orders they received.* Murer loved to toy with “his” Jews. He would show up by surprise, calmly and without shouting, at the gates of the ghetto to inspect those returning from work. When he found them in possession of smuggled foodstuffs, he took it upon himself to drag them off to Lukishki Prison. Or, he would touch their required patches and if one of its edges was torn or not properly affixed to the garment he would not leave the poor victim alone. When Murer discovered someone attempting to smuggle money or flowers, he ordered the police posted at the ghetto gates to whip the transgressor. He especially liked to observe the beatings of young girls. He would stand to the side and scream: “Stronger! Harder!” One time, Murer came across a group of Jews, searched them, and found a kilogram of flour on one of them. He arrested all twenty people

behIND the Gates

69

in the group and was himself present at Ponar when they were led to slaughter. He often visited the ghetto. He had his own key to the gate, and he showed up whenever he pleased. *When he paid a visit to ghetto workshops he ordered everyone present to crawl under the table and howl like dogs.* He liked to pass time in the baths at Strashun Street 6. He would cross his arms and stare at the naked women. One time he approached them and taunted them, calling out: “You’re too fat! I’ll personally see to it that you lose weight.” After the murder of four thousand Jews from the provinces who were diverted to Ponar instead of to Kovno, Murer summoned Gens, who was in charge of the ghetto, to apologize. It had been a mistake, Gens was told.38 He told him that after the war he would enlarge the ghetto to include Stefn Street within its boundaries. In May 1943, Murer distributed a proclamation printed in German to all the Jewish commanders of labour brigades that they were to deliver to their German employers, including a signature attesting to the fact that they had read through it. Included among its many rules was a statement that the Jews were only temporary workers. A German should never forget that his greatest enemy was the Jew. *In June 1943 Himmler ordered Murer transferred elsewhere. His deputy, Lakner, assumed his position in Vilna.*

German Mercy I learned what was going on in a German hospital during the course of my slave labour for the Germans at Vivulski Street 18.39 The hospital courtyard was directly opposite the fence. Wounded soldiers used to go for a stroll just behind it. I overheard a mixture of languages: Rumanian, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Finnish, and others. **They were all soldiers of armies allied with Hitler.** Germans were not hospitalized here. Some were crippled, others were blind. They often approached the fence to speak with the Jews to gather the latest news. These injured men were well nourished. Sporket,40 the secretary of the Vilna section of the NsDaP [National-Socialist German Workers Party], who was a former leather dealer from Białystok, delivered lectures. The injured

70

vILNa Ghetto

wrote frequent letters to their families and parents to tell them that they were being well cared for by the Germans. We often saw Rumanian, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, and Finnish journalists drop by to visit them. In the German-language newspaper Wilnaer Zeitung I read an interview with one of these journalists. He could not stop raving about the kindness of the Germans and their humanity in caring for the injured. He concluded the interview by saying: “When I return to my country, I will boast to my people about German mercy.” But I was always suspicious when, the day after these journalists visited, the courtyard was empty, and there were no longer any injured soldiers in the windows of the hospital building. Where had all the infirm and blind men gone? The Jewish labour camp Kailis41 faced the entrance to the hospital. I spent the night there once because the entrance to the ghetto was under surveillance. Since I had weapons on me I could not risk returning there. At midnight I heard the noise of an idling car. I was sensitive to such things. To a Jew from the ghetto, the slightest whisper or movement was a potential danger. Terrified, I jumped to the window. My friend Belkind, who hosted me for the night and had been living in the camp for more than a year, was not afraid: “They are not after us,” he reassured me, “They are coming in search of the disabled to send them to Ponar …” Belkind continued: “What, you didn’t know? They begin by treating them and feeding them well. They invite journalists. Then Weiss arrives with his truck and loads it up with the blind and the lame. He comes back an hour later with an empty truck. They say that the disabled have been transferred to a safer place because the city is at the mercy of Soviet bombers. But don’t take my word for it. Let’s remain by the window for an hour: we will see the truck return and its driver unload the crutches of those who have been shot.” In the moonlight I saw for myself how they loaded the disabled one by one into a truck. An hour later the truck returned. The driver carried crutches back into the hospital. They could now load up a second group. And when the hospital was completely empty they could admit a new batch. •

behIND the Gates

71

On 17 July 1942 Weiss transferred eighty-six aged men and women from the ghetto to the former building of the toz colony, run by the Society for the Protection of Health, 42 in Pospieshk, a town five kilometres from Vilna. Weiss ordered that pots and food be brought from the ghetto for these old people. Nurses in white gowns were to serve these old men and women. Weiss supplied two pud of butter, or approximately 16 kilograms. The pension at Pospieshk was a mystery to the ghetto inhabitants. Nobody knew what was going on there. One, two, three days passed. These eighty-six people were rejuvenated amid the greenery. Ninetyyear-old Teresa Kachanowska was among the pensionnaires. She had been converted to Christianity by her parents when she was nine. Weiss discovered her in a Polish old-folks home and reminded her of her Jewish ancestry at the end of her life. Weiss held these old Jews for six days at the pension, and on the seventh day he arrived with guests from abroad, who proceeded to photograph them. Then, everyone was shipped off to Ponar. • In May 1943, I was assigned to work at the Vilna train station. The collection of the Smolensk museum had been brought there, and my comrades and I were charged with transporting the materials to the municipal archives located on Ignatover Street. Ten train wagons stuffed with little children ranging from the ages of three to ten had arrived along with the museum contents. They were guarded by a German who made sure that the little ones did not escape. The workers at the station took an interest in the children. They learned that they were from Smolensk. The conductor passed by, and said that the children were being sent to Ponar. That’s when the workers approached the Germans and asked: “Perhaps these children are for sale?” At first the Germans balked. But, seeing a good business opportunity, they started to negotiate: “Five marks per child!” People headed for the wagons and started unloading children. Seeing the potential, the guards raised their price: “Ten marks per child!” And since that price did not seem to deter anyone, they raised the stakes again: “Fifteen marks per child!”

72

vILNa Ghetto

And that’s how things proceeded until the price finally settled at thirty marks. We managed to ransom almost all the children **and save them from Ponar.** The Germans, their pockets stuffed with cash, mocked our foolishness. • Feldwebel Hans Degner, a German from Hamburg, was responsible for the airfield at Porubanek, where several hundred Jews worked. Degner provoked and brutalized his Jewish workers so much that they went to Murer to complain about him … After that, he mistreated his victims even more. **One day, when several Jews arrived late to work, he included both the latecomers and others in the following punishment**: he selected twenty workers from the lineup and announced that since certain ones among them had sabotaged work on account of their lateness, he was going to shoot ten of them. When he shouted the order “Laufen” [Run], these twenty were supposed to race across the airfield to a distant point about a kilometre away. The first ten to arrive would have their lives spared. The remaining ones would be executed. Degner mounted a bicycle and cried: “Laufen!” The twenty took off. Degner rode alongside them, watching like the referee of a race. The runners included both young and old. There was also a father and son, with the family name Puziriski. Someone collapsed when his heart let out. **A second one fell just before the finish line.** In the end, Degner tricked them all. He killed the first ten runners, and spared the lives of the rest. • On 5 April 1943, four thousand Jews from Mikhalishok, Sventsyan, Oshmene, and Svir were deported from their hometowns. They were told they were being sent to Kovno. Dr Wulff,43 the commissioner of the Vilna district and a former commandant at Dachau, personally oversaw the liquidation. But their train was redirected to the mass grave at Ponar. Weiss and his men were awaiting them, and the killing moved methodically from train car to train car. Ellen Degner, a former student

behIND the Gates

73

from Hamburg University, and now Weiss’s mistress and a member of the execution brigade at Ponar, participated in the killing herself. Afterwards, Weiss learned that seven Jews had succeeded in escaping from Ponar to the ghetto. Weiss came to the ghetto and ordered the Judenrat to hand the seven escapees over to him immediately. **“No one must escape Ponar,” he insisted.** When he failed to recover the seven fugitives, Weiss ordered his underlings to grab seven random Jews. They brought him seven old Jews, several of whom were sick. When Weiss saw these aged folk, he flew into such a rage that it appeared as though his eyes might pop out of their sockets. “I would be embarrassed to arrive at Ponar with this gang,” he said tapping his feet. “I need young ones!” He went to the ghetto prison and set his sights on Yoshke Matikanski, a healthy nineteen-year-old. Weiss went so far as to smile. His wrath evaporated like smoke. “These are the kinds I need!” he gleefully told his acolytes. “More like this!” He freed one of the seven who had been turned over to him, a sick one, and replaced him with Yoshke Matikanski. • Solomon Garbel, who – according to the partisan underground – was a member of the ghetto police, recounts: On 6 April 1943, the day after the liquidation of the four thousand Jews from the provinces, Weiss entered the ghetto on his Rover motorcycle and summoned the Jewish police to bury the dead. Ten of us went with him. Weiss drove ahead to show us the way. We discovered bodies even before we reached Ponar, about a half-kilometre away, near the railway tracks. They were the bodies of those who had tried to escape. The Germans shot them while they were fleeing. Above the gate leading to the execution site, a sign proclaimed: “Eintritt auch für deutsche Offiziere streng verboten!” [Entrance strictly forbidden, even for German officers!] There was a track passing through the same gate so that the victims who arrived by train were driven directly to the pits. The farther we went, the more terrifying the scene. The grass was red because of the blood. The entire field was covered with bodies. The trees were splattered with brain marrow. Children who

74

vILNa Ghetto

had been smashed against trees lay at their trunks. I saw several children who had been torn in half, a leg here and another there. Elsewhere, I saw only the heads of children. The place was strewn with documents: calling cards, photographs, torn banknotes. Amid the bodies I also saw a German whose throat had been slit. It was probably a Jew who killed him while escaping a train car. Weiss provided us with liquor and exhorted us: “Work honestly!” We were told to undress the bodies and bury them in an orderly fashion. Clothes were to be put to the side, men’s clothes here and women’s clothes there. He told us to deposit any gold we found into a bucket. Anyone who dared to steal would be shot. When he finished his instructions, Weiss brought us to the top of a nearby mound, pointing out areas that had been paved, and said: “Underneath them are the Jews liquidated during the period of the khapunes, the mass kidnappings by Jew-snatchers. (He said the word khapunes in Yiddish, with a smug smile, suggesting his delight at his vast knowledge.) The Gypsies are over there. And those who said: ‘Nie damy się’ [We will not go], that is to say Poles, are there. The Lithuanians who opposed us are there. Over there are Russian prisoners of war, and all the way over there,” he said pointing to the horizon, “the earth is still empty, but not for long. There are way too many people on this planet!” Some of the victims were still alive. We didn’t know what to do, but when we lifted them up the wounded ones died. Many Jews were wrapped in their prayer shawls. We found letters in the pockets of others. They had written them during their final journey in railcars sealed with barbed-wire to prevent their escape. I remember that one of them read: “Jews, we are being led to slaughter! Avenge us! Flekser from Sventsyan.” While removing blood-covered bundles from the railcars we found a living child, wrapped in rags. He had been hidden and nobody noticed him. His name was Berele Goldshteyn from Mikhalishok. He saw that we were Jews and begged us to save him. We hid him so that Weiss wouldn’t find him and brought him back to the ghetto. We buried about five hundred Jews: those whose bodies were strewn in the fields and all those who were not yet naked and had tried to flee. The others were tossed, one on top of another, in a ditch. We covered them with chlorine.

behIND the Gates

75

We were certain that we would never leave this place. Weiss was planning to shoot us. But he got up tipsily and proclaimed: “You are the only ones brought to Ponar who are being allowed to return home because you are decent Jews.” Before our return to the ghetto I saw a strange scene: the grave where we had buried the Jews started to move. It grew larger minute by minute … Weiss calmed us down: “The bodies are swelling and raising the earth above them.” • Czech Jews had never heard of Ponar. They were certain that they were  on their way to forced labour. They were reassured because they were accompanied by fifty members of the Czech police. Even the police were unaware that they were guiding them to their deaths. These Jews had been afraid to leave their homes. The Germans told them: “To prove to you that we are taking you to work and nowhere else, we will send along Czech police to keep watch over you …” The Czech Jews were reassured, and they departed. At the Vilna train station, Jewish workers from the ghetto noticed the convoy. “Where are you going?” they asked them. “To the town of Ponary,” the Czech citizens responded, exchanging a look with the Czech police. They killed them all. The next day, clothes with the yellow star and Czech uniforms were turned over to the Gestapo.

Clothing The clothing of the murdered was carefully guarded. Jews from the ghetto were forced to sort it at the Gestapo headquarters and in the camps. Mayer, a German from Vienna, organized the work. It was a simple system: shoes in one place, coats in another, and any little objects found in the clothing in yet another. The patches needed to be torn off the clothing **so that when they were shipped back to Germany nobody would know that they once had been worn by Jews.** Mayer asked us to set aside for him a sample of the different badges and patches we found. He had his own collection, and there were many variations. A square white fabric with a “J” (for Jew)

76

vILNa Ghetto

inside a yellow circle. Blue armbands with a white Star of David. Yellow stars with black borders, with the word “Jude” in the centre (these came from the convoy of Czech Jews who had been shipped to Vilna). Yellow patches. Plain Stars of David. And square red patches. And also the numbered tin necklaces that were worn in Vilna in addition to the required patch, and all different kinds of documents and various colours of permits. They all had to be handed over to Mayer, a devout Catholic, as a relic of the former Europe. Gestapo members often fought among themselves about the clothes. Even though each of the murderers had amassed suitcases full of gold by looting during this period, it would be a shame to pass up yet another opportunity. When the time came to sort and inspect clothing, dozens of Gestapo men rushed to help. Weiss, the main culprit in this business, was offended. What was this? He had discovered a gold mine, and others were stealing from him! From that moment on, he took his own helper with him to Ponar, whose only job was to search the pockets of those who had been shot. Only then could the clothes be sent on to the Gestapo. After each execution, the Germans felt a kind of “pity” towards those of us left behind. They would send the worn-out shoes and coats of those who had been killed to the ghetto as a gift. Once I recognized one of my mother’s shoes on a wagon.44

The Boss of Ponar Schweinberger was sent to the front. Martin Weiss succeeded him. He became the head of the Ypatinga, the boss of Ponar.45 Weiss was not the kind of person who just carried out someone else’s orders. **He did not undertake the job only because Neugebauer had ordered him to do so.** No, he loved his art like a musician loves his violin. His greatest joy was to strangle children with his own hands. He built a country home for himself in Ponar, not far from the pits where victims were shot. 17 July 1941 was the date of Weiss’s first command performance. At the time he was still Schweinberger’s deputy. Under the pretext that the Jews had killed a German, he conducted a pogrom on Novigorod Street. He shot five hundred Jews in the middle of the street. He had several thousand more arrested and shipped to Lukishki Prison.

behIND the Gates

77

On the way, he ordered the Jews to take off their belts, so that their pants would fall down. They could not pull them back up because they had to hold their hands in the air, crossed above their heads. Segal, the rabbi of Novigorod, headed the procession. On 6 September 1941, the day we were forced into the ghetto, Weiss held the hand of Gitele Perlove and guided her through the gates of the ghetto. She was not wearing a yellow patch. The eleven-year-old girl, educated at Vilna’s Real-Gymnasium, probably believed that Weiss was a “good German” who wanted to save her from the Jew-snatchers. She was mistaken. He put her up against a wall and shot her. • Zelde Aynhorn, who escaped from Ponar (she hid amid the bushes and witnessed the execution of her family from a distance), told me about the death of Tserne Morgenshtern, a beautiful eighteen-year-old young woman and the daughter of a Vilna teacher. She was walking with her mother and younger brother. She was told to undress not far from the pit. Those who refused had their eyes poked out. It was evening. The moon had just risen. When Tserne descended into the pit, half-naked, Weiss ran over. He took her by the arm and moved her to the side. He wanted to save her. Tserne tore herself away. She preferred to die with her mother and younger brother, who had already been shot. But Weiss would not hear of it: “A beautiful girl like you must not die,” he claimed. He dragged her further away from the pit. Tserne was crying. She wanted to escape from him, but Weiss was holding her by the hand and was not letting her go. “Look at the beauty of the world,” he told her while pointing to the trees, between whose branches the moonlight gleamed. “You are so beautiful in the moonlight! …” He spoke to her like a young suitor, carrying on about the beauty of life, at the same time that he removed his revolver and shot her in the head. Then, he let out a hearty laugh and dragged the dying girl to the pit. •

78

vILNa Ghetto

Weiss’s career flourished. From a simple Feldwebel, he moved up the ranks to Hauptführer and then Sturmführer, roughly equivalent to a first lieutenant. Silver insignia adorned his epaulettes, and on his chest he sported a swastika with a small sword. **He personally participated in all the executions, and murdered thousands of people with his own hands.** Just as a sparrow hawk does not make distinctions among its prey, he did not distinguish among people, especially in death. When Roma were missing from his collection, he organized a raid in the forest to capture them along with their horses and their caravans, and transfer them to his kingdom. He took five hundred Polish clergy members – priests and nuns – from the Benedictine convent and locked them up in Lukishki Prison. He ordered them to disrobe and to put on the clothes of Jews who had been murdered recently. The five hundred were brought to Ponar wearing the yellow patch on their chest. They were killed. Brenayzn, a Jew who was in prison at the time, told me the story. We should not forget that among Weiss’s other exploits he created and directed the German state brothel at Subotsh Street 9. He procured “merchandise” for his enterprise in the following manner: he and his minions surrounded the Green Ray café. They grabbed all the girls and women, whether they were alone or accompanied by a man, and brought them to Subotsh Street. The girls were not allowed to leave. They received medals for “good conduct.” Their legs were branded so as to prevent anyone from escaping. As a result of Weiss’s exploits it is still possible to see women on the streets of Vilna with bandages covering the top part of their legs. When Kittel46 replaced Weiss, Weiss moved to Rose Street 10, to the Gestapo gardens [on the premises of a former monastery], where he busied himself with growing flowers.

The Book of Official Regulations There were some Jews who stubbornly refused to believe that everyone had been killed at Ponar up until the last days of the ghetto. They believed that the Jews must have undergone a selection there and the healthiest had been shipped off to forced labour elsewhere. Such persons imagined that among them was their child or father.

behIND the Gates

79

In the Vilna Gestapo there was a special office staffed by German professors charged with drawing up plans for the persecution and execution of Jews. Professor Gotthard, who had been a lecturer at a university in Berlin and later a confidant of Himmler, wrote a code of some five hundred paragraphs that explained in great detail how to exterminate a people. The Vilna Jew Kamermakher, who was in charge of the slave labourers at the Gestapo headquarters, told me in the ghetto that he had managed to take a look at Gotthard’s Book of Official Regulations. Here are several paragraphs that he remembers from it: Simply shooting a Jew is not in accord with Himmler’s directives. A Jew must first be tortured. Executions do not necessarily need to be conducted by Germans. In fact, it is preferable that Germans only give the order. The killing itself should be done by others. The entire extermination process must remain secret. The execution sites should remain confidential so that those who remain behind do not try to escape. In the same Book of Official Regulations there was an additional directive applicable specifically to Vilna, which essentially stated: “The Vilna Jew is the most dangerous in the world. Even if only ten Jews were to remain behind in Vilna this would amount to a failure of our mission. Any form of pity towards the enemy is a form of state treason.” The Gestapo did not limit itself to the physical annihilation of the Jewish population. It also strove to break Jewish morale and to disfigure Jewish history forever. This last point was as important to the murderers as was the extermination itself. Their program consisted of forcing Jews to participate in the murder of their fellow Jews in exchange for a temporary lease on life. Those who were temporarily left alive were rendered spiritually dead, deprived of agency, without a soul or a conscience, so that they blindly followed German orders. • The Jew-snatchers shipped about twelve thousand Jewish men to prison prior to the establishment of the ghetto. Hundreds were arrested for not

80

vILNa Ghetto

obeying the orders of Gebietskommissar Hingst: their yellow patch was not properly sewn onto a garment; they had not handed over their gold and silver; someone had forgotten the rules and stepped on the sidewalk. For all such violations, people were sent to Lukishki Prison. We did not know what this signified. The women who assembled in front of the prison were told that their husbands would be freed in around a month. Bringing money and food to the prison for them was permitted. But their husbands no longer needed such care packages. They had all been executed. The “free” Jews could not believe it. Neugebauer’s Gestapo office was sufficiently cunning to confuse the population with such tricks. A hundred of those captured men had actually been sent to work near Pskov. They wrote letters from there. Joy spread among Vilna’s Jews. Parents believed that their son was still alive, and children believed that their father would soon return home. During this period of the ghetto, when not a day passed without Jews being sent to slaughter, people did not believe, or more precisely, they did not want to believe, that those who had been arrested would never return, even when local peasants swore that they had seen how the executions unfolded. And more: in January 1942 the well-known Vilna teacher Teme Kats managed to escape from the death pits.47 She returned to the ghetto covered in blood and recounted in stark detail how she crawled out from beneath a pile of bodies, victims of the mass shootings. “They were all killed at Ponar. None of those who were captured will return. They will kill us all,” she told members of the Judenrat and the doctors she knew in the ghetto hospital, where they removed the bullets lodged inside her. But nobody wanted to listen. Everyone thought: ‘Even if it’s true, it won’t happen to me.’ Only a small number of savvy youths believed the truth of what she was saying. They organized the resistance to the German murderers. Later, when the word “Ponar” was on everyone’s lips, and people tried to escape from the ghetto to the surrounding countryside, the following occurred: Burakas, head of the Ypatinga in Vilna, who was the intermediary between the ghetto and the Gebietskommissar, provided supplies to the ghetto. Trapido, a Jew who regularly met with him to acquire bread for the ghetto, noticed a list of foodstuffs for three ghettos on his desk. Next to the words “third ghetto” someone had added in parentheses: “Ponar.” At the time, there were only two ghettos in Vilna. Jews came to believe that there was also a ghetto in Ponar. After all,

behIND the Gates

81

Trapido had seen the notation on Burakas’s desk with his own eyes! – “Ponar, the third ghetto!” For a time this calmed the ghetto population. Neugebauer’s office had achieved its goal.

Access to Food **As we already know from the early ordinances,** a Jew did not have the right to possess more than three hundred rubles, or thirty marks (both currencies were valid in town and in the ghetto; one mark was worth ten rubles). At dawn on 6 September 1941, homes were suddenly invaded, and in the space of a single day the city was emptied of its Jewish population. Some residents were not even able to grab a piece of bread and a towel. Their homes and belongings were immediately sealed with a sign claiming them as “German property.” In reality, some individual Jews had been clever enough to bury a portion of their belongings in anticipation of the establishment of a ghetto. The most cumbersome items, such as coats, clothing, shoes, and so on were given to non-Jewish neighbours to hold onto. Of course, that did not answer the question of how they were going to feed and clothe themselves. At first, there were about twenty-nine thousand people in the first ghetto. Based on this number, bread cards were distributed equivalent to 7.849 kilograms of bread for five, or about 50 grams per person per day. Murer ordered the Judenrat to post a sign on the ghetto gate warning that the entry of wood and food of any kind was forbidden. During the initial days of the ghetto, people ran around as if possessed. In the struggle for life, they forgot about death. Contact was made with sympathetic, non-Jewish neighbours, whose windows faced out into the ghetto, and trade was initiated – a danger for both sides. At first, trade was very rudimentary. A rope was lowered from a window. A ghetto Jew attached money, a valuable object, or clothes to it, and the neighbour raised it up, and then lowered foodstuffs down the same rope. In the days before Yom Kippur, dozens of chickens were provided in this way to the ghetto. Surrounded by death, ghetto Jews did not forget the ritual of kapores.48 Later, trade expanded. Night after night, tens of poods49 of essential products were smuggled in through the attics of Daytshe Street 21, whose walls bordered buildings outside the ghetto, and through the maline at Strashun Street 3.

82

vILNa Ghetto

Money and fear were the cost: money to pay off the police on the other side of the gate, and fear of Murer, who lay in wait like a dog.50 Along with other crucial institutions, the ghetto administration established a division in charge of food supply and used extraordinary means to ensure that the population did not starve to death. **In addition to foodstuffs that were distributed according to ration cards in the municipal cooperatives (bread, grains, horse meat, potatoes), food was also acquired illegally.** The Judenrat opened five public kitchens in the ghetto. One was reserved for children, and another at Shavl Street 5 was for religious Jews who observed the kosher laws. In October 1941, a public health office was opened, and a milk distribution program for young children and the sick was established at Strashun Street 12. It was not an easy task. The ghetto lacked everything, including wood and pots. But the desire to live overcame the shortages in the space of a few nights. Pots were pulled from the debris of Jewish restaurants, and wood collected from ruined buildings to enable cooking. In November 1941, at the height of the bloody slaughter, when the ghetto population continued to shrink, the public kitchens distributed sixty-six thousand meals. **In January 1942, Murer modified the supply system. Instead of distributing German ration cards, he sent food supplies corresponding to the number of people holding the proper work permit and employed in workshops and businesses in town and in the ghetto. In all, it amounted to sustenance for about twelve thousand people. The food supply office had to distribute newly printed “Jewish” ration cards.** Together with those who left their hideouts and returned to the ghetto and those who managed to escape from Ponar, there were eighteen thousand people remaining in the ghetto. Six thousand of them did not have a ration card. We called them the “white permits,” referring back to the white work permits that were no longer valid. Those in possession of a yellow permit were scared to share a living space with the so-called white permits. We reckoned that the white permits would be the first victims of the next slaughter. If all the colours were mixed together, the khapunes might not care to distinguish among them. At the time, there were three cooperatives in the ghetto for two thousand workers, who depended on the Judenrat and were employed

behIND the Gates

83

by various institutions and workshops in the ghetto. These three cooperatives smuggled in a large amount of food. Those affiliated with the cooperatives set out to feed all those with “white permits.” They established a committee to support the poor. Three important institutions emerged from that committee: the Social Welfare Committee, the Public Committee for Relief and Assistance, and the Winter Aid Committee. The Social Welfare Committee provided financial and material assistance to all those who turned to it. **During the month of December 1941 it distributed 26,950 meals and almost four hundred thousand rubles.** With a ticket from Social Welfare, one could receive free treatment at the ghetto hospital, free medicine at the pharmacy, and also some supplementary foodstuffs, like milk or butter, for those who were most vulnerable. The Social Welfare Committee also took it upon itself to pay the rent and various taxes that applied in the ghetto. During the year 1942–1943, the administration distributed around half a million rubles in cash, meals, and medical supplies to the ghetto population. It maintained the following institutions: a day clinic, medical care for children, the boarding houses Yeladim for boys and Yeladot for girls, and a home for the aged. Diverse sources fed the coffers of the Committee for Relief and Assistance: currency confiscated by the Judenrat, the imposition of taxes that all inhabitants of the ghetto had to pay to the ghetto administration, and so on. The Social Welfare Committee also assisted those interned in concentration camps at Reshe, Bezdan, Byalovake, and in those remaining in the ghettos of Sventsyan and Oshmene. The Committee for Relief and Assistance, whose leadership consisted of representatives from all groups in the ghetto, played a very different role. People did not have to beg for help from the Committee for Relief and Assistance; it provided help willingly. When it became aware that a teacher, writer, actor, or widow of a murdered social activist was facing difficulties, the committee sent money, bread, clothing, or ration cards that gave the recipient the right to meals in newly created soup kitchens. During 1942–1943, the Committee for Relief and Assistance collected two million rubles in the ghetto. The money was acquired in an organized fashion: every month **the three hundred** Jewish collectives that worked in the city (consisting of some eight thousand people) had to contribute to the Committee. The amount of the contribution depended

84

vILNa Ghetto

on the collective’s abilities. That is, the more it managed to pilfer from the Germans, the more it could contribute. And pilfering was universal. **Those who worked at the Verpflegungsamt [Office of Food Supply] pilfered foodstuffs; those in the Tailoring Office – clothing. And those in the field headquarters were able to “take” boots and fur-lined jackets.** Aside from these collectives, the underground shops, restaurants, and cafés that popped up in the early days of the ghetto also paid their fair share. **Dovidke, the restaurateur of Strashun Street 1, contributed twenty thousand rubles to the Social Welfare Committee. Vayskop, a wealthy parvenu, gave double that.51** Money also came from Warsaw. Giterman,52 the director of the Joint [the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee], sent it personally. The Winter Aid Committee concerned itself mainly with providing adequate clothing for the ghetto population. Roundups continued unabated in the ghetto. The fifteen thousand people who were sent to their deaths left behind their clothes in the ghetto. The clothes were collected and redistributed to those who remained. Against our wishes, clothing covered in the blood of those who had been executed was reintroduced to the ghetto. Those who were still alive wore it – they had no other choice. But even this could not remedy the vulnerability of the population. The Winter Aid Committee worked tirelessly to collect more clothing. Whoever had two outfits, two suits, or two pairs of shoes was required to turn one over to the Committee. There was a popular saying in the ghetto: “Bread for the hungry, clothes for the naked.” Thousands of pairs of shoes, coats, and suits were salvaged in ghetto workshops. Over the course of a single month, the Committee scratched together a million rubles to purchase old clothing or to make new ones with fabrics taken by agile hands from German warehouses. Half the ghetto population benefitted, in one manner or another, from social assistance. The other half concerned itself with looting supplies from the Germans. Even a new slang (a secret language) emerged. The watchword “Apple” warned that a German was coming and that you should be on your watch. “Nem a ropte un plyukhe on” meant “Grab a sack and pour away,” that is, stuff it with grain or sugar because there are no Germans around, no one will notice. A “compress” was a specially sewn double-layered corset that was worn underneath one’s clothing, right

behIND the Gates

85

up against the skin. It encircled you and was filled with flour that had been purchased or stolen in the city to smuggle through the gates of the ghetto. The guards in charge of searching us at the gates of the ghetto quickly caught on to the trick of the compresses. Ten streets before the ghetto gates, residents of the city would alert columns of Jews who were returning from work whether Murer was conducting searches. In such cases, Jews spread the word in code: Der mem iz in mokem 53 (meaning that Murer was on guard). The entire column of workers would steal into a side street waiting for the demon to leave the ghetto. But it was difficult to fool Murer. He quickly caught on to why the labour brigades were late. So he waited until six in the evening, after which time Jewish workers were no longer permitted in the city. He rode around town in his car in search of “transgressors.” It was double the punishment: one for being out past curfew and another for wearing a “compress.” The Germans set a bread ration for Jewish workers of 3.25 kilograms per month. The food supply division of the ghetto administration managed to clandestinely supply 6 kilograms per inhabitant during the month of June 1942. In addition to bread, people received 550 grams of meat and 350 grams of sugar. In the same month, public kitchens served 93,449 lunches and 21,831 dinners, either for free or for a very low price. As to private bakeries and food suppliers, they furnished the equivalent of 110 tons of bread and 16 tons of vegetables. The milk kitchen provided 4,355 litres of milk for free. • Those who worked in the city and in the ghetto workshops did not actually receive a salary. Murer used to argue: “You’re alive because of your work; the better you work, the longer you will live.” The German Labour Department and the Gestapo claimed the same thing. A great many of those holding yellow permits – those who had not been directly affected by the initial killing – believed that work would continue to protect them. Those who did not believe this worked all the same, because anyone who did not work was denied both a permit and a bread ration. And without these, it was impossible to survive even a day in such conditions.

86

vILNa Ghetto

The system of slave labour was as refined as the system for mass murder. At the end of 1942, an article lauding the magnanimity of Gebietskommissar Hingst appeared in the local press. “The wages for the Jewish population have been raised.” Believe it or not, Jewish workers were told that because their salaries would be increased starting on 1 December, they were now expected to work two hours more per day. The workers were divided into five categories: non-skilled workers received 30 pfennigs per hour of labour; semi-skilled workers received 34 pfennigs; skilled workers were paid 38 pfennigs; the next category, 44 pfennigs; the fifth and final category consisted of the heads of the labour brigades, who received 50 pfennigs. In reality, no group received more than 15 pfennigs per hour. The rest was siphoned off by Gebietskommissar Hingst. The gradations between categories were only a ruse to enrich him. And to benefit the factory owner, the workday was extended by two hours. On average, the district commissioner earned 25 pfennigs per hour from every Jewish worker. Since close to eight thousand workers were employed in various enterprises, Hingst earned around half a million marks per month from the ghetto. The Jewish worker never received the remaining 15 pfennigs either. After the levying of various taxes, more often than not it was his fate to have to pay even more. Productivity in the ghetto faced similar realities. Dozens of workshops were established in the ghetto: tinsmithing, locksmithing, carpentry, polishing, electric workshops, wood carving, foundry, tailoring, leather, shoe repair, weaving, cleaning, a cardboard factory, and so on. And Hingst took a healthy cut of all of this slave labour. As the number of orders from the ghetto rose, so too did the impression that the ghetto was necessary due to its productivity, and that we would continue to live thanks to our work. In January 1943 there were thirty-four underground bakeries, six large ones and twenty-eight smaller ones. The price of bread depended on the amount of flour that had been smuggled into the ghetto. If one shipment of flour failed to arrive, the price of bread went up. There was a time in the ghetto when a kilogram of bread cost three hundred rubles. The bakeries also accepted flour from individuals which they made into bread. For 1 kilogram of flour, one received 1 kilogram of bread. The rest went to the public kitchens. A small mill was established in the ghetto. Half of its parts were stolen from town, and the others were made in the ghetto’s machine shops.

behIND the Gates

87

The mill operated day and night. In twenty-four hours it could produce enough bread for three days. The mill’s builder, an engineer by the name of Polak, also built a machine capable of grinding other grains. A factory to recycle potato peelings and frozen potatoes was also established. Potato peelings were rendered into starch, and the syrup that was extracted from frozen potatoes was made by another factory into candy. In the same way that flour was secretly smuggled into the ghetto, so was wood. When Murer was not present, dozens of carts loaded with wood drove through the ghetto gate as if they had been waiting for the right moment. Wood was also brought into the ghetto legally, from forests where there were Jewish work camps. But instead of allowing in the ten carts authorized by Murer, ten additional ones, and then ten more, entered until all the carts had crossed over. Of course, underneath the wood there was always something else hidden, be it a sack of rye, potatoes, or sometimes even a sheep. • The eighteen chimney sweeps in the ghetto played a critical role. It was an occupation that Jews had pursued even before the war. After the establishment of the ghetto, the city was lacking chimney sweeps, and Murer had to call on the Jews. These eighteen chimney sweeps received yellow permits, in addition to special privileges. They had the right to enter and leave the ghetto whenever they wanted, and to go all over the city to work on non-Jewish buildings. Nobody else had this right. Thanks to this privilege, the chimney sweeps served as intermediaries between the sealed-off ghetto and the city’s population. They roamed the streets, black pail and broom in hand. They delivered letters from Jews in the ghetto to their non-Jewish friends and brought back with them items and money that the ghetto’s inhabitants had left with their former neighbours. When they returned to the ghetto, the chimney sweeps carried these items in their buckets of soot, hidden underneath their black brooms. When it became apparent that chimney sweeps were especially useful to the ghetto, a decision was made to expand their numbers. The Judenrat opened a training course, and in the space of two weeks there were twenty new specialists. They included former lawyers, doctors, and businessmen, all of whom adapted to the atmosphere of soot. It

88

vILNa Ghetto

became the most important occupation. I remember the professional pride of the well-known Vilna lawyer Kaplan when he set out with his black bucket. He gave off the impression of having been born a chimney sweep. There were now forty of them, and the “Black Ones” established their own code: each chimney sweep had to smuggle rye flour into the ghetto three times a day in his soot bucket. By dint of going back and forth through the ghetto gates so often, the chimney sweeps and their privileges soon raised suspicion. They got along well with the many non-Jewish watchmen who lived near the ghetto and set out to smuggle merchandise through empty attics. The main maline passed through the church near Lidske Street. There were also painful sacrifices. One night, a Gestapo agent noticed a chimney sweep by the name of Herts on a roof with a bag of potatoes. The agent pursued him, gun drawn, beat him violently, and brought him to the Gestapo. His wife and three-year-old daughter were also brought in. The whole family was shot at Ponar.

Cultural Life in the Vilna Ghetto Cultural life in the Vilna ghetto began the moment the ghetto was established. **The creative impulse was never extinguished in the ghetto.** *If it was once assumed that there was no purpose to creative life for one condemned to death or abandoned on an island, our lived experience taught us the exact opposite. Whether a creative person resides in a modern hotel or in a desert amid sand and jackals, whether he admires the sunset by the seashore or stands by the edge of a grave he has been forced to dig himself, the spirit of creativity does not abandon him.*

Schools Mire Bernshteyn,54 the former director of the Vilna Real-Gymnasium, marched into the ghetto with her students. Her group was assigned to the second ghetto. That same night, Mire gathered her children and read them a tale by Sholem Aleichem. She re-established her school in the ruins of the Gravediggers’ kloyz, a prayer house situated in the Shulhoyf. At first, the school had an

behIND the Gates

89

enrolment of 130 students. She divided them into groups, according to age. When one group was in class, another prepared food or darned clothes. The teachers Malke Khayimson and [ Yankev] Gershteyn quickly joined in her work. Malke Khayimson taught literature, and Gershteyn, who was sick, taught singing. The students loved their teachers. In them they found parents whom they had lost. The teachers salvaged books for their students from the ruins of the ransacked Strashun Library.55 Every morning Mire counted the children, and every morning their number diminished, because during the night the murderers got their hands on victims. Studies continued nevertheless. In October 1941, Mire invited me to a performance at the school. The Gravediggers’ prayer house was unrecognizable. The holy ark was covered with greenery. Flowers had been placed on windowsills. Quotations from Yiddish writers hung from the walls. The children – no more than forty remaining of the original hundred and thirty – sparkled in their festive clothing. Red flowers decorated their chests. In the middle of the performance there was a racket outside. The performance continued. But when a gunshot broke a window, Mire went out to see what was happening. Jew-snatchers were running through the alleys and courtyards in search of Jews. People were being grabbed and transported to a truck idling by the ghetto gates. Mire returned. She mounted the stage and announced: “Children, those who want to annihilate us are in the ghetto. Do not scream, do not run. Remain calm – nobody panic – and slide yourselves under the stage, youngest first, and then according to age.” Mire kept watch by the door all night. If the Jew-snatchers entered the kloyz she would sacrifice herself. They would think that there was nobody else there and satisfy themselves with a single victim. The Jew-snatchers never entered the kloyz. They had secured their quota of Jews and left the ghetto. When the second ghetto was liquidated, there were only seven students remaining of the original 130. Mire brought them with her to the first ghetto.56 • Of the 29,000 people in the first ghetto, teachers immediately sought to register schoolchildren, who numbered 2,712. Ruined buildings were

90

vILNa Ghetto

rehabilitated to house schools. Clothing and food were given to the children, in addition to books and paper. Those who worked in town brought back gifts for the children. A health unit was charged with their well-being. **The character of the ghetto schools drew inspiration from Vilna’s long-standing traditions.** The children helped in building these improvised schools. The walls were decorated with pictures of writers, wallpaper, and greenery. Maps were painted, and lectures were held. • Fifteen hundred children were in ghetto schools in the winter of 1942. Education was free. The teaching staff organized scholarships for needy and talented students. In July 1943, the Judenrat made schooling compulsory. Issue 45 of the underground paper Geto yedies [Ghetto News] published the following announcement: “Warning: the ordinance regarding compulsory education is now in effect. Violators will be turned over to the ghetto court.” One cannot compare a child in the ghetto to a child in peacetime. A child who has had to find a maline possesses life experience and has a greater sense of personal and collective responsibility. A child in the ghetto who still had parents or relatives was responsible for preparing meals at home for those who went off to forced labour, and had to worry about whether Murer, who conducted snap searches of apartments, would discover their food. If a child was an orphan, he had even greater responsibility. He had to be a tailor, cobbler, carpenter, or baker. And yet, the majority of children in the ghetto went to school. An education department was established within the Judenrat. It was directed by Olitski,57 a veteran pedagogue in Vilna, and Rokhl Broydo.58 Prior to the liquidation of the ghetto, the school division oversaw the following institutions: two kindergartens; three primary schools for children ages 7–13 led by the teachers Borekh Lubotski,59 Leykin, and Bushel; and one underground primary school established by the school division in the Kailis concentration camp [in Vilna] directed by Yankl Kaplan.60 There was also a high school in the ghetto, directed  by Leyb Turbovitsh, a music school established by the musicians Avrom Sliep61 and Tamare Gershovitsh, and a vocational school, directed by Shrayber,62 an engineer by training.

behIND the Gates

91

The Gymnasium was established in the spring of 1942. *Its director, Leyb Turbovitsh, a superb pedagogue, battled Hebraists who attempted to Hebraize the school. The fight lasted a few months. Even during the worst of the killings he did not relent. The dispute went so far that the Partisan Organization in the ghetto had to intervene. In the end, each side compromised for the sake of peace.* Turbovitsh was committed to the curriculum of the former Real-Gymnasium, which had been the city’s Yiddish-language high school. It was very demanding, and asked a lot of the students. He even held five students back for an additional year of study. He was very happy when a child received high grades. One day I ran into him and he was beaming. He showed me a paper on Maimonides, written by Ratner, a sixteen-yearold student. *The paper interested us all, and the ghetto press agreed to publish it.* **The Gymnasium educated a hundred and fifty students in the following subjects: Yiddish, Hebrew, mathematics, physics, Jewish history, natural sciences, geography, chemistry, Latin, English, art, and physical education. The students worked hard; they regularly submitted written reports and made presentations. During the chemistry course, they visited secret ghetto factories and laboratories in which saccharine, soap, syrup, starch, beer, and other products were produced. The courses in natural science depended on materials that the students themselves brought in. They ran through the alleys chasing butterflies. They were saddened and felt themselves powerless when a butterfly escaped beyond the gates of the ghetto …63 Parents who worked in town brought flowers, leaves, and plants for their children.** The music school offered lessons in piano, violin, and singing. There were a hundred students enrolled in the school, which held public concerts. Twelve-year-old pianist and composer Alik Volkoviski64 *(who saved himself from a death camp in Germany)* excited audiences with one of his compositions that he performed himself. The eight-year-old pianist Toybnhoyz and the eleven-year-old violinist Nadye Benyakovksi also distinguished themselves. Over a six-month period the technical school managed to train dozens of electricians and locksmiths. Graduation celebrations were organized at the end of the year to recognize those who had completed their studies. They received a diploma

92

vILNa Ghetto

from the ghetto school, accompanied by a wish for freedom soon. The principal attached a rose to the certificate. In addition to end-of-year celebrations, other special days were organized for parents. There was a youth club associated with the schools. At night, students would gather to do their homework together in a clean, brightly lit room. The youth club also included a reading room, a social hall where one could distract oneself, and workshops, where those studying during the day could master a trade during the evening hours. The youth club consisted of different sections, led by teachers, writers, and intellectuals. There, one could occupy oneself with literature, history, languages, mathematics, and physics. It was also a place where folklore and materials about the history of the ghetto were collected. Its drama division staged performances.65 • The education department included seventy teachers who organized themselves into a union. At night, they gathered to exchange news from the front. Every Friday the teachers organized symposia. Talks about the psychology of the ghetto child were particularly pertinent. The teacher’s union also organized seminars for professors. Borekh Lubotski taught modern psychology. The historian Dr Lize Gordon66 spoke about the evolution of capitalism. The teachers strove to create the illusion of a normal life for the children. They believed that deliverance was just around the corner, and they planted that faith in the hearts of children. They expended all their energy to ensure that the children would not leave the ghetto damaged, but rather as proud, conscientious, healthy, and productive individuals. In addition to these schools, which were part of the ghetto’s education department, there were other institutions of learning: an art school, a school of rhythmic music and plastic arts (directed by Nine Gershteyn67), a drama school, two boarding schools, day care, professional courses, a traditional primary school [heder], and two yeshivas.68 •

behIND the Gates

93

One of Murer’s edicts forbade the presence of rabbis in the ghetto. Prayer and religious ceremonies were prohibited. Like the Marranos during the period of the Spanish Inquisition, religious Jews did not abandon their convictions. They established a yeshiva in Shaulke’s kloyz,69 which they named in honour of Khayim-Oyzer Grodzenski. Thirty young men studied there under the leadership of Yitskhok Karniks. Later, a yeshiva for teenagers was established, directed by Arn Berek. *Both were murdered during the liquidation of the ghetto.* Torah study was conducted at night. Days were occupied with forced labour. Very few inhabitants of the ghetto were aware of the existence of the two yeshivas. Not until the mass roundups did the melody of a chapter of Psalms spill out into the ghetto lanes, when the yeshiva students raised their voices so that the God who existed beyond the ghetto could hear them and take pity on them.

Theatre 70 **The day after my mother was murdered, the young director Viskind71 came to pay me his condolences.** He invited me to a meeting of Yiddish actors. They wanted to establish a theatre. I looked at him, astonished: “A theatre in the ghetto?” “Yes,” Viskind confirmed. “We must be true to ourselves and resist the enemy even with this weapon. We must not surrender under any circumstance. *Theatre was also performed in the ghettos during the Middle Ages. The origins of Yiddish theatre are there.* Let us, too, create a theatre to delight and embolden the ghetto. **It might even be the vanguard of a new Yiddish theatre in a free world.”**72 *I left. Viskind’s faith soothed my sadness.* At Strashun Street 7, in the frigid little attic belonging to the actor Blyakher, I met with the remaining actors in the ghetto. All of them were in favour of establishing a theatre. I agreed with them and accepted the position of literary director of the planned theatre. We got to work on the first performance. It was a challenge to choose appropriate material. With what words could we appear before audiences and avoid dishonouring their anguish? How could we temporarily cloud the vision of mass graves before their eyes? And how could we awaken ghetto residents to the heroism of Jewish history, to appreciate beauty, and to continue to believe in the future?

94

vILNa Ghetto

The program of the first performance consisted of the following: “I want to cry,” by Bialik73 (chorale); folk songs interpreted by Eydelson and Lyube Levitski;74 excerpts of Mirele Efros by Yankev Gordon75 (the role of Mirele was played by Ester Lipovski); a scene from Stefan Zweig’s76 Mother Rachel; and an excerpt from The Golden Chain77 by Y.L. Peretz. During the day the actors were under the whip of the stormtroopers as slave labourers, and at night they would rehearse. In addition to scenes from such Yiddish plays as Mazl-tov,78 Shloyme Molkho,79 The Golden Chain, The Golem,80 and others, the theatre also performed complete works: Peretz Hirshbeyn’s pastoral drama Green Fields,81 Otto Indig’s comedy The Man under the Bridge (the Yiddish translation from Hungarian was completed in the ghetto), Berger’s The Flood,82 and Dovid Pinski’s The Treasure.83 We were preparing to  stage Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman, but we were not able to perform it. While the play was in rehearsals, several actors were murdered. *Other actors quickly replaced them, and rehearsals continued. But even the new ones did not survive long enough to make it to the première.* The most appreciated actors were Yankev Beregolski, Max Shadovski,84 Ester Lipovski,85 Shapse Blyakher, Roytblum from Kovno, Yekusiel Rutenberg,86 *Dore Rubin,* and the “star of the ghetto,” Khayele Rozental (the last two of whom survived).87 **There were also many other performances, shows, and celebrations organized by the youth club, schoolchildren, the Yeladim boarding house for homeless children, kindergartens, and so on.**

Music During the period of the roundups, before Jews were driven from their homes to the ghetto, Vilna’s musicians buried their instruments in the ground to hide them. Later, it was possible to slip into the sewer system situated beneath the walled-in streets of the ghetto to dig them up and bring them into the ghetto. This is how a symphony orchestra was established in the ghetto, directed by Volf Durmashkin.88 The musicians worked as slave labourers in town. That is how they managed to smuggle a piano into the ghetto. They found a piano in an abandoned Jewish apartment. Each musician was responsible for smuggling one piece. Once back in the ghetto, they located a specialist who managed to rebuild the instrument.

behIND the Gates

95

*The first performance of the symphony orchestra and its seventeen musicians on 15 March 1942 was greeted as a festival in the ghetto. It performed the Caucasian Sketches by Ippolitov-Ivanov, a Jewish potpourri by Max Geyger, and part of Franz Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. The symphony inspired the ghetto population like mountain air for those with lung disease. It was worth fighting for beauty in the world.* By the last days of the ghetto, forty musicians played in the orchestra. *It held seven premières (and about thirty-five concerts in total).* Among other works, audiences were treated to performances of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, the overture to Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, Dvořák’s Fifth Symphony, the Concerto in A Minor by Chopin, the overture to Beethoven’s Leonore No. 3, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, *which marked the high point of the symphony orchestra’s achievement.* Aside from the symphony orchestra, there were also *special outdoor concerts* and **performances by different musicians (piano, violin, and vocal).** From time to time there were also chamber music performances (trios and duets). **Two professors of music, Mme Gershovitsh and Mme Feygus, performed a concerto by Mozart on two pianos. Violinist Y. Rabinovitsh’s concert of Paganini was the most powerful musical moment in the ghetto.**

The Union of Writers and Artists in the Vilna Ghetto The founding meeting of the Vilna ghetto’s Union of Writers and Artists took place on 17 February 1942. Around one hundred people attended, including writers, musicians, actors, and artists. *Z. Kalmanovitsh, who was the chair of the gathering, clarified the goals of the union, which included the following provisions: 1. provide space for creative elements in the ghetto to escape its oppressive atmosphere; stimulate them in their creative work and raise their morale through a perspective on a future that is intimately linked to the Jewish past; and 2. obtain permits and material support for members by finding them suitable work; provide members with appropriate social support in the form of money and foodstuffs.* Anyone previously affiliated with a union of writers, journalists, actors, musicians, or artists could become a member, in addition to those who were creatively active in the area of literature and the arts. Family members of writers or artists who were not present in the ghetto were supported in the same way as actual members.

96

vILNa Ghetto

Those elected to administer the work of the Union included Zelig Kalmanovitsh, Yankev Gershteyn, H. Gutgeshtalt,89 Herman Kruk,90 Shapse Blyakher, Yankev Sher,91 M. Shadovski, Yoysef Glazman,92 and A. Sutzkever. At first, the Union helped its members acquire the yellow or pink permits that, at the time, could be the difference between life and death. It also collected works left behind by members who had been killed. It made a list of all the writers, artists, and researchers who were murdered by the Germans, and prepared a literary almanac of works written in the ghetto. The following are just a few of the literary and artistic soirées held in the ghetto:93 an evening on Baruch Spinoza, with a talk by Dr Tsemakh Feldstein; Jewish music, accompanied by musical excerpts and a talk by Yankev Gershteyn; a lecture by Leo Bernshteyn on Franz Werfel’s “Fourteen Days of Musa Dagh”; an evening dedicated to Marc Chagall, introduced by Yankev Sher; “The Martyr in Yiddish Literature,” with a talk by Borekh Lubotski; and communal evenings dedicated to the cultural history of Vilna and Warsaw.94 *Thanks to underground radios in the ghetto, we learned that the famous German writer Stefan Zweig had committed suicide in the United States. We organized a solemn memorial evening in his honour. Musicians played Chopin’s Death March, and actors performed a fragment from Stefan Zweig’s Jeremiah. The Union often organized meetings with ghetto writers. A writer would read his work, and people would discuss it late into the night. The Union also organized performances in the ghetto theatre dedicated to the writers Mendele, Sholem Aleichem, Peretz, Bialik, and Yehoash. In order to stimulate membership in their creative work, the leadership of the Union of Writers and Artists established a “press.” The “Ghetto-Press” purchased the works of writers, painters, and musicians with the goal of publishing them after the war. The works were evaluated by a special committee, and writers received an honorarium for their work according to its evaluation. Works in progress also were considered by its administrators. The personal qualifications of the writers were evaluated, and works were purchased even before their completion so that the writers could be provided the material support necessary for them to progress in their creativity.*

behIND the Gates

97

The Union of Writers and Artists in the ghetto also established a ghetto university under the rubric of a “research group.” It had five sections: mathematics and physics, chemistry, natural sciences, linguistics, philosophy, and social sciences. Each section had a chair, and the entire academy was overseen by Zelig Kalmanovitsh. Each section was independent. A chemical technology lab was created by the chemistry division. The philosophy department established courses in ethnography, ethnology, and folklore studies for the general public. *Every Saturday, general seminars were held by members of all the divisions and their invited guests. The scientific circles included such lectures as Dr Daniel Faynshteyn’s “The Myth of the Garden of Eden in Psychoanalysis,” Dr Zalkindson’s “An Introduction to the Theory of Counting,” Dr Liber’s “English Philology,” and Leyb Turbovitsh’s “About Folkovitsh’s book Yiddish.” * • The Union also organized competitions in three artistic areas: literature, music, and art. These competitions were held on three occasions. Dozens of poems, dramatic scripts, musical compositions, and tableaux were submitted to a jury, all created within the walls of the ghetto. I had the honour of receiving the first literary prize in the Vilna ghetto for my dramatic poem Dos keyver-kind [The Grave Child].95 *Yankev Gershteyn, the beloved cultural activist, musician, and teacher, died in the ghetto in September 1942. The entire ghetto participated in the funeral, organized by the Union.96*

Art Exhibits In March 1943 an art exhibit was held in the foyer of the ghetto theatre. The exhibited works included several colourful landscapes by Rokhl Sutzkever,97 Yankev Sher’s graphic art “From the Old Ghetto,” miniature wood carvings by Daykhes,98 Notes, and Vultz, sketches by the architect Mme Rom, and works by nine-year-old Zalmen [Samuel] Bak. •

98

vILNa Ghetto

In honour of Yehoash,99 the Yiddish poet and translator of the Hebrew Bible, the literary circle organized a colourful exhibit at the youth club. *Over the course of half a year, I smuggled into the ghetto from local libraries and museums all the works, pictures, letters, and manuscripts by this writer, in addition to original letters to Yehoash by writers of his generation: Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, Bialik, and others. In the exhibit’s section on “Bible Translations in Yiddish,” there were rare editions of Bibles in Yiddish, including translations by Buxtorf (16th century), Blitz and Witzenhausen (17th century), Mendl Lefin, and others.100 A special corner was dedicated to “Yehoash the Poet.” It included clippings from newspapers and fragments from Yehoash’s poetry. A large bust of the poet, moulded by the ten-year-old ghetto sculptor Volmark, greeted visitors to the exhibit.* This exhibit, and all other cultural institutions in the ghetto, were completely illegal. During the day, the entryway was hidden behind boards so that if the Germans conducted a search they would not discover it. The show was open only at night.

The Culture House at Strashun 6 One of the major cultural centres in the Vilna ghetto was the Culture House at Strashun Street 6. Several institutions were located there: a library, a lecture hall, an archive, the Offices of Statistics and Addresses, and a museum. Well before the war, the Mefitsey-Haskole Library was located at Strashun Street 6. When Jews were put into the ghetto, they saw hundreds of books from the library strewn on the pavement. Herman Kruk, a librarian originally from Warsaw, devoted himself to rebuilding the library. By 10 September 1941, books were once again available for borrowing. Those who rarely picked up a book in normal times now flocked to the library. Books became their companions, a consolation in a time of distress. In the ghetto’s hiding places and secret cellars, books were read by the light of a thin wick or a tiny ray of sun penetrating through a window. *On 1 October, around three thousand people were dragged to their death from the Vilna ghetto. And on 2 October, 390 books were borrowed. The slaughters in the second ghetto continued on 3–4 October.

behIND the Gates

99

On 5 October, 421 books were borrowed from the library. By November the population had decreased by forty percent, while the number of books borrowed increased by almost a third.* By the end of November 1942, the number of books borrowed during the time of the ghetto exceeded the figure of one hundred thousand. In recognition of this milestone the library organized a festive morning, during which book prizes were distributed to the first and latest readers. *A concealed space was built to house a reading room. It was always full. The reading room was administered by Khaykl Lunski,101 who was later tortured in infamous cell no. 16 in September 1943.* There was also a secret bookstore in the library. The books were taken from the ruins of Jewish libraries and museums in town. • The ghetto archive and museum accumulated a large trove of documents from the ghetto and the city. Documents were sealed in metal boxes and buried in anticipation of better days. The Office of Statistics collected information regarding all ghetto institutions, and then transformed the data into statistical reports. The office prepared reports related to health, social services, work, cultural life, food supply, and other aspects of ghetto life. *The schools, theatre, Union of Writers and Artists, library, sports club, and all the other institutions I mentioned fell under the Cultural Section of the ghetto. It provided funding, materials, and other forms of assistance.* Of the three hundred people associated with cultural life in the Vilna ghetto (teachers, writers, actors, intellectuals, painters, and musicians), only a small number survived. And of the several thousand children in the ghetto schools, only a few dozen survived.

The Hospital and the Department of Health and Sanitation Vilna’s Jewish hospital had been around for a hundred and forty years. It had formerly been known as the hekdesh, or hospice. When the Germans established the ghetto, they expelled all nonJewish patients and doctors. They confiscated medical instruments,

100

vILNa Ghetto

medicines, and medical care products, and they shipped mentally ill Jews and those with contagious diseases who had been in other city hospitals to the ghetto hospital. **An announcement appeared on the gates of the ghetto: “Achtung. Seuchengefahr! Eintritt für Nichtjuden verboten!” [Attention. Danger of Infection! Entry to Non-Jews Forbidden!]** Hering (who was then one of the heads of the Gestapo) informed the Judenrat that if he found any cases of leprosy or typhus it would mean the end of the ghetto. During the first days of the ghetto, Schweinberger carefully inspected every patient in the hospital. In many cases, he declared them “incurable” and ordered that they be transferred to “another town.” Schweinberger chose Komber, who was mentally impaired, and named him head of the Judenrat. He gave him a special office on the premises of the Judenrat and gave him personnel to oversee. A few days later Schweinberger visited the ward for mentally ill patients and delivered the following message: “It is difficult for you here in the ghetto. Come along with me to a second city where you will not lack for anything.” He took out some bread rolls and tossed them at the patients. They rushed forward in joy and laughter thanks to Schweinberger’s gift. A good number danced their way into the truck. Others fought with their capturers and refused to go along. When three trucks were stuffed with mentally ill patients, Schweinberger asked Komber whether he wanted to join the others in the second city. If he agreed, he would be appointed administrator of all evacuees there. Komber accepted. He sat next to Schweinberger, and with fanfare his master drove him off to the “second city.” • When especially challenging operations or important consultations were required, the non-Jewish Professors Michejda and Januszkiewicz were invited to the hospital. They would slip into the ghetto at night through a side entrance. Local pharmacies also supported the ghetto hospital. Since Jews had no legal right to any medical help outside the borders of the ghetto, Jewish doctors wrote prescriptions under false names. Pharmacists in town were aware of this, but they did not hesitate to fill them. Apart from this source of medicine, the city hospitals where Jews were employed as slave labourers were another source of medical

behIND the Gates

101

supplies, maybe even the most important one. Workers smuggled back to the ghetto just what the doctors ordered from the military hospital in Antokol or the Spanish field hospital. Later, medicines were produced in the ghetto itself. As I mentioned, the hospital was warned that were there to be an outbreak of contagious disease the entire ghetto would be in danger. In truth, it never came to pass. But those few who did carry such illnesses (mainly individuals arriving in the ghetto from the camps) were cared for quietly under a different diagnosis. Among its many offices for social support, the Judenrat included a health division with several sections, whose general mission included the cleanliness of the ghetto and the health of its population. There was an epidemiology section, health and sanitation inspectors, a section devoted to curative care, a section for the protection of children, another in charge of the cemetery, and so on. There were a hundred and fifty members in the Physician’s Union. They established a medical organization, and also published a newspaper in the ghetto. It included lectures that different doctors delivered week in, week out. The journal was called Folks-gezunt [Public Health]. For example, here is the table of contents for Folks-gezunt #6, published 7 November 1942: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Dr Feygus – On Nutrition Dr Breytbart – Do Not Panic if Your Child Is Jaundiced Dr Peysakhovitsh – When a Finger Gets Infected Dr Burak– Should You Be Alarmed by a High Fever? Dr Antokolets – Medical Superstitions Medicine in the Ghetto: A Record Letters from Readers

In the Kingdom of Alfred Rosenberg The Rosenberg Task Force in Vilna [in German: Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, or err] was designed to complement the work of the Gestapo by locating and liquidating Jewish cultural treasures. Within a short period of time, it sought to erase completely five hundred years of Jewish life in Vilna. •

102

vILNa Ghetto

Noyekh Prilutski was arrested on 1 August [1941]. He was at home and working on Yiddish Phonetics, just as he had been since the first day of the war. He was put into a car and taken to the Gestapo cellars on Mickiewicz Street. Dr Gotthard,102 a German professor of Judaic studies, was waiting for him. He had been sent from Berlin to select the most valuable and rare cultural items in Vilna. He was friendly with Prilutski. They spoke about literature. Dr Gotthard ordered him to put together a list of incunabula (that is to say, the earliest printed documents through the 16th century) housed in the famous Strashun Library. (Strashun, the director of the library and the grandson of its founder, could not bear to see the Germans take possession of the library. He hanged himself by the straps of his phylacteries.) Prilutski was imprisoned in the Gestapo cellars along with the older writer Eliohu Yankev Goldschmidt.103 Every morning, they were brought to the library, where they drew up lists for Dr Gotthard. And whenever he returned to Berlin, the two intellectuals were held at the Gestapo headquarters. The librarian Khaykl Lunski, who was with them in a Gestapo dungeon, later told me that they devoted the last nights before they were deported to discussing Maimonides. A month later, Prilutski was spotted at the prison. He was lying half-naked on the floor, and the shirt that served to bandage his head was covered in blood. Lying at his side was Goldschmidt, who was no longer breathing. • Dr Pohl,104 the director of the Frankfurt Museum for the Study of Oriental Peoples **and a contributor to Der Stürmer,105** arrived in Vilna in January 1942.106 He did not come alone. He was accompanied by an entire staff of so-called scholars, which included Ober-Einsatzführer Dr [Hans] Müller and Dr [Gerhard] Wulff, both from Berlin. Later, Sporket and a certain [Alexander] Himpel joined them. These characters came to the ghetto and demanded that twenty people be made available to collect the Jewish cultural treasures scattered throughout the city. The twenty individuals would have to sort, pack, and ship these treasures to Germany. “It’s war,” said Dr Müller, “and these rare items might get destroyed. We can’t let something like that happen. That’s why we are shipping them all to Germany. Just until the end of the war …”

behIND the Gates

103

Dr Müller insisted that among these twenty workers there needed to be five who knew Yiddish and Hebrew well, and were capable of deciphering manuscripts and older religious books. I was included among the five. I had a singular goal: rescue everything possible. I clearly understood the meaning of “German protectors of culture,” having seen how well they treated people. In the ghetto, I had heard that the libraries were supplying the raw fuel for heating. I was taken to the headquarters of the Rosenberg Task Force at Zigmunt Street 18. The first thing that our boss, Dr Müller, ordered us to do was to burn the medical library of the university hospital that was located in the same building. Dr Pohl ordered us to create a “ghetto” of Jewish books. He ordered that forty thousand religious texts from the world-renowned Strashun Library be transported to University Street 3. Books from three hundred other smaller prayer houses in Vilna also were gathered there. In 1933 Dr Pohl had been sent to Jerusalem by the Nazi Party. He took courses in Oriental studies at the Hebrew University until 1936. He developed “expertise” in Jewish literature, and he was appointed adviser to Alfred Rosenberg, who was responsible for the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws. At the same time he was director of the Museum for the Study of Oriental Peoples in Frankfurt, and he was one of the main contributors to the murderous rag Der Stürmer. He wanted to deal with the priceless treasures of Vilna’s Jewish museums in the same way that his colleague Schweinberger, that mass murderer, dealt with the Jews themselves – by sorting them “left-right,” and in the end annihilating them all. Dr Pohl ordered that all the collected books and manuscripts be organized according to century. He personally supervised each pile and put aside books for his museum in Frankfurt. Of the more than one hundred thousand books collected, about twenty thousand were shipped to Germany in eighty-four cases.107 He sold all the others, including many rare items, for 19 marks per ton to the paper factory in Nay-Vileyke. Manuscripts, paintings, and sculptures all met the same fate. •

104

vILNa Ghetto

From the moment of their arrival in Vilna, the Germans transformed YIvo, the Yiddish Scientific Institute, into a barrack. Its archives, exhibits, and collections were relegated to the cellar like garbage. Himmler’s adviser, Dr Gotthard, rushed to YIvo in search of … gold. When he discovered a safe in the cellar, he called a locksmith who forced it open with a blowtorch. Once the safe was open, Gotthard was very disappointed: manuscripts by Sholem Aleichem and Peretz stared back at him mockingly. He was so enraged that he tossed them from the safe and trampled on them. With the exception of the collection from the Strashun Library that had already been liquidated, all books, manuscripts, paintings, and sculptures from both Jewish museums and private collections in town were transported to YIvo. When Antokolski’s108 sculptures from the [Sh.] An-ski museum109 arrived, Dr Pohl destroyed a good many of them by tossing them to the ground. He sold the lead type for the Talmud published by the Romm press that had taken some twenty years to set to a foundry for 39 marks a ton.110 He shipped five cases of manuscripts and rare volumes to Berlin. But his collaborator Sporket, a former leather dealer, hastened to the train depot to replace the contents of the cases with pigs for his black-market dealings in Germany. Sporket quickly emerged as the point man for Rosenberg’s Task Force. He provided five hundred Torah scrolls to a leather factory to turn them into lining for boots. He ordered the leather bindings of old books published in Venice and Amsterdam to be torn off. He shipped marble gravestones from the Jewish cemetery at Zaretshe to Germany for use as road paving. The Rosenberg Task Force hunted down Jewish texts with the same determination as the Gestapo pursuing Jews in hiding. The rector of the university told me that after Rosenberg’s military staff had removed all Jewish books and books written by Jewish authors from the shelves, his lackeys tore up the parquet floor and spent several days searching to be certain that not even the smallest Jewish booklet had been hidden. In the same way the Gestapo liquidated the Jews together with hundreds, even thousands of others, the Rosenberg Task Force pillaged and destroyed not only Jewish museums and libraries, but also those belonging to other groups, such as the Polish museum Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk (the Society of Friends of Knowledge), the Pushkin Museum, the famous Polish publishing house of Josef Zawadski, the

behIND the Gates

105

Polish library of Tomasz Zan, the Evangelical Lutheran church library, and many others. Twice a month, the Rosenberg Task Force sent a report on its activities to the Rosenberg Headquarters for the Baltics, located in Riga. These reports detailed how many books had been shipped to Germany, how many had been turned into pulp, and so on. The reports also had to detail what kind of books they were and in what language. Precise statistics were kept on the destruction of these works. Over the year and a half that our group of comrades from the ghetto worked for the Rosenberg Task Force we managed to save a good portion of our cultural treasures from destruction by hiding them in walls or burying them in cellars and holes, with the hope that the day would soon come when free people would be able to discover them for the benefit of our people and for all humanity.111 We hid the most valuable manuscripts and books under our clothes to smuggle them into the ghetto. One day, I asked Sporket’s permission to bring some of this material with me into the ghetto for use as kindling. Sporket granted permission and gave me a note so that the police posted at the gates would not confiscate them. Among these “old scraps” were letters by Tolstoy (which I found in the snow near the Strashun Library), manuscripts by Sholem Aleichem, letters by Gorky, Bialik, and Romain Rolland, rare volumes from the 15th and 16th centuries, a painting by Repin,112 Theodor Herzl’s113 diary, the only existing manuscript by the Gaon of Vilna, sketches by Marc Chagall, and dozens of other documents, paintings, and objects of inestimable cultural value. Thanks to Sporket’s authorization we were able to repeat the stunt day after day. My fellow workers participated. It was understood that we would be able to salvage only a small part of what was in the building. So we built a secret cache under the building itself where we concealed about five thousand precious books in different languages. It was particularly challenging to save sculptures, but we managed none the less. First we carried them out of the building and hid them in the courtyard. That made it easier to move them into the ghetto later. In May 1943, the Smolensk museum was transferred to Vilna, including several dozen crates filled with manuscripts and paintings. My comrades and I quickly transported three of these crates from the train depot to the municipal archives on Ignatover Street, where we

106

vILNa Ghetto

hid them under a heap of archival materials. When I later opened the crates I discovered the diary of the valet to Peter the Great, ecclesiastical chronicles from the 15th and 16th centuries, paintings by Repin and Levitan, and many other museum pieces. I brought a portion of these objects to the ghetto, where I buried them. I did so because I could not be certain that they would remain intact in the municipal archives. I hoped that they would be protected in at least one of these two locations. • In one of Vilna’s museums, whose contents we were emptying and transferring to the Rosenberg Task Force, I found a document signed by Tadeusz Kosciuszko, the Polish-American freedom fighter. It was spring 1943, a time of terror for the local population. I gave the document to a Polish woman who had saved twenty Jews from a roundup. When this woman saw the signature she fell to her knees and kissed it. The next day, she visited me at my workplace and told me that when she showed Kosciuszko’s signature to members of an underground organization to which she belonged, it had the same effect as a spark on cannon powder. Her comrades implored her to tell me that not only they but also their children and their grandchildren would remember it and thank me for it.114 The following people assisted in the work of hiding Vilna’s cultural treasures: Zelig Kalmanovitsh, Herman Kruk, Shmerke Kaczerginski, Rokhl Krinski,115 Ume Olkenitski,116 Noime Markeles,117 Dr  Daniel Faynshteyn,118 and lecturers from the local university, Maria Abramowicz and the famous Lithuanian poet Kazys Boruta.119 In March 1942 I entrusted the most important manuscripts by Y.L. Peretz, the classic writer of Yiddish literature, to the Lithuanian journalist [Ona] Šimaitė. She frequently came to the German establishment where I worked, and she left with packages I had prepared for her. • Šimaitė is no longer among us. The Germans sent her to a concentration camp as punishment for helping Jews.120 I found one of her letters in the secret archives of the ghetto. She sent it to the teacher Nine Gershteyn, the day after a performance she attended in the ghetto. I cite a paragraph from that letter in memory of this special person: “Dear

behIND the Gates

107

Nine, Forgive me for addressing you so personally without having made your acquaintance. Your creative performance in the youth club [of the ghetto, A.S.] of Chaim Nahman Bialik’s poem ‘A freylekhs’ [A Lively Dance],121 Avrom Reyzen’s ‘Di vant’ [The Wall],122 and the stage adaptation of Yiddish folk-songs was enchanting and warmed my heart. Yes, one truly must be a people of genius to have performed with such talent in nightmarish times. Together with Jewish youth, I believe and hope that the wall will soon fall and that fraternity among peoples will reign over the entire world.”

The Nine-Year-Old Artist My friend Rokhl Sarabski,123 a teacher in the ghetto, came to find me one night in the frigid winter of January 1943, accompanied by one of her new students, nine-year-old Zalmen Bak. She came to show me his drawings. **I completely forgot that I was in the ghetto, and that an hour earlier news had arrived about mass killings in the last remaining Jewish villages in the countryside.** I looked over the drawings, and even more at this pale boy whose skin was like silk and who had large, clear-blue eyes. I observed the transparent little veins that ran across his delicate temples, his mysterious smile that reminded one of a Madonna, and I felt that this boy harboured something much stronger than those who had set out to exterminate our people. I contemplated the pictures drawn in pencil on random pieces of paper: profile sketches of people he had seen in passing. The lines belonged to those of a mature artist. These unfinished, incomplete lines provided a hint of his artistic talent. Just look at a painting of a ball. A work of art in itself. A picture of fluid, easy motion in which one feels its very essence. “What is Expressionism?” he asked me calmly, but with much curiosity. His question caught me off guard. His teacher was smiling. “Yesterday, I went to the reading room at Strashun Street 6,” he pressed on in a clear, subdued Yiddish, “and I came across the word ‘Expressionism’ in a book. I didn’t know what it meant. I asked my teacher, and she told me that we should ask you.” I tried to explain, but I could not find the right words to make it comprehensible to him. “You know what,” he interrupted. “Draw it for me.” “I can’t, my dear boy,” I responded.

108

vILNa Ghetto

“How is it possible not to be able to draw something you understand?” asked this nine-year-old with deep, sincere eyes, raising his shoulders. That evening, I was introduced to a new phenomenon that was unlike any other I had previously encountered in the ghetto: Zalmen Bak. He had not yet been in the ghetto a month. He had spent a year and a half with his mother hiding in the attic of a monastery. The caretaker brought them food to eat at night. This is how they hoped to survive the war. Zalmen grasped the situation with the maturity of an adult. More than once he had seen Jews being led to slaughter through the attic window. He had a pencil and several pieces of paper, and so he drew. He spent entire days drawing, including during the winter when the cold froze his delicate little fingers while he sketched in a corner. When planes bombed the city, their roof caught fire. They barely managed to escape. It was winter. They had no choice but to enter the ghetto. He was the joy of the ghetto artists. Rokhl Sutzkever, a well-known painter in Vilna, took him in. She collected his drawings as if they were precious jewels. During Passover 1943, there was an art exhibit in the lobby of the ghetto theatre. Half a wall was reserved for Zalmen. Apart from the sketches he had brought with him from the monastery attic, he exhibited newer works from the ghetto. I remember a painting that depicted Jews leaving for work and Germans patrolling the ghetto gates. Another depicted the ghetto at night, drawn in ink. The artist titled a third one “Me, on the way to the slaughterhouse,” in which police discover his hideout and drag him to his death. Zalmen’s paintings stood out prominently in the exhibition, which included works by ten other Vilna painters. Accordingly, he was awarded the ghetto art prize. • The liquidation of the ghetto was near. August 1943. A Friday. Screams permeated the streets, which were strewn with rags of every colour imaginable. Faces illuminated by the setting sun expressed an atmosphere of madness. An old woman elbowed her way into the middle of the crowd. She was carrying a pot of tsholent, running to the bakery to put it in the oven for the Sabbath, all the while howling: “They shot my three children!” An old man struck his chest and begged for death.

behIND the Gates

109

Children were running around without direction. Doctors were carrying a woman who had swallowed poison. I arrived at Shpitol Street 7, where Zalmen lived. **I left the agonyfilled streets behind.** Zalmen was focused on his work. His sleeves were rolled up to his shoulders. His little hands were moulding a clay silhouette, whose shape and form responded to the artist’s every movement. From a formless piece of clay, a proud head emerged over a pair of manly shoulders. **I thought it was a live person, a person covered in clay … Zalmen, who had not noticed me until that moment, came over. He greeted me with a smile, and the artist explained: “It will be Moses, exactly as he was …”** Zalmen’s mother added: “He’s been working on this statue for more than a week. I have no clue where he managed to acquire the clay. I also don’t understand where he learned to mould. **It’s the first time I’ve seen him work with clay.** He works from dawn to dusk. Yesterday, when there was a full moon, he stayed awake when everyone else went to bed just to continue work on an arm. He explained to me that the arm could not remain as it was. Only at dawn did he manage to doze off in a corner.” • I saw the artist for the last time a few hours before I escaped the ghetto, on 12 September 1943. It was during the days of armed resistance. I knew that I would be gone the next day, either having fallen trying to break the siege, weapon in hand, or at a partisan encampment in the forest. I decided to say goodbye to Zalmen. Shpitol Street was already three-quarters empty. Buildings had been torn open by dynamite, and the roads were almost impassable. I came across Dr Feldshteyn, the former director of a high school in Kovno.124 He had aged, his hair was grey, as if covered with ash. His eyelids fluttered nervously, and a white paste formed at the corners of his lips. He asked my advice: what should we do? I advised him to go immediately to his non-Jewish friends in town who had told him they would take him in at a time of need. We went together to Zalmen’s. It was dusk, but his little room was no longer the same. The roughcast had fallen due to the explosions. The

110

vILNa Ghetto

same walls that had once been decorated with Zalmen’s paintings were bare and cracked. Only the statue of Moses remained, in a corner near the window. Moses leaning on a rock, full of power and ire. Zalmen stood silently, the picture of innocence, caressing one of the sculpture’s cheeks: “Yesterday, during the shooting, a bullet penetrated right there.” *As I sped through forests and swamps towards the partisans, evading German guard posts, I could not rid my mind of Zalmen.* I could not rest in the forest. I tried various means to learn about Zalmen’s fate, but without any results. **The liaison officers, who came and went between the forest and Vilna, transmitted a single bit of news: “The ghetto has been liquidated.” At the train station, a sign was posted announcing: “Judenrein! [Cleansed of Jews!].” There were still two concentration camps located in the city in which several thousand Jews were interned. There was no trace of Zalmen in the Kailis camp. One of my contacts had been there. It was impossible to know whether he had made it to hkP, the second camp,125 because it was carefully guarded and impossible to gain entry. In December 1943, Tevke Sheres, a long-time member of the ghetto underground, escaped from hkP and made it to our partisan base. Thanks to him, I learned that Zalmen was there with his mother. He was hiding in an attic, just as he had done at the monastery, where he continued to draw. He had painted amazing sets for a secret children’s performance in the camp. The walls were also covered with his works. “How can I save this young artist?” This question nagged at me. I approached our unit commander, and I told him about this unusual child. “Comrade Commander, tell me how can we save him? Can we send in some men?” My story captured his attention because he was interested in painting. “Well, I have to send some men to Vilna in any case in the coming days. One of their missions will be to get the young artist out of the concentration camp and to bring him here.” I was overjoyed and excited. I wrote a word to his mother, so that she would let Zalmen leave: “We are doing this to save your child. Come, too, if it’s at all possible.” I could not wait for our emissaries to return. But it so happened that the very day they had wanted to enter the camp by cutting through the barbed wire, the number of camp guards doubled. They returned without the young artist.**

behIND the Gates

111

Then, in July 1944, the Red Army liberated Vilna. With a pounding heart I rushed back to my city. I met Jewish partisan fighters. “Do you know what happened to Zalmen?” To my great astonishment, I learned that he was alive. He and his mother had survived together. They managed to overcome their share of challenges, and in the end Professor Stakauskas,126 the Lithuanian director of the municipal archives, hid them. Stakauskas built a hideout for them at the archives on Ignatover Street where he managed to save the artist, his mother, and fourteen other Jews.127 • **While his mother told me about all their challenges, Zalmen remained hunched over a piece of paper drawing.** “This is what Moses looked like before Kittel destroyed him,” Zalmen told me, showing me a brand new sketch. “I am going to repair the sculpture, you’ll see …” “And where are the paintings that you made in the camp?” I inquired, before immediately regretting that I may have been opening recent wounds. “I left my entire box of drawings there,” said Zalmen, looking up at his mother. “Maybe we can retrieve them. But in any case, I don’t like those drawings …” We went to Subotsh Street, where the concentration camp had been located. When the Red Army was on the outskirts of town, a German battalion attacked its thousand Jews. Thanks to the resistance in the camp, one hundred and forty managed to save themselves.128 The remainder were shot to death. In the midst of the dead we found his album of drawings. It was wide open, exposed to the sun, and several drawings were sanctified by blood.

The Singer Who in Vilna had not heard of the singer Lyube Levitski? After studying at the music conservatory in Vienna, she returned to her hometown. Her concerts on the local radio delighted the Jews of Vilna. She taught at the local conservatory. She was invited to Moscow for concerts.

112

vILNa Ghetto

For a long while I did not see her in the ghetto. She was hiding with non-Jewish friends of hers, musicians, who lived in the suburb of Zverinyets. But when the big roundups started in town, she slipped back into the ghetto. Her appearance had changed: her head seemed to have grown larger since her body had shrunk. Her hair, dyed blonde so that she would not be recognized, changed the look of her face. In January 1942, at the same moment the underground was established, cultural life in the ghetto also came alive. We organized the first concert in the auditorium of the former Real-Gymnasium. As the literary director of the concert series and the one responsible for carrying out the initiative to create theatre in the ghetto, I asked Lyube Levitski to perform folk-songs. I will never forget the concert. It was shortly after the “Night of the Yellow Permits.” The ambiance in the auditorium was akin to a memorial service. Every sound, every word reminded us of those who had disappeared. But we managed to forget that at any moment we could be surrounded and dragged off to the death pits of Ponar. This gathering was illegal, organized unbeknownst to Murer. People stood, as they would before an open grave, as they listened to the melody of Chopin’s Funeral March, Shloyme’s monologue from Y.L. Peretz’s The Golden Chain,129 a choral recitation of Bialik’s “I Want to Cry,” and the lyrics of Lyube’s folk-songs, which she performed with deep nostalgia, and penetrating sadness: Two doves glide over the water And kiss with their little beaks Let the person who interferes in love Be damned. • A year after the concert, we organized a Yiddish performance on the premises of the former Jewish State Theatre at Konske Street 3, **one of whose back doors opened to the ghetto.** The symphony, conducted by Durmashkin, prepared an opera in great secrecy. Lyube was supposed to play the lead role. **Rehearsals took place over several months.** The artists Ume Olkenitski and Rokhl Sutzkever designed the sets. The stage was enlarged, and costumes were put together in

behIND the Gates

113

ghetto workshops. Lyube rehearsed intently. On her way to work in the morning she sang the libretto in her head, in silence, so that the enemy would not overhear. The day of the première was approaching. Lyube was full of anticipation. She kept asking herself how her voice would sound. Once upon a time, she had guarded her voice like a treasure. She would not venture out into the cold. But now, forced to clean floors, she inevitably swallowed dust. During the liquidation of the second ghetto, she hid herself for over a week in a garbage bin, covered in trash. During another roundup, she was dragged to the Gestapo cellars, where Schweinberger trampled her and stabbed her with his gold knife. Somehow, she managed to escape. She was treated in the ghetto hospital, spitting up blood. When she managed to recover, she once again took to singing for those condemned to death. When Avrom Sliep, the former director of the Vilbig choir, and Professor Tamara Gershovitsh opened a music school in the ghetto, Lyube taught a class. Now she was consumed with this opera. It was the eve of the première. She was counting down the minutes to when her workday in the barracks would come to an end. She was tense, full of anticipation and curiosity about the state of her voice. An acquaintance in town managed to bring her a gift – a sack of peas for her mother, who had fallen sick due to hunger. Finally, evening arrived. Lyube, wearing the patch on her breast, proudly marched down the cobblestone streets back towards the ghetto. She was thinking of the opera and of her sick mother. Murer happened to be driving on Rudnitske Street, and he arrested the singer. He inspected the tin number she was forced to wear around her neck and the edges of her patch. He patted down her stomach and chest to be sure that she was not smuggling food into the ghetto. He found the little pouch of peas, ordered her to get into his car, and dumped her at Lukishki Prison. She spent a month in prison. Every day, prisoners were taken from her cell and thrown into the gleaming black car that awaited them at the entrance. She knew that she would never sing at the première in the ghetto. Her days and maybe even her hours were numbered. Therefore she sang in her cell, for the other Jews awaiting death. Weiss, the chief of the execution squad at that time, brought Lyube to Ponar. A small silver skull resembling his face in miniature peered down from his solemn gray cap. He drove the car himself. Ellen Degner, his lover, a thirty-year-old member of the Gestapo from Hamburg, sat next to him smoking a cigarette.

114

vILNa Ghetto

When they passed through the barbed wire that surrounded the pits, Ellen stopped the car and ordered Lyube to undress. When the singer did not immediately obey, Ellen took out a spade and threatened that if Lyube did not undress that second she would gouge out her eyes. Weiss had used the same tactics with great effectiveness. Lyube undressed. She continued on naked. She descended into the pit where she found bodies covered in lime. Weiss and Murer, the latter with his monocle, looked on. Ellen Degner, a former student at the University of Hamburg, grabbed a machine-gun, and in one burst of laughter, riddled Lyube with bullets.

The Mathematician Young Zalkindson was a surgeon. He was known for his remarkable talent, but mathematics, the mystery of numbers, interested him above all else. He completed many complicated operations in the ghetto hospital. He operated on and nursed the sick at times when those in good health were being slaughtered in the street. In the ghetto, he began a treatise on astronomy. He refused to work in town, saying: “I prefer to die rather than collaborate with our murderers.” He refused the few grams of bread and the horse rations that Jews called “Susine.”130 He never registered with the Information Office in the ghetto to let them know that a Jew called Zalkindson existed. He slept during the day and stayed up all night. When nightfall put a temporary damper on the day’s sorrows he turned to his treatise. When dawn broke, he liked to play the violin. He was also a musician. When the ghetto was in its death throes, I looked for a way to save the mathematician. I did not know him personally, but I had heard a lot about him from a friend who was one of his neighbours. One of my acquaintances in town, Julian Jankauskas, agreed to hide six ghetto Jews in a specially designed hideout. His plan was as follows: he had a friend who was a police officer, but this friend was his own man and supported the partisans. The policeman lived alone. His apartment had a bathroom. He would wall-in the entrance to the bathroom and cover it with wallpaper. A secret entry was created on the other side, where six people could be hidden.

behIND the Gates

115

That night, I visited Zalkindson to make his acquaintance and explain my plan to him. I told him that he was one of the six people we had in mind for the hideout. “For me, death doesn’t exist,” he responded, wrinkling his brow. “I never went into hiding. So long as I continue to work on my treatise, death has no power over me. And when I finish it, I will no longer have any reason to live.” He removed a crumpled paper from his vest pocket and volunteered: “It’s cyanide. My death is rolled up within it.” “You know,” he told me later, “if you really want to help me, I ask you one favour: make sure that my treatise makes it to Rudnicki, my professor of mathematics, so that he can read it and protect it.” I took his thick notebooks. I wrapped them tightly around my chest, and I took them to the professor. The next week, the professor came to the courtyard of the YIvo building where I was working, and he asked a Jew he knew to ask me to come outside. We hid in the trees so that nobody would notice us. There, the professor told me: “The greatest joy of my life was the day you brought me Zalkindson’s treatise. I cannot contain my pride in my Jewish student! Tell him that I send him my heartfelt wishes, and that after the war, when the world has had the opportunity to read Zalkindson’s treatise, it will salute his accomplishment.” The earth trembled in the ghetto. Kittel came every day to demand one more thing, sometimes the sick, sometimes the aged. His voracious appetite desired children. Young people fled to the forest. Parents built underground hideouts. But sometimes their walls caved in on the inhabitants. I called on Zalkindson. I insisted he follow me into town. The secret room was ready. We also had worked out the matter of food supply. There was even a radio there. I argued with him for three days, begging him as one would a child. Finally, I managed to convince him. He decided to go on 30 August 1943. At five o’clock in the morning, he was to leave the ghetto. The policeman would be waiting for him, and take him away as if he were under arrest. Zalkindson arrived at the gate at the designated hour. But at that moment, an aunt whom he adored rushed over to prevent him from leaving. She had noticed that he was not in his room, and she had gone

116

vILNa Ghetto

out to search for him. She caught up with him at the gate and did not want to let him leave, convinced that he would be in mortal danger in the city. On the morning of 1 September 1943 Kittel encircled the ghetto with machine-gunners. Young Zalkindson was one of his victims.

The Fantastic Cave Every day I smuggled treasures back into the ghetto, and over time I struggled over what to do with them. Every inch of my apartment on Strashun Street 1 was taken up with precious manuscripts, books, paintings, and sculptures that I had managed to save from the Germans. I then had to figure out an appropriate place to bury them for safekeeping. Yoysef Glazman, one of the leaders of the ghetto resistance, told me about a former yeshiva student who was constructing amazing underground hiding places. I had to contact him. He would provide me with advice. I went to see him. He was tall, lanky, and a bit cross-eyed. Gershn Abramovitsh, the name of this strange architect, told me a little about himself. His entire family was in the ghetto. He had two brothers, and his mother was paralysed. The three brothers had studied at Ramayles yeshiva131 before the war. Once in the ghetto, they swore on a Torah scroll to save their mother. The three brothers built an underground hideout for their mother. But it was only temporary. Gershn had not known that the Germans would deploy dogs to sniff out hidden Jews. So now he was hewing a man-made cave beneath the ghetto, at the end of an underground tunnel far beyond his mother’s current location. The cave was half-finished. It would be impossible to discover. It would not succumb to bombs, fire, or search dogs. He would transfer his mother to this new hidden bunker. The aforementioned cultural treasures and the ghetto archives could be put into the same secret space. **He promised to show me his work.** He led me down into the dim basement of a ruined building, through fallen bricks, and he advised me to hold on to his sleeve so that he would not lose me on the way. When we arrived at a corner of the ruins, he lit a small lamp. He cleared away some earth with his finger and lifted two small wooden boards: “Come.” We crawled downhill for about five minutes through a narrow

behIND the Gates

117

corridor, and then he told me to grab hold of a railing. The path continued along the railing until he removed two more wooden boards, and light sprung forth. “I’m hiding my mother here,” he told me, pointing to a woman who was lying like a pile of bones among feather blankets and pillows. “The electricity does not come from the ghetto, so that if the ghetto is encircled and the Germans cut its electricity, Mother will still have light. She has been here for a year and a half. I’ve hidden her from seven roundups, and I hope she will outlive Hitler.” Hearing our voices, the woman turned her head and addressed her son. “Gershn, did you bring candles?” Gershn removed two candles from his pocket and put them on a chair. It was Friday. He took me over to his mother, and pointed at me: “Mother, this young man has brought you a new Korbn-minkhe [prayerbook].” The diminutive old woman managed a small smile. She extended her emaciated hand, took the prayer book, and placed it under her pillow. There was a sudden sound in the hideout. I shuddered. “I connected a fan,” Gershn reassured me, as he pressed on with the tour. “I’m no longer satisfied with this hideout. At first it was a safe place, but now I need something better. Come along, I’ll show you the hiding place for your books. The Germans will never reach it. It’s 20 metres below ground.” We made our way through a labyrinth. And again, a sudden beam of light. We had come to a new cave. “This cave is six courtyards away from the first one,” Gershn explained. “From here, there is a sewer line that extends all the way to the Shulhoyf. But it is blocked in places.” He pointed to a hole covered with bricks, letting me know that the three cases of books I had recently entrusted to him were there. Gershn planned to transfer his mother into this cavernous space. He had even dug a well. **I looked into the secret well. Its walls were covered with boards to keep the water potable.** We turned back. I was reassured about the books. Gershn had stored them in the same cave where he was hiding his mother. When he learned that German planes were dropping bombs on ghettos, Gershn had doubts about his underground construction. If a more violent bombardment occurred, a wall could collapse and block the exit. He needed to find a solution. He thought it over and came up with one.

118

vILNa Ghetto

After removing their yellow patches, he and his two brothers went into town. About a kilometre from the ghetto he began to lay out bricks from a building that had been hit by a bomb. Of the hundreds of murderous Gestapo men and their collaborators in the area, none grew suspicious of these three brothers who were working in plain sight to gather bricks from a damaged wall. Gershn built an amazing hideout underneath that building. But where would the water supply come from? He dug a tunnel some 20 metres in length that connected his hideout with an artesian well. He carved an opening in the cement wall of the well that left no trace behind when it was pulled shut. The water problem was solved. What is more, at night he would be able to crawl outside through the well-shaft to buy food. An accident occurred during one of these dawn-to-dusk workdays in town, when the brothers were without their yellow patches. A beam fell on his oldest brother, and he broke his leg. Gershn brought him to the ghetto hospital. The leg had to be amputated. The question remained: how was Gershn going to transfer his mother to the new, more secure hideout? The ghetto was already sealed. Its residents were terrified that an awful slaughter was immanent, perhaps the one that would consume them all. Gershn dug a tunnel from his cave beneath the ghetto to the sewer system. He crawled all the way from the ghetto to his new hideout in the city, and from there he dug out another tunnel to the sewer system. He had an open path. He would transport his paralysed mother, his disabled brother, and his little brother from the ghetto through the underground cave. Then, he would take them through the sewers to the new hideout. A day earlier, before I escaped from the encircled ghetto with weapon in hand, I ran into Gershn on one of the streets that had been blown apart. It was a warm day. Summer was taking leave of the ghetto. Gershn was carrying two blankets under his arm. I stopped him: “Where are you going?” Gershn winked at me with that crossed eye of his and hurriedly excused himself: “No offence, but I’m in a rush. A friend gave me these blankets. I have to take them to the hideout right away. Autumn will soon be here. They’re cold there, underground.” The previous night he had transferred his paralysed mother and his disabled brother, first through the cave, then through the sewers, all the way to the secret hideout beneath the collapsed building in the city.

behIND the Gates

119

The Underground City Once upon a time, only a thief took to hiding himself in a maline. The saying used to be: “We caught the thief in his lair.” But now every inhabitant of the ghetto required not only a place to live above ground, but also a secure hideout below ground. The word maline became so popular that various new usages of it emerged: me darf zikh malineven [one must go into hiding], bist a guter malinshtshik [you are a good designer of hideouts], ikh bin gelegn malinert [I lay low by concealing myself ], and so on. When the teacher Stolitski’s wife gave birth to a baby girl in a hideout in the second ghetto, she named her Maline.132 In the period before the establishment of the ghetto, malines were primitive. People hid in cellars, stoves, dark back rooms, or garrets. During the period of the ghetto, the design of malines developed into a true art. An underground city came to life. When the Germans also sought to exterminate non-Jews in Vilna, the word also caught on in the city. I read the following slogan in an underground paper: “Poles, hide yourselves in malines!” Malines were built at night so that nobody would notice. Even the best maline was useless if an unfriendly eye caught a glimpse of it. Malines were built everywhere: underneath ruined buildings, in cellars, underneath garbage dumps, in caves, and everywhere else imaginable. People would put up a wall in a room, cover it in wallpaper, and construct a hidden entrance around back. This was known as an apartment maline. Thanks to this kind of hideout, people were able to spend the night at home. In case of danger, one could rush directly to the hideaway. At Rudnitske Street 6, forty wealthy Jews built an amazing maline. It was accessed through an oven. One opened the oven lid, and from there one was taken into the maline by means of a mobile electric platform, similar to a subway escalator. In the hideout there was a radio, a bath, a place to go to the bathroom, and even a library. Spokoyni, an engineer who built more than one such living space beneath the ghetto, came up with a maline whose entrance was through a well. At the hkP concentration camp, around eighty children managed to escape the killing. They were not allowed to show themselves in the camp. Children’s skin was sought after for cosmetic operations. Their parents agreed to wall in a portion of a side room, behind which their

120

vILNa Ghetto

offspring could live. Access to them was through a tin stove that was purposely pushed up against the wall. The stove was on all day so that it would not occur to German inspectors to check it. A school was opened for these eighty walled-in children in the maline. In the morning, their teacher, Opeskin,133 would crawl through the stove in order to hold class for the young pupils until evening. He organized a performance with them. The stage was decorated in greenery, and they were dressed festively. There, in that walled-in room in a concentration camp, Opeskin’s children performed his song “The Maline Jew”: The Maline Jew Jew, where are you off to in the windy night? Why does your expression burn with murder and transgression, And give off sparks of hatred? I’m off to wherever my feet take me, My wound is a burning glow, I am the last Jew, The maline Jew. Jew, what do you seek on the empty cobblestones? I wander alone at night And sneak around until dawn In search of my beloved’s remains There where the forlorn cry glows There where I cannot find it. Night veils and envelops me, Daytime’s anger and chaos threaten me. Where should I disappear? My tongue is full of curses, While my dreams today are of the dog that barks At the maline Jew. Off you go, Jew, cursing the world, Blessed is your hand that takes careful aim. Oh, let hands be put to a good purpose! Will my sorrow then be stilled?

behIND the Gates

121

Will the sun then cast a gentle smile On the maline Jew? • Those who planned ahead did not think highly of the ghetto hideouts because the Germans were teaching themselves how to locate them. Within the Ypatinga, groups dedicated to khapunes – seizing Jews – specialized in discovering malines. There was also the risk that the ghetto would be burnt to the ground. When the buildings collapsed, they would block access to the hideouts. That’s why malines were built in town, directly accessible from the ghetto. From Shpitol Street 6 an amazing cave was dug out leading to the monastery of the All Saints Church. An underground pathway led from the ghetto hospital to the Choral Synagogue situated on Zavalne. An underground cave led from Daytshe Street 29 to beneath the second ghetto. There were malines for the wealthy and for the poor, large and small, some able to hold a single family and others a hundred people. The maline at Daytshe 21, built by Herts Zusman, consisted of three cave-like rooms. Zusman walled in the last one, and dug a tunnel that extended from it into the sewer system, so that those in the underground cave could respond to a sudden danger. Sixty-some people lived in its two rooms.134 Zusman installed a radio, and on the exterior wall, hidden in a water line, he mounted a device that allowed the inhabitants to hear what was happening on the street. He also managed to bring in water and gas. On the chance that those were cut off externally, Zusman dug a well and built a stove. He connected the chimney to that of a non-Jewish neighbour so that when the heating was on it would not arouse suspicion. But this hideout lasted no more than two weeks. The building watchman got wind of it and informed the authorities. The Gestapo came, and spent an entire day destroying the maline. With the help of four youngsters, Zusman broke into the third cellar room that was connected to the sewers, and everyone streamed out into the underground pathways. The five men had to remain behind to conceal the entrance to the cellar. The Gestapo roamed above ground. The five rushed to wall in the entrance with concrete, and to move the food reserves into the sewer pipes. A single man remained in the second cellar room to finish building the wall. When the Gestapo penetrated

122

vILNa Ghetto

the maline, he slid through the chimney and reached the third cellar room, and from there he made his way to the sewers. The same Zusman then hid himself with his family, a group of six, in the boiler room beneath the mass murderer Kittel’s apartment on Kashtan Street 3. Zusman reckoned that to be between a wolf ’s teeth was sometimes safer. Stanisław Stankiewicz, the man responsible for stoking the boiler, hid him there. He brought the family food, hidden underneath ashes in a bucket. The maline was located beneath a staircase cluttered with pieces of wood. The family lay hidden there, tangled together. Once a day, they would all roll over at the same time. Zusman had installed a radio with headphones there, and they would listen to the latest headlines from around the world all day long. Kittel often came down to the cellar. His voice could be heard through the chunks of wood. The worst days were Saturdays, when members of the Gestapo in the building all took their baths. The wall of fire logs that hid the Zusman family diminished week by week. The situation became critical as summer neared, when there was no longer any need to heat the boilers. The watchman no longer had a reason to be in the cellar, and he could not bring the family its food. Additionally, the inhabitants kept taking pieces of wood from the stack to heat the water for bathing. After four months of struggle in the maline, the protective wall consisted of only a single remaining log. Zusman and his family had to flee. He returned to the first maline at Daytshe Street 21, the one the Gestapo had previously discovered. They stayed there until the city was liberated. It was common to reuse a hideout that had been previously discovered. The reasoning was simple: it would not occur to the Germans that people would re-establish themselves in a location that had already been compromised. Terrible tragedies took place in the malines. People died of hunger and suffocation. When the ghetto was liquidated, dozens of people were buried alive underneath collapsed buildings. **Even today there are still victims under the rubble.** Many malines were revealed because of children: their crying gave away the hideout. **I know of cases where parents suffocated their own children to keep them from crying. Most of the time they did so when threatened by other occupants of the hideaway. “We’re all going to die because of a single child.” In the frenzied conditions of the maline, children were smothered to death.**

behIND the Gates

123

I took refuge several times in a maline. I know the atmosphere well, the terror of bodies huddled together. The slightest whisper, the slightest movement made one’s heart skip a beat and sapped one’s energy. In such conditions, humans are capable of anything. I hope to forget some of the trials I endured. **Some of the horrors have already begun to fade.** But I will never forget the moment in one maline when matches would no longer ignite because the air was so low on oxygen. • **Several days before the entry of the Red Army into Vilna, the Jews interned in the hkP concentration camp were informed that the camp was to be liquidated and they would be evacuated to Germany. Everyone knew what the word “evacuation” meant. So, they decided to farmalineven, to conceal themselves in a hideout. Nine-year-old Shmuel Gutman told me about the madness that befell his hideout. Others also told me about how the group there lost its collective mind, but let us describe it through the words of a child: One beautiful morning, Plagge135 [the head of the hkP camp] showed up and ordered everyone to gather their belongings because we would be departing any day. Everyone was agitated. My father specialized in malines. He took my mother and me to the cooperative. There was a hideout there where they hid the foodstuffs. My father lifted a trapdoor in the floor, and we descended into the cellar down a ladder. There were six rooms. Each of them was stuffed with people. It was suffocating. People were passing out. There was nothing to drink. We had to lick water from a gutter. I did so myself. Suddenly, through a slit, we saw the Germans arrive in a car, furnished with grenades and machineguns. Zmigrod, a quick-thinking man who was hiding among us, pierced a hole in the wall and crawled to a second hideout. He said it would be safer there. My father, my mother, and an entire crowd followed him to the second maline. There was a pipe there through which air was piped in. All of a sudden, someone pointed out to the Germans that there were people in the first hideout. They tossed in grenades that caused a breach in a wall. They seized those who were still hiding there. But they didn’t come across our

124

vILNa Ghetto

hideout. All those who had been discovered in the first hideout were gathered together and machine-gunned on the spot. Because of the grenades that had been tossed into the first hideout, gas penetrated into our maline and a woman suffocated to death. The aged lost consciousness. But children like me did not faint. My mother lost her mind. She cried out: “They will soon discover our hideout!” But since we had to remain absolutely silent, people started to beat my mother. She couldn’t stop screaming. When one is consumed by terror, one screams. Then another Jew panicked. His name was Malkes, and he started hitting my mother with a brick. My father took out a knife and stabbed Malkes. Six men pounced on him and subdued him. My father, still restrained, cried out: “God, I’ve killed a man.” A person by the name of Kotler begged my father to stop sobbing, but without success. Kotler took out a gun and shot him with a single bullet, but the adrenaline had left Father with extra energy, and he broke free from their restraints and launched himself at the man. Three others finished the job with a brick. Whenever I recount what happened next I choke up. When my mother noticed what happened, she started to wail. Someone struck her in the neck with a brick, and she fell down. She was still alive. They finished her off with another bullet. The two were buried in a hole that was dug in the hideout. I screamed: “Murderers, what are you doing?!,” but nobody paid any attention. A few days later, we were told that it was time to leave the hideout. A friend of my father’s took me along with him. By the time we made it out, the Russians were already in Vilna.** • As mentioned previously, there was a maline for children in the hkP concentration camp. Parents certainly knew that their children would not be able to hold out for long. They tried to transfer them to the city. Dovid Gitelman had a two-year-old daughter in the maline. How could he get her out? The girl might start to cry, and the guards would catch her along with her parents. In the camp, there was a doctor. He suggested that the child be sedated with chloroform, and then smuggled

behIND the Gates

125

out of the camp in a sack through a trench dug beneath the barbed-wire fence. That’s exactly what happened. The child survived. I personally knew of ten such cases of children who were sedated with chloroform so that they could be smuggled to acquaintances in town. • After the liquidation of the ghetto, a group of Jew-snatchers led by the officer Lukosius descended on Rudnitske Street 6. Their task was to find Jews still hiding in a maline. At the same time they brought workers who were supposed to take all the bedding, furniture, and products from ghetto workshops that had been left behind. The workers were told that they would get a bonus if they happened upon a hideout. The amount of the bonus depended on the number of Jews the worker managed to deliver. The Jew-snatchers took courses. When I returned to liberated Vilna, I found a chalkboard at their base upon which all the different kinds of malines were described. There were also papers there in the Yiddish alphabet. They were learning Yiddish to assist them in their hunt for malines. They would move from building to building, shouting in Yiddish: “There’s nobody left in the ghetto! You can come out now.” When they came upon a maline, the Jew-snatchers would drag its occupants to their headquarters, where they stole everything from the Jews, searched them, and delivered them to the Gestapo. They kept young women behind to rape them. Later, they tried to convince them that their lives would be spared if they revealed where other Jews were hiding. Itsik Lurie told me that while he hid underneath the parquet floor at Oshmener Street 1, he saw two Jew-snatchers through a crack guiding a fettered horse into the building. They walked it around the full length of the room which had once housed a felt-boot workshop several times. They were trying to detect whether there was a void where Jews could hide by listening to the sound of the horse’s hoofs on the floor. **Meanwhile, Lurie was confused. He did not understand what was happening. While the horse was above his maline, he overheard one of the Jew-snatchers say: “Perhaps here, let’s look.” And Lurie heard the sound of an axe right above his head. He escaped through a second exit.** Eliohu Kopanski’s maline at Rudnitske 23 was among the few to hold out until liberation. Kopanski enclosed a section of his maline to

126

vILNa Ghetto

conceal a room, and covered the partition wall with newspapers. He and his family took refuge behind the partition. The little room had three entrances: through a cellar, through a wall which had an opening covered with bricks and was hidden by a layer of earth on the outside, and through the partition wall, itself masked by newspapers. In front of the entrance to this hidden room he purposely tossed all his belongings and bedding to give the impression that the place had already been ransacked and that there was no need to search it again. Kopanski even left the wall clock. After a month in the maline subsisting only on peas, he crawled out of his maline to another room and looked outside. He wanted to know if the hkP camp was still there. He saw two young girls go by. He had a sense they were Jews. He popped his head out of the metal door and asked the girls about the camp. They did not respond. A Jew-snatcher happened to be right across the way. He screamed at the young girls: “Do you know who just spoke to you. A zhid!” Kopanski sped back to his maline and concealed its entrance. He remained in his little room and listened through the false partition wall to determine what was happening. A few hours later, the metal door opened and some people entered the front room. Kopanski heard the voices of two girls. One asked the other in Yiddish, “Where did you come from?” and the other responded, also in Yiddish, “From hkP.” Conversations such as this in Yiddish repeated themselves again and again over the next couple of weeks. The murderers were trying to trick Kopanski in order to uncover his maline. But he understood their games and did not fall into their trap. Kopanski was running low on food. He counted how many peas remained. He and his family subsisted on fifty peas per day. During the two weeks before liberation they got by on only twenty-two peas per day. When Kopanski could no longer bear the hunger, he left the maline to search for food, only to discover that the city had been liberated a week earlier. • Most of the malines, whether in the city or in the ghetto, did not manage to hold out. They were revealed through denunciations or through searches. The will to live drove ten Jews who were being hunted to the

behIND the Gates

127

sewers. They felt more secure in this mouse-ridden, disgusting realm than anywhere in town. They accustomed themselves quickly to the flow of water, learning how to fasten themselves to the pipes with their hands to prevent themselves from being carried away by the current. They came to know this underground network by heart, recognizing every blind nook, and naming these underground sewer lines according to the streets under which they passed. They used to say, “I’m on Rudnitske,” or “I’m on Breyte,” and so on. They wandered these Vilna “streets” by night, crawling out of the sewer covers in search of food. People lived with the hope that liberation was near.136 There were different kinds of sewers. The pipes underneath main roads ranged from 1.2 to 1.8 metres in height. Those underneath smaller streets were not more than 80, 50, or even 40 centimetres. The oldest pipes were no longer used for discharge. There were small reservoirs in them. When the water was flowing, all of the refuse gathered in these reservoirs. One needed to pay careful attention while walking. It was possible to fall in, hurt oneself, and even to drown if the current was strong enough. It was impossible to remain in the sewers for long. Even during the summer it was cold down there, and still more so when winter approached. Different groups and families were in contact with nonJews in the city who lived close to the sewer lines, and with their help malines were constructed underneath their apartments. From these malines, tunnels were dug to meet up with the sewer system, and sewer lids were made that could be closed from the inside so that they would not be noticed. People lived in these newly constructed malines. At the first sign of danger they escaped to the sewers. There were fifteen such malines connected to the sewer system. Around one hundred and fifty people hid in them, and they were all over the city on the following streets: Stefn, Rudnitske, Novigorod, Subotsh, Glezer, and Ignatover. These sewer-Jews spent most of the day sleeping. They did not move around because during the day sanitation workers were present. Life began at night when the sewer lids were opened, and people called on one another. From the maline at Vilner Street 22 they made their way to Subotsh Street 10. From Glezer Street 9 they went for tea at Daytshishe Street 19. The maline at Daytshishe 19 was one of the most important. **I was there.** It was a masterpiece in the full sense of the word. Its entry was

128

vILNa Ghetto

through a private apartment. Its owner, Monika Kolvaitis, helped in its construction. One opened a hatch in the floor that led down to a dark and humid cellar. In one corner there was a crate of potatoes. One removed two boards from the crate and crawled on all fours until one was able to push open a cover with one’s head to access a second cellar. In the corner, one rolled away a stone to crawl up a steep set of steps until one arrived at a nook between two walls. There was a wellshaft there. One descended the shaft by a ladder, and about 2 metres from the water’s surface, there were two wooden logs upon which one slid into a very narrow sewer. Only after passing through the entire pipe did one arrive at the maline. The maline gave off the impression of being a normal apartment. There was electricity and a radio on a table. The wooden beds were impeccably made, and the walls were well painted. What most impressed me was the blue fabric that beautifully covered the walls. There was a pantry, a kitchen, and a bathroom. In the bathroom there was a shower, whose water flowed from the concrete floor into a pipe which carried it away. At the entrance to the bathroom was a wooden doormat to clean one’s shoes. When the doormat was lifted, one entered a hole that led to the sewers. Dozens of Jews from different “streets” visited the maline at Daytshishe Street 19 at night. They left with the latest radio reports that they then spread throughout the “underground city.” People went out on dates in the sewers. They pursued their romantic relationships down there. It was forbidden to light a match, to prevent any light from being seen through the grates above ground. But young people still managed to rendezvous in prearranged spots. Love provided moments of brightness in the dark. Such amorous encounters sometimes almost revealed the location of a maline. On one occasion a young couple in the heat of passion found themselves underneath a sewer grate gazing up at the moon. During this moment of intense pleasure, the lovers forgot that the Germans were on the sidewalk above them. The couple were talking and giggling out loud. A passerby heard them and alerted the Gestapo, which came to arrest them the next morning. When thirty people in the underground city heard that the maline at Daytshe 19 was under attack, they abandoned the cave for the sewers. The Germans blocked the road above ground and tossed grenades into

behIND the Gates

129

open manholes. Most of the maline’s inhabitants managed to escape the explosions and take refuge with their subterranean neighbours. Three people died: a paralysed woman, an old man, and a child. • Food was often provided by those neighbours in whose cellars malines were constructed. From time to time, those in hiding would slip into town to purchase supplies. A synagogue and a cemetery were also created during the year spent underground. Six people were buried in a makeshift cemetery located in the maline at Glezer Street 9. Celebrations were also held in the sewers. They lit candles on Hanukkah, and ate latkes. The first of May was celebrated in a unique way. Young girls embroidered red flags, and at night the flags were tossed into the streets above through sewer grates. The arts also thrived underground. The composer Bernshteyn137 spent half a year in the sewers. Before she found a corner for herself in a nearby maline, she hid in a little well-shaft underneath Hotel Europa. For days on end she would listen to the splashing of mice in the water, and to their unusual sounds echoing in the cavernous sewers. Pieces of glass, tin cans, and stones also floated by in the water. When combined with the sounds of mice, these objects all came together in a kind of harmony for the musician, who was inspired to compose a piece there in the sewers. • I have a diary written in the sewers by the aforementioned famous architect of the underground city, Gershn Abramovitsh. Here are a few remarkable excerpts from his diary: Mendl crawled first. He was holding a pouch of dry toast between his teeth. It had already fallen in the water several times when Mendl had started to speak, forgetting that his mouth was full. Fetid drops dripped from the bag. Mendl was carrying his daughter on his back, who had her little arms grasped tightly around his neck. Mendl was sweating. Because of the little bag in his mouth, he had to breathe through his nose. The sewer pipe

130

vILNa Ghetto

was 80 centimetres in height. He had to bend over so that it would not scrape his daughter’s back. From behind, he resembled a mythological creature carrying its child through prehistoric caves. He was impatient and extended his right arm. His right leg had to keep up. Because of his awkward movements, when his backside rose his daughter fell forward. She wanted to scream out “Daddy!” but caught herself because she knew the Germans might overhear. I was crawling behind Mendl. My bundle was crushing my shoulders, and the sack of bread I was holding in my mouth threatened to tear out my front teeth. I had to brace with my knees against the cast-iron walls, so that the current would not carry me away. The cast iron tore my pants, and my knees were burning in pain. My arms were bleeding, too. Khayke and Mother crawled behind me. And behind all of us was the din of water streaming in from Stefn and Zavalne Streets. The noise was amplified a thousandfold and resonated through the sewers like a waterfall. We crawled on. The noise from our “waterfall” diminished. We heard the drone of passing cars. All of a sudden we heard a cry. We overheard Yiddish words. Nobody could tell where it was coming from. The sewer continued on to the right. We could see a somber grey light in the distance. We came to a small well-shaft. Mendl and I crawled inside it. The rest of our group remained in the water to catch its breath. The voices were getting closer. Through the sewer grates we could see the edges of blue sky. The sound of footsteps. We looked up, and, through the grates, we saw boots, luggage, slippers, and even naked feet. The feet were running. It seemed as though they were being chased. At the time, I was just opposite the ghetto gate. The last ghetto Jews were being liquidated. I heard the voice of a child: “Mother, help! They’re beating me!” The mother gathered her remaining strength and rushed over to her child. The blows of a rifle-butt rained down on her. I climbed the stairs all the way to the grate. Above my head soldiers’ boots were treading on the metal. Only 20 centimetres separated us. A woman passed carrying a large bundle on her shoulders. A little girl emerged from under the bundle. I saw a grey beard dripping with blood. I recognized the man. He had been my

behIND the Gates

131

neighbour in the ghetto. There were also young men, arms linked. Trucks stopped. They were stuffed with the inhabitants of the ghetto to take them to their death. … We had been wandering in the sewers for five days. It had rained the day before. A strong current came in its wake. The water took us for such a ride underneath Zavalne Street that we rode it like a motorcycle. Thanks to a miracle, I managed to grab hold of a branch of the sewer pipe at Troker Street. Had I not, the current would almost certainly have been the end of me. The sack of bread that I had been holding in my teeth was lost. Mendl found it the next day against a grate by the river. • When the Red Army encircled the Germans in Vilna and every street became the frontline, the inhabitants of the underground city rushed to the sewers to see what was going on above ground through the grates. Were they in a part of the city under the control of the Germans or the Red Army? If they saw a Red Army soldier it was a sign that the street had been liberated. Youth in the sewers would call back to their comrades: “Run away from Germany and come over here! We are no longer under Hitler’s heel!” They escaped through the grates into the liberated streets to take up the battle to help liberate others.

Kittel Kittel is a performer. A singer. He graduated from a school of drama in Berlin, and from an academy of murder in Frankfurt. He managed to harmonize the teachings of both institutions. Every Sunday he appeared on the local radio. He played his silver saxophone and sang songs. Kittel was young, born in 1922. He was the youngest of his colleagues and, we should add, the most capable. When it was finally decided to liquidate the Vilna ghetto, Neugebauer gave the honour to Kittel. He lacked confidence in Weiss. Weiss was successful when there were no obstacles, but when Neugebauer learned that there was a Partisan Organization in the ghetto he turned to Kittel,

132

vILNa Ghetto

whose reputation for the mass murder of Jews had been well earned a few hundred kilometres away, in Riga and Tallinn, Łódź and Warsaw. At first glance, one could not imagine that Kittel was Kittel. He was always smiling. His white teeth were blinding. He always smelled of fine cologne. He was elegant and polite, modern and educated. When he went off to the provinces to carry out a massacre he always took along his saxophone … As soon as he arrived in Vilna, we became aware of his special style. Weiss was shamed into admitting that he had a lot more to learn from Kittel … So he turned over the keys of Ponar to him and became his disciple, even though Weiss was significantly older. For his debut, Kittel went with Weiss to the labour camp in Bezdan. He entered the camp office and had the Jewish barber called so that he could get a shave. Once the shave was done, Kittel offered the barber a cigarette. He asked him politely: “Do you want a light?” “Yes,” the Jew responded, bringing the cigarette towards his client. Kittel took out his gun. “Here’s your light!” He shot him on the spot. The bullet was also a sign to Weiss and his minions to begin the carnage. During the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto, Kittel ordered his henchmen to bring a piano into the middle of the street. He sat at the piano and began to play. At the same moment, the Jew-snatchers discovered a maline and dragged out a young man. He was crying and begged them to spare his life. When he saw Kittel at the piano, he fell at his feet. Kittel drew his pistol. With one hand he shot the youngster, and with the other he kept on playing. • After the liquidation of the ghetto there were only two concentration camps138 remaining in the city, with three thousand Jews, “skilled workers.” During one of his strolls in town with a young woman, Kittel noticed an old couple with a small child on the sidewalk across the street. He knew they were Jews. He arrested them and had them brought to the hkP concentration camp on Subotsh Street. When he learned that the couple and child had been concealing themselves in a maline,

behIND the Gates

133

he called some Jews together and ordered them to erect gallows in the camp courtyard. In the interim he rang up the Gestapo and summoned sixty additional murderous agents. When the gallows were ready and the courtyard was filled with SS men encircling the captive Jews, Kittel ordered the woman, her son, and her husband (their family name was Zalkind) to the gallows. He told them: “Since you disobeyed my orders and hid yourselves in the city when I demanded that all Jews in the ghetto be deported to Estonia, we are going to hang you in front of everybody.” Kittel approached, tested the rope himself, and initiated the hangings. First the child was hanged. Then came the mother’s turn. Finally, when the knot cut into Zalkind’s neck the rope broke. Zalkind fell to the ground. He begged Kittel: “Spare my life. It is well known that if the rope breaks one doesn’t hang a convicted man a second time.” Kittel burst out laughing and ordered a new noose, but when they hanged Zalkind a second time the rope broke again, and the condemned man tested his luck again. “Let me live! Look, it’s the second time the noose has broken. The rope itself wants me to live …” “It can break a hundred times … ,” screamed Kittel to the condemned man, ordering a new rope for the gallows. After Zalkind’s execution, Kittel ordered all the Jews to arrange themselves in rows and count themselves accordingly. He separated the first fifty, surrounded them with his armed hordes, and delivered the following sermon: “This will teach you that you should not try to escape. If I find another Jew in town, it will cost you double.” And he ordered the fifty Jews into the truck known as the “Black Crow.” The forty-ninth was Khayim Semyatitski, a well-known Yiddish poet. • Yankl Zalmanovitsh, a student at the Jewish Vocational School, told me: From September 1943 until January 1, 1944 we were in a maline at Glezer Street 6. There were thirty of us. It was a wonderful maline that was impossible to discover. The watchman provided us with food in exchange for payment. I was certain we would be able to hold out in our maline until the end of the war. But wouldn’t you

134

vILNa Ghetto

know it: Tevl Ayznshtat, an old man and former Vilna merchant, died in the maline. We didn’t have a shovel. The earth was frozen, and we didn’t know how to bury him. We dug for two days with our bare hands with no luck. We decided that one of us would have to leave the maline to get a shovel. Shteynholts was the one who left. At that very moment, the watchman above us was the target of an inspection. When Shteynholts opened the hatch to our cellar, an agent caught sight of him immediately. The Gestapo was called, and we were driven out of the cellar. We had to bring the body up with us. We were at Ponar within ten minutes. I knew that my time was limited. The truck door was opened, and Kittel (I recognized him from the ghetto) ordered us to get out. We had no choice but to obey him. He and ten armed men led us to a snow-covered pit and ordered us to undress. It was frigid, and the wind cut into us. Across from us, on the other side of the pit, was a crackling pyre (I learned later that they were burning bodies). When we were naked, Kittel ordered us to lie in the snow and to cover our eyes with our hands. I can’t recall how long we remained like this. I prayed to God for the bullet to put a quick end to things. But nobody pulled the trigger. I overheard Kittel speaking to his comrades, and, between my fingers, I saw them swilling vodka. When it seemed as though my feet were going to freeze, my mind went blank, and I started to get up. Kittel ran over holding his gun and screamed: “Where do you think you’re going?” “I’m cold,” I responded somewhat crazily, “I’m cold, and I’m going to warm myself up …” Kittel looked me over and said: “You’re cold? Good, get dressed, I’m letting you go …” I thought these were just empty words, that he was teasing me. But when I finished getting dressed, he ordered one of the executioners to lead me through the gate. I still don’t understand what was going through Kittel’s mind. He was no doubt drunk. I later learned that he waited for the other Jews from my maline to freeze to death. My father was among them.

Part III The Partisan Organization

1

The First Appeal *After the slaughter of the “yellow permits” [24 October 1941], three Communist Party activists gathered  – Itsik Vitenberg,2 Berl Shereshnyevski,3 and Khyene Borovski.4 They decided to create a resistance organization in the ghetto. It was at this point that the basis of the Communist organization was established in the ghetto. The following individuals were part of the regional committee later set up in the ghetto: Berl Shereshnyevski (secretary), Roze Shereshnyevski, Khyene Borovski, Sonye Madeysker,5 Sheyne Lunski, and Yankl Kaplan.6 Kaplan became secretary when Berl Shereshnyevski left to fight in the forest. The Communist Party committee in the ghetto sought out and partnered with representatives of other organizations who were committed to active resistance. These are the words of the first appeal of the United Partisan Organization [Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye, or FPo]:* Let us not go like sheep to the slaughter! Jewish youth, do not believe those whose goal is to trick you. Of eighty thousand Jews in the Jerusalem of Lithuania, only twenty thousand remain. We have seen our parents, our brothers, our sisters taken away before our very eyes. Where are the hundreds of men snatched by the local police while they were at work? Where are the naked women and children who were seized at night during the terror of the Great Assault? Where are the Jews who were snatched on Yom Kippur? And where are our brothers from the second ghetto? Those who were snatched from the ghetto will never return, because all roads of the Gestapo lead to Ponar. And Ponar means death!

136

vILNa Ghetto

Disabuse yourselves of your desperate hope. Your children, your wives, and your husbands are no longer among the living! Ponar is not a camp. They were all executed. Hitler conceived of a plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe. We are the front line. Let us not go like sheep to the slaughter! It is true that we are relatively weak and that we can’t count on assistance, but the only honourable response to the enemy is resistance! Brothers! Better to die as free fighters than to live at the mercy of murderers. Let us resist until our last breath. 1 January 19427 Vilna. The Ghetto. *This happened after the mass killings in the two ghettos. The testimony of Teme Kats, a teacher who had fled from a pit in Ponar, was presented at the meeting where this appeal was read aloud. She had managed to sneak out of the mass grave at night, her half-naked body riddled with bullets, and made it back to the ghetto. Of course, those who had gathered to mount a resistance did not need an actual eyewitness. They understood what Ponar meant. Nevertheless, the injured teacher, whom everyone already knew to be an activist, was brought in so that her presence might strengthen their resolve and thirst for revenge. By that time, when the streets of the ghetto had begun haemorrhaging and Neugebauer’s Gestapo office used every means possible to confuse and morally break the Jewish population, various groups spontaneously began to organize with the goal of raising a fist against the enemy. The first act of active resistance took place on 24 December 1941, during the slaughter of the “pink permits.”* Twenty people were hiding in the cellar of Shpitol Street 11. The police were on patrol, equipped with axes and bloodhounds. They discovered the maline and ordered the twenty people to exit immediately. They refused and remained inside. **If they had to die, it would be in this cellar.** Schweinberger and his gang of police tore into the cellar. He aimed his machine-gun at the Jews hiding below and ordered them up into the courtyard immediately. In response to the executioner’s order, two young men, Hoyz and Goldshteyn, launched themselves at the assassins with their bare fists: “Jews! Don’t leave the maline! Attack the murderers!”

the PartIsaN orGaNIzatIoN

137

In the darkness of the cellar, there was a burst of fire. Flesh and bones fought against guns. **Teeth tore into German throats.** Bloodhounds also took part in the fight. Schweinberger fled to the gate to bring reinforcements. Twenty Jews died as heroes. They redeemed our honour by ensuring that several policemen were severely injured and mutilated in the course of the fight. At night, when columns of Jews returned to the ghetto after work, they found the following pasted to the walls: “Honour to the martyrs Hoyz and Goldshteyn! Honour to those who have fallen!” • On 23 January 1942, the foundations of the future Partisan Organization in the ghetto were laid at a meeting of representatives of different political factions, held in a secret attic at Rudnitske Street 6. **It was the first call, the first flash of lightning in the ghetto’s darkened streets. Abba Kovner8 wrote the aforementioned appeal.9 At the time, he was in hiding in a convent. He presented his appeal during a meeting organized for the occasion. It was held just after the massive roundups in both ghettos, following the “Yellow Permit” operation.** The following individuals took part in the meeting: Itsik Vitenberg, Abba Kovner, Yoysef Glazman, Khyene Borovski, Nisan Reznik,10 and Frukht, a former major in the Polish army. After discussing the founding principles of the organization, a general staff of three individuals was selected: Itsik Vitenberg (pseudonym Leon), commander; Abba Kovner (pseudonym Uri); and Yoysef Glazman (pseudonym Avrom). Later, Nisan Reznik, Avrom Khvoynik, Yankl Kaplan, and Ziskovitsh11 joined the general staff. The objective of the United Partisan Organization was to prepare for armed struggle in the ghetto in order to defend the honour and the lives of the remaining Jewish population, engage in sabotage, undermine German workshops and factories, and establish contact with the resistance movement in the forest. It accumulated weapons and recruited fighters. To be a fighter in the FPo one needed to be a reliable young person for whom a political party was willing to vouch. The general staff enacted regulations for the initial recruits: “The organization is based on strict military principles.

138

vILNa Ghetto

The smallest fighting unit will consist of five people, that is four fighters and a unit commander. Four fighting units constitute a division, overseen by a division commander. The entire organization is divided into two battalions.” The first unit leaders were Edek Boraks12 (who later went on to become the coordinator of the FPo in Białystok, where he fell in combat) and Itsik Matskevitsh13 (who died forcing his way through the ghetto with weapons). Borekh Goldshteyn,14 Sonye Madeysker, and Shmuel Kaplinski15 were among the first division commanders. Abba Kovner and Yoysef Glazman were battalion commanders. Different military units were established within the organization: grenade launchers, diversionary tactics squad, minelayers, snipers, and an intelligence unit. The rules of engagement called for mobilization of the partisans in case of sudden danger. There were protocols to follow in case the Gestapo attacked. The regulations also established precise rules for battle in the ghetto. One paragraph formulated the responsibilities of Jewish saboteurs: fighters had to provide a daily report to their commanders on sabotage or diversionary operations conducted in the German workshops where they were forced labourers. The watchword “Lize ruft” [Lize is calling] was the signal for immediate mobilization. (Lize was the name of a fallen hero.16) Hearing the call, all fighters were to report to their posts and mobilize the unaffiliated residents of the ghetto to gather at a predetermined location. In order for  the different military units to recognize one another when the time for uprising came, special insignia were produced: red tin triangles.17

Arms Borekh Goldshteyn was the first to smuggle a pistol into the ghetto for the organization. It was the end of January 1942. Borekh was sent along with eighty other Jews to work at the German munitions depot in Burbishok. Under strict surveillance by the SS, he was tasked with carrying bombs and loading them onto rail cars. At noon, there was a half-hour break, during which time the Jewish workers attempted to evade notice by the guards and slip under the barbed wire to purchase food from local peasants to smuggle back into the ghetto. Borekh Goldshteyn was searching for something different: weapons and bullets

the PartIsaN orGaNIzatIoN

139

for the resistance. He put together the following plan: he wrapped a bandage around his left hand so that it appeared to be swollen with an infection. For two days he came to work with the bandage so that the police guarding the ghetto gate and the SS assigned to Burbishok would take notice of him. On the third day, while his colleagues were wrapping themselves in a “compress” of flour, Borekh slid a pistol he had stolen from a bunker into the bandage of his “swollen” hand and set out for the ghetto. When he arrived at the ghetto, its gate was manned by the “Master,” a Gestapo agent who specialized in patting down and arresting those attempting to smuggle in food. This expert lunged at Borekh and started to search him, combing through his clothes. When he touched Borekh’s “swollen” hand, Borekh cried out in pain. The master stopped his search. From that moment on, there was not a single day that Goldshteyn did not smuggle a weapon into the ghetto. **He passed through town with a limp owing to a weapon concealed in his pant leg. His comrades awaiting him on the other side of the gate watched him through slits in the boards with racing hearts. That day, it was the SS who were on guard. They searched as never before. Borekh was the ninth in line. Half of those who ran the gauntlet before him were arrested. They found potatoes on one, bread on another. If a woman was found with food she had to undress and was publicly flogged. Borekh was now second in line. If they came across a weapon, he knew that hundreds would pay with their lives. That day, the stormtroopers were in control of every lever. But all of a sudden, Yoshke Raf approached the ghetto gate and rushed over to the stormtroopers. He was attempting to draw their attention away from Borekh. The trick worked. Borekh made it through, and Yoshke was arrested.** The FPo’s arsenal included half of a Degtyaryov machine-gun. The next day, Borekh arrived with the missing half. In a very short while, and at great risk to their own lives, the FPo fighters managed to steal five sub-machine-guns, fifty grenades, around thirty revolvers, a few rifles, and thousands of bullets from German bunkers and armoured cars. Even though smuggling weapons through the gates of the ghetto was risky both for the smuggler and for the ghetto as a whole, a variety of tricks were used to get by. A weapon could be concealed in the double

140

vILNa Ghetto

bottom of a toolbox, in a secret pocket, or in a loaf of bread. A coffin could hold a body when it left the ghetto and a rifle when it returned. In May 1942, squad commander Shmuel Kaplinski and partisan fighter Mates Levin dressed in the clothes of municipal sewer workers and set off for the city administration, where they stole red traffic signs. They arranged their red signs in the middle of Stefn Street, opposite the well-guarded ghetto gates, and stopped traffic. Kaplinski opened a manhole and shoved two improvised troughs loaded with weapons down into the sewer. That same night, some of our youths made it to the sewers through a secret opening in Spokoyni’s ghetto workshop. They made their way underground to Stefn Street, where they loaded the weapons into a wheelbarrow and whisked them off. The same Kaplinski made excellent firing pins for forty grenades that had reached the ghetto without them. In September 1943, the grenades were used against the Germans. It was possible to bribe the police guarding the ghetto gates. For ten thousand rubles they allowed entry of potatoes and salt for the starving population. Instead of salt, the brothers Hirsh and Leybl Gordon managed to smuggle in gunpowder. The first acts of sabotage were organized thanks to these explosive ingredients. Eight hundred homemade grenades were manufactured out of lightbulbs using this gunpowder. Yisroel Pilovski also demonstrated great heroism. He was a partisan from Group 3, Battalion 1. He procured weapons from a cobbler whom he knew on Lipuvke Street. One day, when this fighter was in the process of concealing handguns on his body, dozens of Gestapo men burst into the apartment. Pilovski did not panic. He broke a window and escaped with the weapons into the ghetto. The FPo fighters had to be no less careful in the ghetto than outside it. Most of the ghetto population did not and could not know about the FPo. Who knew what kind of people were circulating in the ghetto? We did not want to alarm anyone. During the day, very little was undertaken that might betray the activities of the Resistance. At night, when there was less movement in the ghetto, the transport of weapons began. The FPo’s arsenal was hidden underground, under floorboards, in recesses and holes, and in artfully placed hollowed-out logs. Doublebottomed pails, where pistols were hidden, are worth mentioning as evidence of the underground organization’s ingenuity. The pails were filled with water and stood in plain sight in the soup kitchen at Strashun 12.

the PartIsaN orGaNIzatIoN

141

Military training for different groups took place in caves beneath Karmelitn Street 3 and Daytshe Street 31, and in the Mefitsey-Haskole Library at Strashun Street 6. The lessons were conducted by instructors who were, when not engaged in the lessons, themselves studying to master military skills. Vitenberg, who had not served in the military, quickly became an extraordinary tactician. He acquired expertise in the use of different kinds of weapons and trained his commanders in the strategy the FPo would employ if the ghetto came under assault.

Zalmen Tiktin He was a member of the literary section of the youth club. I taught literature to a group of youths, most of them students in the ghetto high school. At the time we were preparing a literary soirée. Zalmen Tiktin, who was sixteen years old and lost his parents during the First Assault [provokatsye], showed a deep interest in the soirée. He brought a bouquet of flowers to the celebration from Burbishok, where he worked loading munitions. He did this secretly, because anyone found with flowers was punished with twenty lashes. They were not any ordinary flowers. They had grown over the grave of the Gordon brothers, who had been torn to pieces by a bomb in the munitions depot where they worked. The explosion destroyed the camp along with the two brothers. Oberleutnant Wagner, who was the supervisor and boss of Burbishok, thought it was an accident, since Jews had been killed. But Tiktin knew for sure that it was far from an accident, because one of the dead brothers had confided to him that he had decided to blow up a German munitions camp, even if it cost him his life. Zalmen [Tiktin] circulated among the children, his face beaming. The flowers were not the only item exciting him. That day, he also managed to smuggle into the ghetto twelve first-rate grenades for the partisans. I knew that Tiktin was one of us, a partisan. He was the youngest of our comrades. Others knew that he was an expert in the art of smuggling weapons. But few were aware that this sixteen-year-old conceived a plan to blow up the Gestapo headquarters. He told me about it one day when we were returning from a literary meeting. He explained his plan to me in detail. Jews worked in the same courtyard as the Gestapo headquarters. It was not hard to gain access. He

142

vILNa Ghetto

would contact a guy he knew who was employed there as a stone carter, and they would blow up the building together. “Sutzkever, do you understand what a blow that would be? It would rock the entire city!” I warned Zalmen not to undertake anything on his own initiative. He was a member of the Partisan Organization, so he had to restrain himself by following protocol. He was obligated to inform the general staff of his plans. Tiktin confessed that he had already requested permission from the general staff, which had refused his proposal for the time being. He was ordered to be prudent and not to do anything without authorization. But he was not dissuaded. He was prepared to quit the resistance organization in order to carry out his attack. The young man was all worked up. I had the feeling that his actions might be the cause of a great misfortune. I advised him not to behave rashly. One had to be very careful when in possession of grenades, because his behaviour could endanger the lives of twenty thousand Jews. The next day, he went to work as he did every other day. Bombs were lugged around, as usual. Oberleutnant Wagner, the commander of Burbishok, ordered the Jews to move a munitions depot in Antokol. A colonel was coming for an inspection, and Wagner wanted to impress him by showing him how he had transported munitions to distant outposts. **A few days later, when the colonel was gone, the Oberleutnant ordered the Jews to bring all the bombs back to Burbishok. That’s how he put one past his superior. The same bombs made the rounds of Vilna and returned to Burbishok a few months later.** Wagner was cunning. He knew how to trick the colonels. His only goal was to avoid being sent to the front. That night, before going home, Tiktin noticed a new train car on the rails. If a railcar was parked there, it was a sign that it was full of munitions. Tiktin slipped away from the pack, and discretely approached the car. It was sealed. He tore open the seal with his teeth, entered the railcar, and looked around. There were no grenades that day, only fuses and ammunition cartridges. But those were also important. He would not leave the railcar empty-handed. He tied a rope under his pants, and loaded himself up. On his way out he managed to close the railcar door. He crossed over a ditch before making it to a nearby forest. It was there that Mikolauskas, a local Lithuanian expert in pyrotechnics, noticed him. He fired on Tiktin, injuring him, and twelve armed thugs attacked the young man.

the PartIsaN orGaNIzatIoN

143

They tossed Tiktin into a cell. Wagner called the Gestapo. In the meantime he kept all of the Jewish workers under watch in the courtyard. All of a sudden, they saw the following: the cell where Tiktin was being held burst open, and he jumped out, dashing into some nearby bushes and from there to the train tracks. Hit by seven bullets, he fell in the grass. Kittel arrived. When he saw that Tiktin was still alive, he took him in his car to the prison hospital. Kittel called on him every day, bringing him sweets and chocolate. He asked him for whom he had stolen the weapons? Tiktin did not touch these cursed gifts and did not whisper a word to Kittel. A nurse who worked in the hospital later told us that when Kittel insisted on getting the truth out of Tiktin, to find out for whom he had stolen the grenade fuses, the sixteen-year-old boy responded: “I intended them for you. Because you murdered my parents.”

Contacts with the Outside World The Benedictine convent stood on the road between Vilna and Vileyke, near the Vilna-Colony train station.18 It was surrounded by a concrete wall. Seven nuns from Krakow pursued their holy work there. Abba Kovner, a member of the FPo general staff, had previously taken refuge in the convent after he managed to escape from certain death. The mother superior, or matka przeorysza as she was known, took him to a special sideroom where she hid him. The mother superior was thirty-five years old. In her youth she had been a socialist. She had a diploma from the university in Krakow. As the result of a personal tragedy, she had abandoned everything for the monastic life. She was now mother to seven sisters.19 When the Red Army retreated from Vilna, she personally hid a wounded soldier and did not leave him until he had recovered. Aside from Kovner, she later welcomed other Jews into the convent: Kovner’s brother Mikhl, the commander of a group of minelayers who fell fighting in the Kazan forests; and Taybl Gelboym, a twenty-threeyear-old woman later killed while she was on a reconnaissance mission between the ghetto and a partisan base. Edek Boraks, who would later organize an uprising in the Białystok ghetto, also spent time there. The area was subject to frequent searches. During the most critical moments, the mother superior hid the men under nuns’ habits so that they would not be noticed.

144

vILNa Ghetto

It was in this very convent that our comrades came up with the idea of organizing armed resistance in the ghetto. **It was there that Kovner wrote the famous appeal to the ghetto population about not going like sheep to slaughter, and it was there that the decision was made to read it aloud during a secret meeting of Jewish youths.** It was Christmas 1941 when Vitke Kempner20 arrived at the convent from the ghetto to let them know that a date for the initial meeting of the resistance was set. The Jews who had been in hiding at the convent snuck into the ghetto, where they remained. A few days later, the mother superior arrived at a predetermined place with four grenades for Kovner. Because the grenades were specially assembled, the two of them entered the courtyard at Troker Street 11 so the mother superior could show Kovner how to use these special grenades. They were the very first grenades in the ghetto. When they met, the mother superior said to Kovner: “I want to join you in the ghetto. I want to fight and die alongside you. Your battle is sacred. You are noble warriors. And even though you are a Marxist21 and not religious, you have a God, and your God is great. You are closer to Him than I am at this moment. May God be with you!” A short time later, when the mother superior learned that an armed resistance existed in the ghetto, she arrived at the ghetto gates with the intention of entering. She had affixed a yellow patch to herself, and she presented the guards with a counterfeit pass. But the police posted at the ghetto gates recognized that she was not a Jew, and she barely managed to escape imprisonment. Later, the mother superior was the liaison between the ghetto resistance and the Polish underground. It turned out that the people she put us into contact with were part of the Niepodleglosc [Independence] movement. **When we suggested that we combine forces to fight the German occupier, they responded that the time had not yet come to go to battle.** They also refused to provide us with weapons. After talks with the Polish underground broke down, the mother superior herself supplied arms to the ghetto.

**A Radio22 In order not to be cut off from the world, the Partisan Organization installed a secret radio at Karmelitn 3. Every night we printed and distributed a political bulletin for members of the underground.

the PartIsaN orGaNIzatIoN

145

It was winter 1942, the winter of the great Soviet offensive, and the partisans devoured the contents of the bulletins, which encouraged them and sustained their heroism. An attempt was made to install a radio-transmission station in the same cave to inform the rest of the world about the German killings.**

Non-Jewish Partisans in the Ghetto A group of non-Jews belonged to the FPo and actively participated in its work. Irena Adamowicz,23 who knew Yiddish and Hebrew well, furnished weapons to the Warsaw ghetto for months. In March 1942, she came to Vilna at the order of a *democratic scouting* organization. She stayed in the ghetto for two weeks. She lived at Strashun 12, and helped us as much as she could. Our general staff ordered her to Kovno and Shavl in order to help establish similar resistance organizations in those cities. Jadzia Dudziec,24 who was also a member of Polish democratic circles, stayed for even longer in the ghetto, where she counterfeited Polish and Lithuanian papers for the FPo fighters. She regularly hid Jews at her home in a suburb of Vilna. Later, when our organization redeployed to the forests, her home became our meeting place, where partisan messengers would come. The Russian Vanka lived in the ghetto for a long period and was a member of the partisan resistance. He joined the underground Communist Party and later became the liaison agent between the partisan general staff in the forest and the Party organization that remained in the city. Sixteen-year-old Janek joined us in the ghetto from our earliest days. He was born on Yatkever Street, and spoke fluent Yiddish. When war broke out, he fled the city with two Jewish friends. He was hit with shrapnel not far from Minsk. One of his Jewish friends was also injured. The three of them returned to Vilna, entered the ghetto together, and wore the yellow patch. Janek was snatched during the “Night of the Yellow Permits.” He was sent to Ponar with hundreds of others. When the group reached the white mileage markers on Pohulyanke, he managed to escape. He wandered the city for a month and never stopped longing for his Jewish friends. Were they still alive? If so, he had to go find them. So Janek returned to the ghetto.

146

vILNa Ghetto

Of his two friends he managed to find only one: Zalmen Tiktin. They lived together as brothers, and both joined the partisans in the ghetto.

The Paratroopers of Byalovake In February 1942, Hersh Rozonovitsh, our liaison in Byalovake, informed our general staff that groups of Soviet paratroopers had landed in the Skorbutshan Forest, not far from Byalovake. It was the first sign that the resistance was active in the region. The FPo’s general staff decided to establish contact with the partisans. Commander Itsik Vitenberg personally went to Byalovake to find the paratroopers in the forest, establish contact with them, **and speak with their commander, Margis.25** They were the pioneers of the partisan resistance in Lithuania. Their names were Margis, Alksnis, Čiburys, Moysenko, and the radiomen Timauskas and Zaleski (the latter was killed during the battle for the liberation of Vilna). It was from Margis that Vitenberg received the formal support of the Communist organization in the ghetto. Itsik Vitenberg, Berl Shereshnyevski, and Khyene Borovski were appointed to the Vilna municipal Party committee, with the right to recruit new members. The committee’s mission was to organize Party activity in Vilna. The Party recognized the Partisan Organization in the ghetto as part of the broader Lithuanian resistance movement. Berl Shereshnyevski, the secretary of the Vilna committee, contacted the Belorussian Karablikov and Jan Przewalski, a well-known Party activist, and they got to work establishing different Party cells in town, in addition to organizing groups of resistance fighters in several factories. The main objective of resistance groups was to carry out sabotage operations in German businesses. When the two sections of the Party in the ghetto and in the city were consolidated into one, a new Party committee was designated in Vilna. It included Berl Shereshnyevski (secretary of the city committee), Itsik Vitenberg (FPo commander), Sonye Madeysker (responsible for coordinating the work of the Komsomol, the young Communists in Vilna), Makar Korablikov26 (human resources coordinator for the city), and Jan Przewalski (in charge of propaganda). The Vilna committee focused on the struggle against forced mobilization, appealing to the local population to go to the forests rather than

the PartIsaN orGaNIzatIoN

147

serve the enemy. The question of armed resistance in the city and in the ghetto also was raised. Under the direction of Shurke Mazitsh, a group of railway workers charged with sabotage was established. It worked on disrupting rail lines, and provided regular intelligence to the partisans regarding train schedules.

Sabotage and Diversionary Operations Summer 1942. The Germans launched an offensive. Tanks were loaded at the railway spur at Burbishok. The engineer Itsik Ratner built chemical-based miniature devices that he clandestinely inserted into the gasoline reservoirs of fourteen tanks. Eight hours later, when the tanks were pushing towards the front, they caught fire and were totally destroyed. The same Goldshteyn who had managed to smuggle the first machine-gun into the ghetto sabotaged 145 Zenith devices at the munitions depot of Burbishok. He removed the trigger-locks from ninety machine-guns that had been readied for combat at the front. When the Germans ordered the Jews to detonate old shells, the partisans managed to slide newer German weapons among them so that they were destroyed the same time. On a spring day in 1943, a recently arrived German reserve soldier accidentally armed a grenade whose mechanism was unfamiliar to him. Ratner approached the panicked soldier and told him: “Toss the grenade in that direction before it tears you to bits.” (Ratner intentionally pointed in the direction of a camouflaged munitions shed.) When the German threw the grenade, an enormous explosion rang out. A million and a half bullets went up in smoke. The German was accused of sabotage and was later shot. Tevke Galpern worked at the German post office. In the course of routing the mail from the office to the rail station, he managed to tear up and burn thousands of military letters and important packages. He diverted German packages stuffed with food to the ghetto and distributed them to those who were hungry. For the anniversary of the creation of the FPo, Galpern stole a revolver from the suitcase of a German officer and presented it to the organization. Vazgel and Glezer worked diligently to remove the bolts from eight trucks, rendering them useless.

148

vILNa Ghetto

Seventeen-year-old Leyb Distel, a partisan fighter in Group 33, worked at an anti-aircraft site. A trained locksmith, he quickly mastered the workings of the Zenith cannons that were assembled there. Between April and July 1942, he managed to disable forty-three cylinders from these Zeniths. The German army’s summer offensive was in its most active phase. Troop transports passed through the Vilna station without pause. Yitskhok Matskevitsh managed to get hired at the station thanks to false papers he acquired from a Tatar. He kept a careful record of the movements of the military convoys and transmitted them to the general staff of the partisan resistance. The German head of Military Motor Vehicle Repair Park 562 (hkP) could not figure out why his cisterns were losing so much fuel. The FPo leadership had posted nine workers there who were totally devoted to the Partisan Organization. There was a concentration camp for the extraction of peat in Bezdan, 40 kilometres from Vilna, in which men and women from the ghetto were interned. Three young men – Itskovitsh, Kuperberg, and Vaynshtayn, all members of the FPo – worked there. They informed the general staff that they planned to sabotage the rail lines. They were asking for authorization. The general staff dispatched Hirsh Levin to organize the attack. On 20 February 1942, the four young men disconnected 100 metres of track on the Vilna-Ignaline line, not far from Bezdan, using a screw key. One of the most efficient saboteurs was Zelik Goldberg, a former teacher at the Jewish Technical School in Vilna. Since he worked as an engineer in the military factory at the Porubanek airfield, he was able to remove crucial parts and pierce the kerosene tanks of fifty planes that had been brought there for repair. It is also important to credit the FPo with two fires at the Kailis fur and leather factory and the military gas depot at Benzinuvke. At the Kailis factory, Jewish workers coordinated with their Polish and Lithuanian comrades, and in January 1942 they managed to burn down the entire left side of the factory, where sixty thousand fur-lined coats were ready to be sent to the front for German soldiers. They all went up in smoke. The fire reached the other wing of the factory and damaged the machines. At Benzinuvke, the partisan Fridman flipped over a gas lamp in the guard station. The watchman, who was dozing off, woke up only when

the PartIsaN orGaNIzatIoN

149

the fire reached the barracks. Before the fire was under control, it managed to reach a number of large containers of gasoline. Three hundred cans of gasoline exploded. Since the fire started in the guard post, it did not occur to the Gestapo that it was sabotage. Thanks to the work of the FPo, a planned program of sabotage was carried out in German factories where Jews were employed as labourers. Every Jew, whether a member of the Partisan Organization or not, affirmed responsibility to cause damage. Aside from the systematic gathering of weapons from German depots, the organization required money to purchase weapons. We set a goal of collecting a half-million rubles in half a month. Group 4, commanded by Matskevitsh, put a risky plan in motion. Every day, its fighters slipped into the German supply depot and, with the help of the partisan Tolye Zhabinski who worked there, managed to remove bundles of military overcoats, Persian wool jackets, and other fur-lined items. They took it all on a cart to a peasant who was charged with selling the items. The group managed to collect forty thousand rubles this way. Kovalski,27 who was a printer by profession, approached the general staff with an original idea: he wanted to print false bread-ration cards in order to make a handsome profit. The project was approved. A specially constituted group purchased products with these false ration cards. The products were then sold in the ghetto, and a hundred thousand rubles made it to the coffers of the partisans. Dodik Vidutski snatched a packet of money containing thirty-five thousand rubles from a German control station and turned it over to the organization. Money was also collected secretly from the ghetto population, whose Jews provided thousands of rubles, no questions asked. Groups competed to determine who could collect the largest sum. Partisans turned over valuables, among them their last mementos from their slaughtered parents, such as watches, rings, and bracelets. A fighter by the name of Rotkin offered the watch that had belonged to his wife, who had recently been shot. He said: “My vengeance is worth more than a memento!” I also donated to the cause of purchasing weapons by turning over the last remaining possession of my murdered mother: her wedding ring, which she had entrusted to me on the eve of her execution. The frenzy of fund-raising was so strong that, instead of collecting a half-million rubles, we managed to gather a million for the organization.

150

vILNa Ghetto

Assistance for Prisoners of War and Families of Soviet Commanders In Vilna there were two large camps for Soviet prisoners of war and for families of Soviet military leaders: in the “cheap houses” at Subotsh Street 37 *(the same location would host the hkP concentration camp for Jews)*, and in the Antokol prison. Jews who worked in the area did everything in their power to assist the prisoners, despite the German edict that proclaimed: “If a Jew speaks to a prisoner, both will be shot.” The execution of thousands of [Soviet] prisoners of war began once the murderers had their fill of Jewish blood. Russians were not treated any better than the Jews. I personally witnessed a scene that I will never be able to forget. It was freezing cold. Three hundred prisoners of war lay in the snow along the railway tracks by the iron bridge. They were barefoot. Their hands and feet were frozen, and their bodies were ravaged by starvation. They were tossed one on top of the other. Many were already dead. Others were still moving, barely breathing. A stout, ruddy-faced German stood opposite them, provocatively gorging himself on a sausage. Prisoners of war were used as slave labour in German workshops at the hkP camp. A few of them tried to escape. The general command in the ghetto assigned a group to procure false papers and civilian clothing for the prisoners, and to find a way for them to make it to the partisans. For example, the fighters Feldman and Blume Markovitsh (who would fall during the fight for the liberation of Vilna) helped eight prisoners of war, including Captain Seriozhin, furnishing them with everything they needed and dispatching them to the forests around Lide.

In the “Cheap Houses”28 Before the war about a thousand Jews lived in the “cheap houses,” tenements at Subotsh Street 37. A few days before the Jews were herded into the ghetto, the Germans encircled both buildings and murdered their inhabitants. The apartments of the murdered Jews were immediately filled with the wives and children of Soviet commanders and members of the Red Army. **The prisoner-of-war camp was guarded. Entry or exit was forbidden. But a Russian song, written by a ten-year-old child, managed to

the PartIsaN orGaNIzatIoN

151

tear itself free from the makeshift camp, like a dove. We sang it in the ghetto. I still remember the lyrics of the first stanza: На улице Субоч два дома стоят, Раньше евреи там жили; Теперь там русские люди живут – Евреев-то немцы убили … There are two buildings on Subotsh Street, Jews once lived in them; Now Russians have taken up home there – The Germans slaughtered the Jews … I heard the song for the first time in January 1942.** It was terribly cold. The Red Army had pushed Hitler from the outskirts of Moscow. Jews who worked around the train station reported nightly on the number of military convoys that were returning from the front filled with “apples” – frozen Germans in retreat from the front. Germans in Vilna and Lithuania decided to assist their frozen colleagues. A call for a “voluntary” assessment in support of the German army appeared all over town: the population was asked to bring warm clothes, shoes, boots, furs, and blankets to a police station, anything that could warm these frozen Nazis. The announcement, signed by German Oberkommissar von Renteln, concluded by stating that those who voluntarily contributed would receive a Citation of Honest Citizenship. The assessment also applied to the ghetto. But the local population did not want to assist those who were enslaving them. So the Germans showed their “cleverness.” They stopped men and women in the street, tore off their clothing, and left them naked. They also undertook snap searches throughout town and confiscated whatever they could find. The Germans used the Jews of the ghetto to sort, pack, and gather all the clothes. I was among them. Once, I found myself on a truck full of furs and felt boots. One of my comrades in the truck started to sing the song of the “cheap houses.” He told me that the woman and children interned there were dying of hunger and hypothermia. “How do you know this?” asked young Rudashevski, who was in the truck with us.

152

vILNa Ghetto

“I was there a short while back. I slid under the barbed wire and spent the night in the camp. I am the one who brought the song to the outside world.” Indeed, Gershke (that was the name of the guy singing) learned that one of his friends was interned in the Russian camp, the son of a Red Army soldier who had fallen in battle. Gershke went there to take bread to his friend, who then taught him the song. Gershke brought it back to the ghetto, and everyone took it up. The truck stopped on Poplaves, near the disinfection centre. We were to unload the stolen clothing there. While we were unloading the packages, it occurred to us that, rather than handing them over to the Germans, it would be better to provide them to the naked and starving children and women of the “cheap houses.” Children as young as ten years old often slid under the barbed wire around the “cheap houses.” They begged for bread in the surrounding buildings. These kids were there when we unloaded the fur-lined coats. It was important to develop a relationship with them. I called over a barefooted youngster and told him that tomorrow he and his buddies should sneak out of the camp and wait for our truck at the top of Subotsh Street, next to the small market. We would drive by and toss out what we could from the same truck. The little fellow understood. The next day ten kids were waiting for us. We tossed them fur-lined jackets, underwear, felt boots, shawls, sweaters, shoes, and a package of foodstuffs. We purchased the food on the way from a peasant in exchange for a Persian wool coat **that clearly did not belong to us.** The German who was sitting next to the driver and who was there to make sure we did not steal anything noticed nothing. The driver certainly knew. Since the German guard was unfamiliar with Vilna, the driver took backroads, and when we arrived at the spot on Subotsh Street he intentionally slowed down so that we could toss out the packages. The kids quickly gathered up our gifts and covered them in snow so that nobody would notice. When night fell, they smuggled them into the camp for their mothers. We repeated the operation day after day for an entire week. The prisoners felt reborn. We received a note from them: “We will always remember what you did for us, and when the time comes we will let our country know that in Vilna, in 1942, the Jews of the ghetto, themselves reduced to slaves and brutalized, did not lose their humanity. During a time when the

the PartIsaN orGaNIzatIoN

153

simple act of talking to a non-Jew was a capital crime, they risked their lives and saved other victims of the same regime from famine and cold.”

**The First Operation29 Itsik Vitenberg, the ghetto resistance commander, summoned me. We had to talk about a Soviet officer I knew who was hiding in the ghetto and looking for a way to make contact with the partisans. It was night. When we finished talking, we were joined by general staff members Abba [Kovner] and Borekh [Goldshteyn], our weapons master. “Listen, Borekh,” Itsik told him, drawing him closer, “I know you are someone we can trust. I also know that you are a connoisseur of weapons. All of the pistols you refurbished have proven to be great shots. But now, it’s not a matter of trust. Don’t misunderstand me. We need to know whether the mine you assembled in the ghetto will actually explode. It will be our first major operation. We are going to dispatch our best fighters. Their very lives will be on the line. If the train isn’t blown to pieces, we will lose infinitely more than if we had done nothing, because there will be victims, in addition to the fact that the rail lines then will be more heavily guarded and it will be more difficult to get anywhere near them again. That’s why I’m asking you again: are you positive that the mine will explode?” “Yes, I’m certain,” Borekh responded. Abba added: “If Borekh says that he is certain, then I say the same thing. We must make plans for this operation immediately. Our informants tell us that tomorrow troop transports will be passing through Nay-Vileyke all night. We should not lose this opportunity.” We heard voices from outside. Itsik rose rapidly from the bed on which he was lying and opened the window. A dozen old Jewish women were running, hands on their heads, crying: “Our children!” Their sons, who had been taken by force to Nay-Vileyke to work, had not returned to the ghetto. Murer had found them in possession of potatoes, wood, and a litre of milk each. He locked them in Lukishki Prison, where death awaited them. The next day, new Jews would replace them at Nay-Vileyke. “We will execute the Nay-Vileyke operation,” Itsik commanded. “And now,” Borekh interrupted, “I’m asking you to authorize me to participate in this operation, if only because I built the mine and I understand its mechanism.”

154

vILNa Ghetto

Night after night, for an entire month, hidden in a cellar at Karmelitn Street 3, Borekh had busied himself building a mine. He stole the gun powder from a German munitions depot. He smuggled it into the ghetto and hid it in this dark cellar. In order to make certain that the ignition device would work, he tested it at the very bottom level of the cellar. He buried it with a bit of dynamite, and from afar, with the help of a metal rod, he hit the trigger. A loud explosion and flying dirt in the cellar – it worked! Now, Borekh was with us in the room. He was pale, sporting a twisted star on his chest and breathing hard at the rhythm of his words. He was demanding that he be permitted to participate in the first resistance operation. “Unfortunately,” Vitenberg responded, giving him a tap on the shoulder, “I can’t allow this. You know well that for the moment you are the only one with the ability to repair all kinds of weapons. Moreover, you are the commander of a group of grenade launchers, and it would be a huge risk for the organization to have you participate in this mission.” Vitke Kempner, the liaison between the ghetto resistance and the Party section located in town, entered. She was a sturdily built young woman with a boyish haircut. Her hollow cheeks were dotted with freckles. She handed Vitenberg the bulletin describing the latest political news transcribed from a secret radio in the ghetto. She turned to speak to Itsik: “I know what you are negotiating about. You don’t have to spell it out for me. I haven’t slept a wink all night. In short: I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t participate in blowing up that train.” Her fellow comrades exploded in laughter. Vitenberg put a quick damper on their laughter. “I approve. And who will accompany you?” While Vitke was thinking, Abba came to her aid: “Yitskhok Matskevitsh and Moyshe Brauze.” It was a May night, 1942. The young man and woman snuck out of the ghetto through a secret passage. They were not wearing the required patches, and they reached the city by taking the sidewalks, all the way to the main street. The young man held his female comrade by the arm. They were speaking clear German, in order not to arouse the suspicion of passersby. They had to move quickly. It was already 9:30, and “Aryans” had a right to be out only until 10 p.m. They had to cross the entire city

the PartIsaN orGaNIzatIoN

155

swiftly.  They passed Baksht Street, then the little bridge over the Vilenke, until they reached Polotsker Street. Once they had pushed through Polotsker Street they were already up on the Batory highway. They left the road and took side streets. At 11:30 p.m. they met up with their comrade Moyshe Brauze, not far from a paper factory, under an old oak tree. Brauze had been there since dawn. He had left the ghetto with workers who had been tasked with carrying rocks and paving a road. He waited for his two comrades. He was the one with the mine. It was already two in the morning. They entered a small forest. Vitke and Yitskhok approached the rail line. Brauze served as lookout to make sure nobody was in the area. Yitskhok took out a small spade to clear a rail. He lined the hole with rocks that Vitke passed to him, so that the mine would not sink into the ground when the train passed over it. Once the mine was firmly in the hole, they covered it with sand and took off in the direction of Vileyke. They crossed the river and stood among the willows awaiting the train. Total silence. The mountains on the horizon are lost in a mist coming from the exhaust of an approaching train. The tree line is enveloped with smoke. A train! Suddenly, they observed a locomotive emerge from the thick forest, followed by a string of cars. Ten, twenty, thirty – they could not keep track. German songs could be heard in the distance. Vitke worried that the locomotive had already passed and that the mine had not triggered. She closed her eyes and dared not to admit this to her comrades. But Yitskhok had no doubts. He remembered precisely where they had set the mine, and the locomotive had not yet reached the spot. The train was almost there. It was a matter of seconds; then … Earth, man, and metal blended in the sky. A bunch of cars filled with weapons and Germans, racing down the track in the direction of Polotsk. It was among the first operations that disrupted the relative quiet of the Vilna region. Until today, few people know that it was the work of three young people from the ghetto. The next morning we learned from the peasants who were ordered to gather up bodies that around two hundred soldiers had been killed. This did not include those wounded, whose numbers we did not know.

156

vILNa Ghetto

The peasants gathered up and hid the pistols, rifles, and many bullets from the scene of the explosion. A year and a half later, when we, the ghetto fighters, fled through the sewers for the forests, we remembered the guns and rifles that the peasants of Vileyke had obtained during that first operation. We went in search of them. They handed them over to us, and with those German weapons we set out to kill Germans.**

The Appeal to Other Jewish Communities When the Partisan Organization was well established in the ghetto, it was decided to send emissaries to other Jewish cities to help them organize the resistance in their own communities. The Białystok ghetto consisted of some forty thousand Jews. The one in Warsaw counted a half-million. The Jews of Białystok did not believe the news about the mass slaughters in Vilna. Those in Warsaw were certain that there was no way to exterminate half a million people. In February 1942 we made contact with Josef Schmid,30 a Czech mobilized in the German army. In his own car, without asking for any payment in return, he drove three of our members to Białystok and Warsaw: Edek Boraks, Josef Kempner, and Solomon Entin. Their mission was to tell the Jews of Białystok and Warsaw about the massacres of the Jews of Lithuania. They also told them about Ponar. When Edek Boraks returned to Vilna and told us about the degree of incredulity that met our warnings about the mass murder, the general staff of the FPo decided to convince Białystok and Warsaw with facts. We printed a special appeal to all Jews under German occupation. It described in precise detail the systematic extermination of the Jews of Lithuania and Belorussia, **and included terrifying numbers about Vilna, Vileyke, Kovno, and Minsk:** The fate of all Jews under Nazi occupation is total extermination, without any regard for German economic interest. Brothers! Stop deluding yourselves that you are economically indispensable. It will not save you. Abandon any hope that because you are so useful the Germans will not exterminate the forty thousand Jews of Białystok, let alone the half-million Jews of Warsaw. The extermination of the Jews is a core objective. It is not contingent on local conditions. The Germans in Grodno,

the PartIsaN orGaNIzatIoN

157

Białystok, and Warsaw, in order to demonstrate their contribution to the war effort through work and avoid being sent to the front, might be able to prolong the existence of their ghettos for a short while. But extermination is being conducted systematically, and it will sooner or later befall everyone. This political objective surpasses any economic calculation. Wherever a Jewish population exists, Hitler will make of it a Ponar! Jews! Organize yourselves! Take up arms! Jews! Resist! The United Partisan Organization of the Vilna ghetto Two sisters, Sore and Reyzl Zilber, carried the appeal to Białystok and Warsaw. It was distributed to members of different parties. This time it opened their eyes. On the way back, the Zilber sisters were arrested by the Gestapo on the outskirts of Malkin. They met their end in a death camp. After them the young teacher Khaye Grosman31 was dispatched to Warsaw. There she made contact with an emissary of the PPr [Polska Partia Robotnicza, the Polish Workers Party].32 Around the same time, Edek Boraks left Vilna for the Białystok ghetto. Khaye Grosman also came from Warsaw to meet up with him in Białystok. There they created the organization Tsum kamf mitn daytshishn okupant [For Battle against the German Occupier]. Later, they made contact with a group of partisan fighters in a nearby forest. • At the beginning of 1942, Dr Wulff, the Gebietskommissar of the Vilna district, set his sights on the last Jews in the countryside. Under the pretext of wanting to protect them from the partisans, Jews were gathered in Oshmene from the neighbouring towns of Sol, Mikhalishok, Svir, and others. In order to reassure the Jews now concentrated in Oshmene, the Gestapo distributed work permits. Aware of the Germans’ murderous plans, the FPo dispatched partisan fighter Lize Magun to Oshmene to organize groups to join the fight in the forest. The Oshmene ghetto was encircled by police. All the same, Lize managed to smuggle herself in and took up her activist work: “Jews! You will be led to the slaughter! These work permits exist only to deceive

158

vILNa Ghetto

you! Escape before it is too late!” She organized armed groups who took to the forests. When Lize returned from Oshmene she carried out additional assignments in Vilna. She once had to register her false papers. When she went to the German police station, she was recognized and arrested. She was tortured by the Gestapo for a month. They burned her with hot irons, but were unable to get a word out of her. She managed to smuggle out a letter from prison: “I know what awaits me. I cannot get used to the thought that they will send me to Ponar. I am calm. I send greetings to our comrades. What is the situation in Białystok? Be strong! Lize.” To memorialize Lize, her comrades purchased a gun in her name. Borekh Goldshteyn stole the weapon from the Germans to mark the shloshim, the traditional end of the thirty-day mourning period, and brought it to the ghetto. The general staff of the FPo chose the code Lize ruft [Lize is calling!] to signal the need for immediate mobilization.

The Secret Print Shop The idea was to establish a print shop. At the beginning of 1942 there was still no established anti-fascist underground in town. The Polish nationalist organization and its paper, Niepodleglość [Independence], had not stopped agitating against the Soviet Union and the partisan resistance. In February 1942 the general staff of the FPo distributed hectograph copies33 of an appeal to the local population. We understood that the matter of resistance was not only a Jewish concern. The slaughter of Jews was only the beginning of a process of systemic murder that would befall the peoples of Europe. This is a translation of the first hectograph appeal disseminated by the FPo: Citizens of all territories under occupation! The enemy is bleeding on all fronts. Enemy reserves have been decimated by the force of the Red Army. The encircled German armies are threatened with death and total annihilation. German divisions are trapped on the battlefield, exhausted, demoralized, and incapable of fighting. Hitler propelled his forces into combat, promising them that they would reach Moscow in fourteen days. But the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months. When summer arrived,

the PartIsaN orGaNIzatIoN

159

he ordered them to wait until autumn. And when all hope of overcoming the Red Army’s resistance evaporated, a new goal was set back to winter. But winter proved catastrophic for the Germans. Millions of soldiers did not return from the battlefield. Tons of military materials were destroyed by the incessant blows of the Red Army. It is now the eve of spring on the frontlines. There are twenty million armed Soviet soldiers. Nine million are at the front, and eleven million in reserve.34 The Red Army, reinforced by new and powerful military supplies, is preparing a massive attack in order to devastate the enemy and deliver it a mortal blow. Inhabitants of all occupied territories! The enemy, fearing an organized resistance, wants to annihilate you as soon as possible. The enemy is executing your best sons. It is deporting you by the hundreds and by the thousands to Germany. Hitler’s terror has already annihilated huge numbers of people in Warsaw, Kalisz, Vilna, and Lemberg. Don’t allow yourself to be led like sheep to slaughter. If the enemy is forced to confront resistance from all of us, it will not be able to carry out its plans. Thousands of passive victims have already fallen. But freedom is earned by those who sacrifice their lives in action. Join the partisans! Block the enemy at all roads and pathways! Take up sabotage! Destroy roads, convoys, factories, camps. Don’t provide the enemy with a moment’s peace! Death to the occupiers! Victory is ours! The Association of Fighters against German Occupation Vilna, February 1942 The leaflet was distributed in every factory and workshop in town thanks to Jewish slave labourers. As they made their way to work at the tip of the stormtrooper’s bayonet, they ensured that it circulated throughout the entire city. Many ghetto children, even those who were only ten or twelve years old, were assigned to forced labour in town. More than once the

160

vILNa Ghetto

Partisan Organization entrusted important missions to them. What conscientiousness and self-sacrifice existed among these young ones! Dozens, even hundreds of leaflets were distributed in town thanks to these precious kids. • After that first hectograph leaflet intended for the local population, Itsik Kovalski, a Vilna printer, proposed an audacious plan to the general staff of the FPo: the creation of a clandestine print shop. The general staff agreed to the project. At the time, our organization had warm ties with the Communist underground organization in town. The plan was coordinated with the Party. Kovalski himself describes how he managed to steal the print fonts: With the approval of our military command I managed to find work in the German state print house. Since the majority of the workers there already knew me, I was able to overcome the obstacles. I immediately got to work for our cause. I arranged with Sonye Madeysker that at noon the next day, during the lunch break, when the print shop was deserted for a half-hour, a man would await me by the entryway. I would hand over everything I could get my hands on that could be of use in the creation of our print shop. I would recognize the man by the following signs: he would be of medium height, wearing glasses and a black coat with a fur collar. He would be holding a rolled-up copy of the Polish newspaper Goniec Codzienny. He was on time. He took my “allotted portion” and continued on his way. In the ghetto, Sonye managed to let me know that the package had arrived safely, and that the next day two comrades would come to take the next delivery. For a few weeks, these two would come at the fixed hour, and I would provide them with packages containing type fonts and other materials. Then, in order not to arouse suspicion, only one of them would come – the one I had met the first time. His name was Jan Przewalski – *an audacious Polish Communist.*

the PartIsaN orGaNIzatIoN

161

Our daily meetings continued for a month, until we established an underground press at Shlos Street 15 that had everything it needed to function effectively: paper, ink, fonts, frames, finishing materials, and so on. We managed to steal and remove materials from the German factory in the following way: while the used page matrices of Goniec Codzienny were disassembled, I gained access to its type fonts, since nobody seemed to be watching over them. I selected those that were most needed and hid them. I had to do it while protecting myself from three hundred sets of eyes. My time to meet with Jan was set for 4:30 in the afternoon, the time I was supposed to return to the ghetto. At one point I had spoken with him about coming the next day with a large briefcase in order to take a framer, a roller, a galley, and a page make-up. I had put them aside at the print house, and it was critical that they be removed. I put the frame around my waist, and I wrapped the other objects in scrap paper, like a package. A surprise was awaiting me at the door: Škėma, the manager. He asked me what I was carrying. I responded coldly that it was scrap paper, because I lacked heating materials in the ghetto. He believed me. My heart was racing as I exited in search of Jan, but there was no trace of him. I ran to the orchard in search of him in case he had hid himself there. But he was nowhere to be found. It was getting late. Jews had no right to be in the streets after six in the evening. I decided to return to the print shop, hide my stash in a maline, and return to the ghetto. But things did not go as planned. The manager of the print shop was in the courtyard, so returning there was out of the question. I did a complete aboutface, and set off for the ghetto loaded with lead and iron. On the way – a catastrophe! My belt broke, and the heavy frame was pulling down my pants. I tried to keep my cool. Through my coat pocket I attempted to hold up the bottom of the frame. My only objective was to make it back to the ghetto as soon as possible. With great difficulty I dragged myself all the way to the ghetto. Murer was personally manning the gate. There was no possibility of going elsewhere because it was already six o’clock. The frame and my pants kept slipping. I was determined to avoid being

162

vILNa Ghetto

searched at all costs, and while Murer was busy whipping a Jewish woman I slid into the ghetto … I turned over my load to Sonye and Berl, and the next day they communicated to Jan that he should no longer come to meet me because he had been followed. Having fully equipped a print shop in town,35 I turned to establishing a second one in the ghetto itself. Many papers, posters, and leaflets in Lithuanian, German, and Polish were published by these two print shops. The newspaper Sztandar Wolności [The Banner of Freedom] was published in Polish. It included articles by Itsik Vitenberg, Sonye Madeysker, Jan Przewalski, and Dr Gordon. Later, Polish writers were attracted to writing for it. Its editorial staff included Przewalski’s wife, Josefa, Vera Aganiovska, and Sonye Madeysker.

The Special Section of the FPO The purpose of this section was to obtain information on secret orders concerning Jews emanating from the German authorities, to gather military secrets, to uncover Gestapo agents working in the ghetto and in town, and to keep an eye on members of the FPo. The group operated unbeknownst to the rest of the organization. Nobody could know who its members were. Yoysef Glazman, a member of the general staff, commanded it. One of his principal agents was Mire Gonionski (a hero who was killed in the forests while trying to urge the police to join the partisans). Thanks to her beauty, she managed to earn the confidence of both Burakas, the head of the Ypatinga, and Major Marušis, in order to glean information regarding planned actions against Jews, Poles, and prisoners of war. At the order of the general staff of the FPo, Gonionski got close to Desler, the chief of Jewish police in the ghetto.36 She was our most trusted agent when it came to him. She was able to steal official Gestapo stationery that proved useful to the resistance. Several members of this special unit purposely enlisted in the ghetto police so as to keep watch over happenings in the ghetto. It also unmasked other traitors in town, and transmitted their names to the

the PartIsaN orGaNIzatIoN

163

underground resistance organization. Based on this information, the Polish Gestapo agent Wilezanska and another spy were executed. This unit also kept watch on members of the FPo. When there were suspicions about a member, we did not remove him from the organization, but put him in a fake unit that was not entrusted with any meaningful action.

The FPO Hymn Never say, this is the last road for you, Leaden skies are masking days of blue. The hour we yearn for is drawing near Our step will beat the signal: We are here! From southern palms, from lands long white with snow, We come with all our pain and all our woe, Wherever seeped our blood into the earth, Our courage and our strength will have rebirth. Tomorrow’s sun will gild our sad today, The enemy and yesterday will fade away. But should the dawn delay or sunrise wait too long, Then let all future generations sing this song. This song was written with our blood and not with lead, This is no song of free birds flying overhead, But a people amid crumbling walls did stand, They stood and sang this song with rifles held in hand.37 The hymn was composed by Hirsh Glik, a young Yiddish poet.38 He was attempting to escape the encirclement of the ghetto during its liquidation when he was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp in Estonia. *He was killed there in September 1944.* **But his song reached the forest through his comrades, who exacted vengeance on his behalf.**

164

vILNa Ghetto

We Celebrate May Day (1943) We met secretly in a café at Shavler (Shavelske) Street 6. The crowd consisted of members of the Partisan Organization, students, and children from the youth club. We all wore white shirts. Everyone had a red ribbon pinned on him or her at the entrance. The hall was decorated with greenery and flowers. Our youths had brought them from their forced labour in town. They had to conceal them from the police. The scent of the greenery evoked freedom. Springtime was concentrated in a single twig. A member of the Partisan Organization opened the ceremony. He began by asking everyone to rise in solidarity with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which had started on 20 April.39 “While we are celebrating the first of May, our fellow Jews in Warsaw are fighting amid the flames. The day is coming when we also will have to take up arms. Let us follow the example of Warsaw and fight to the last person.” The political bulletin of the clandestine ghetto radio was read aloud. We sang revolutionary songs. The violinist Rabinovitsh performed. I recited my poem “A nem ton dem ayzn” [Take Up Arms].40 The Lithuanian librarian [Ona] Šimaitė was also in the hall. She had come to the ghetto to participate in the celebrations. After the public ceremony a few comrades convened at Vitenberg’s apartment. Vitenberg delivered a few words to this small circle. He provided an overview of the situation on the front, delivered information on German losses, and suggested that when the Red Army approached, we would have to go into town to mobilize the population to contribute to the liberation of Vilna.

Under the Protection of Esther-Rokhl Kaminska I worked in the building that had been the headquarters of the Yiddish Scientific Institute [YIvo]. I was part of the Rosenberg Task Force, which was charged with collecting and pillaging cultural treasures from Vilna’s museums and libraries.41 The entire time I occupied myself with saving cultural treasures, I never forgot that we had to defend ourselves also. The Partisan Organization was in desperate need of machine-guns. My friend Kaczerginski worked alongside me. We decided to procure a machine-gun.

the PartIsaN orGaNIzatIoN

165

Kaczerginksi’s wife, who was from Krakow and did not look Jewish, never entered the ghetto. She passed as a non-Jew and lived in town with a close friend of her husband, a Lithuanian, who furnished her with false papers. I also knew him. His name was Julian Jankauskas. He often arrived at the entrance to the institute to bring us food and leaflets from the underground organizations. *On one occasion, we told him that the ghetto needed weapons.* Early the next morning he brought us a gun. In the period of a single month he delivered twenty other weapons: automatic pistols, Mausers, and thirteen Belgian Parabelles with a thousand bullets. He promised to provide us with a machine-gun. At seven in the morning on a specified day, at the time we normally arrived for work, he was supposed to bring us the first machine-gun. We already had a place to hide the machine-gun pieces, and there was a specific plan to smuggle them into the ghetto. I could hardly wait for the day to come. It was the same day Mussolini was deposed.42 We were all encouraged. But Jankauskas did not show up that morning. We did not know what to think. Perhaps the plan had been foiled? Ten o’clock came and went, then eleven, and still he was not there. Even three unknown letters by Sholem Aleichem that I fortuitously discovered hidden between the pages of a tractate of Talmud could not raise morale. Dr Spinkler, the “theoretician” of the Rosenberg Task Force in Vilna, entered the room. He was in a good mood that day. He had received a letter from Berlin informing him that his wife had survived a large bombardment. What joy! The entire street had been reduced to rubble. Only the lower floor, where his Marite lived, was still standing. He had come to tell us that we should be sure to affix the yellow patches to our clothing properly. They had to be fastened not only to our outerwear but also to all shirts and blouses. The order came directly from Murer. An important commission from Berlin would arrive in two hours, after lunch, to inspect the anti-semitic exhibit that was on display on the upper floor. It was possible its members would visit other rooms as well. He advised us to make ourselves scarce. *I was relieved that Jankauskas had not arrived that morning. We would not have to worry about having weapons in the institute while a German commission was visiting. I got to work gathering up the scattered index cards of Alfred Landau’s Yiddish dictionary. 43

166

vILNa Ghetto

The great philologist had worked for sixty years on the project but did not live to see it published. After his death his relatives sent his papers and his private library to YIvo in Vilna. My friend Gininberg from Czernowitz had worked on the project in Vilna for several years before the war, diligently attempting to assemble the dictionary. Now its pages were scattered and trampled on the floor. I gathered them up, put them back in small cardboard boxes, and thought about where I could hide them.* The clock struck one. The Germans left for lunch. Only a single supervisor, Wirblis, remained behind. His job was to listen in on what the Jews were discussing, and to keep an eye on everything they were doing. *Twenty boxes full of Alfred Landau’s work were already packed together. I wrapped them in scrap paper and decided they should be put into hiding that day. The teacher Rokhl Krinski kept watch at the door to make sure nobody was coming.* Suddenly, I looked up and saw Jankauskas through the window. I would have recognized his tall, thin silhouette even at night. The young man was carrying a case that I myself could certainly have fitted into. Blood beat at my temples. I asked Rokhl Krinski to distract Wirblis for a half-hour. Kaczerginski and I rushed to the yard to meet Jankauskas. He was waiting amid the trees. He was sweating. He wiped his face with a handkerchief and told us that he had been unable to come in the morning because there had been a search in the cellar where the machine-gun was stashed. Three hundred inhabitants of the surrounding buildings had been arrested and sent to the Gestapo. He had managed to retrieve the weapon only now. It was in the case. He was hiding its tripod in the belt of his pants … We were not expecting this: to walk the streets of Vilna in the middle of the day with a machine-gun! But we had no time to think. The commission from Berlin would be arriving at two o’clock. The execution platoon of the SS was located across from the YIvo building. All sorts of people were passing back and forth in the courtyard. *I took the valise, barely able to lift it.* The two of us carried the suitcase down to the basement and buried it under a stack of newspapers. We removed its contents and took one piece upstairs to the art storage room, so that the machine-gun could never be discovered whole.

the PartIsaN orGaNIzatIoN

167

At the same time the partisan Reyzl Korczak44 ran to town without wearing the required patch in order to let our comrades in the ghetto know that they should come quickly to take possession of  the machine-gun. The art storage room was divided by a simple partition. The space belonged to me, as it were. All of the Jewish art looted from various museums was brought here to “me.” I had to register the items, give them a number, and bring them into the storage room through a door that connected the two rooms. I took the barrel of the gun and hid it under three paintings. The one at the bottom, touching the metal of the gun, was a portrait of Esther-Rokhl Kaminska. 45 It was from the theatre collection of YIvo. In the painting, the mother of Yiddish theatre appeared young and pretty, her hair covered by a veil. The second work that protected the machine-gun was a drawing by Marc Chagall. The third one, on top, was the famous tableau Refugees, by Maurycy Minkowski,46 that had come from the An-ski Museum. I brought the machine-gun’s automatic loader to my manuscript room, put it in a cardboard box, and covered it with a Bible. The young woman who had run to town came back with awful news: Kittel had come to the ghetto to arrest Vitenberg, the commander of the Partisan Organization.47 The ghetto gates were under tight guard, and it would be impossible to smuggle in the machine-gun today. We heard the sound of a car. The commission from Berlin had arrived … Four crisply dressed Germans alighted. They all wore the same brown uniforms of the Rosenberg Task Force, sporting a black swastika on a red background on their sleeves. The guests went to the top floor to visit the specially prepared anti-Jewish exhibit. *But upstairs they also saw a dozen anti-Nazi publications and caricatures that had been made by Jews in different languages and countries. There was also a corner of Sovietica, including pictures of Soviet leaders and Marxist publications. The exhibit was organized in such a way that it could be displayed in either a Soviet city or anywhere else. Things were the opposite of what the Germans had expected: it was not an anti-Jewish exhibit, but an anti-German one.* The exhibit did not satisfy the commission from Berlin. Its members were shouting, and the sound of Sporket nervously tapping his boots could be heard down the hallway.

168

vILNa Ghetto

I heard someone open the door to the art storage room. Having failed at his exhibition, Sporket had apparently decided to honour his guests by showing them Jewish art. On the other side of the wall I overheard him pontificating about the significant value of these works and how much effort he had made to acquire them. “Dieses Bild stellte jüdische Flüchtlinge dar.” I heard Sporket explain to his friends from Berlin that Minkowski’s tableau, under which I had concealed the machine-gun’s barrel, portrayed Jewish refugees. I felt my heart racing. Blood rushed to my face. Catastrophe was near. They were going to discover the barrel, and aside from killing us, the thirty Jews working at YIvo, they would murder all the inhabitants of the ghetto! And who would be responsible for this? Me! How could I have been so careless? *What could I do? How could I save my fellow Jews? How was the young schoolteacher, my co-worker, guilty? Her only consolation was the opportunity tomorrow to see her child, who was being raised by a peasant woman.48 And what about our youths?! I needed to find a solution.* A crazy thought suddenly occurred to me, and there was no time to think it over. I had to act quickly. I ran into the art storage room, and called out “Verzeihen Sie!” [Pardon me!] I then ran out through the second door and returned to my room through the corridor. I hoped to turn their attention away from the art. I wanted them to take me for a fool, so long as they did not touch the paintings under which the barrel of the machine-gun was hidden. *The teacher was pale. She suspected that we were on the precipice of a terrible calamity. And tomorrow she was supposed to meet with her child. She had prepared a pair of blue shoes for the occasion. Where were they? The Germans would find the shoes and find out about the hidden child.* I stood by the door and overheard what was going on in the art room. My entry had confused them. “Wer ist der verrückte Jude?” [Who is that crazy Jew?], a tall German, like an upright serpent, lisped. Sporket tried to smooth things over. He took the second piece, the drawing by Chagall. He explained: “This painter is a Jew who Judaized European art.” My head was about to explode, my throat was tight as if it were being choked by a fist. The last defence was Esther-Rokhl Kaminska! She alone was protecting the machine-gun. One second more could lead to disaster. The teacher was alarmed by my appearance. **I had to act. The wick was burning, and the flame was approaching the gunpowder.** I

the PartIsaN orGaNIzatIoN

169

opened the door again and pushed my way into the group of Germans. I was waving my hands, my face was dripping with sweat, and I was gesturing wildly. The Germans did not understand what was going on. Who was this crazy Jew spinning through the room like a demon and then disappearing again? Sporket’s hand was frozen on Marc Chagall’s drawing. He had no idea how to explain this, and *the upright serpent,* **that tall German,** said to his comrades: “Schnell, fort aus diesem Irrenhaus” [Quick, let’s get out of this insane asylum]. The Germans marched out of the room in anger and disappointment. A few days later we managed to smuggle the machine-gun into the ghetto. We reassembled it and prepared it to welcome the enemy. On 12 September 1943 it helped us force our way through the ghetto, escape to the forests, and join the partisans.

Itsik Vitenberg Itsik Vitenberg was the inspiration and organizer of the Partisan Organization in the ghetto, as well as its commander. He was born in 1907 in Vilna into a family of workers. He completed a Yiddish elementary school, and went on to learn how to become a leather stitcher. *His friends recall that at night he devoted himself to reading. He excelled at any number of interests.* At a young age he joined his trade union. He was a member of the Polish Communist Party. Thanks to his intelligence and honesty, he earned the respect of workers. In 1936 he was elected head of the Leather Workers Union, which clandestinely conducted its work protesting the unjust treatment of workers. He also was a member of the Council of Trade Unions of Vilna. At the end of October 1939, in light of the new political circumstances, he moved to Dokshits, a Belorussian village, where he became a political and cultural activist. In 1940, after the creation of the Lithuanian Soviet Republic, he returned to Vilna. He again headed the Leather Workers Union. The German-Fascist offensive provided Vitenberg with too little time to flee Vilna. So began a very difficult period for him. He was pursued by the Nazi occupiers due to his work as a Communist activist. He did not register for work in a German factory, and that put his life in further danger.

170

vILNa Ghetto

Here, in the seven blood-filled streets of the ghetto, he was fixated on a single idea: organize armed resistance against the German occupiers. Berl Shereshnyevski, the secretary of the underground Communist Party in town and one of the most active fighters of the FPo, told me the following about Vitenberg: “He had a strong political education. He found a path forward even in the most difficult conditions of our resistance in the ghetto. He was audacious and smart. He considered every situation calmly and with his characteristic clarity.” Abba Kovner, Vitenberg’s deputy, added: “He was one of the most sincere men I ever met. I was most impressed by his ability to understand problems in a straightforward and objective manner.” • Vitenberg contended, and the general staff agreed, that the objective of partisan organization in the ghetto was to protect the ghetto population within the ghetto itself. If its fighters had to leave the ghetto, that would suggest that we were abandoning a defenceless population to a certain death. When the question arose about whether we ought to unite with the partisans fighting in the forest, Vitenberg did not change his position: if we received word that the liquidation of the ghetto was approaching, our duty was to encourage its inhabitants to break through the gates of the ghetto and reach the forests under our defence. As it happened, Vitenberg had a plan to set aflame all military targets if the city were to be lost. Vitenberg’s plan remained in force as the official position of the FPo until 16 July 1943. On 9 July 1943, Witos, the secretary of the Party committee in town, and Kozlowski, a member of the committee, were arrested.49 The next day, Kittel came to the ghetto to demand Vitenberg. **One of them must have betrayed the fact that Vitenberg was the commander of five hundred armed Jews in the ghetto.**50 In order to have us believe that he wanted only to interrogate Vitenberg, he also arrested a certain Auerbukh, whom he promptly freed after speaking with him. If Vitenberg presented himself and answered a few questions, he would be released. But we were not about to be duped by Kittel’s games. He was told that Vitenberg was dead, and Kittel was presented with a false death certificate from the ghetto hospital. Kittel

the PartIsaN orGaNIzatIoN

171

was not convinced. So he brought the chief of the Jewish police into his ploy, the traitor Desler, who was Kittel’s secret agent in the ghetto. On 15 July 1943, at one o’clock in the morning, during a meeting of the Judenrat at which Vitenberg was present, the police burst in, arrested Vitenberg, and put him in handcuffs. But when he arrived at the ghetto gates, Vitenberg managed to escape, thanks to the assistance of several members of the Resistance. We then mobilized all the partisan fighters in the ghetto. At dawn on 16 July, an ultimatum was delivered to the ghetto: if Vitenberg was not handed over by six o’clock that evening, planes would be dispatched from Kovno to destroy the ghetto. At the same time Kittel gave his assurance that if Vitenberg turned himself over to the Gestapo he would be interrogated and freed. A tragic argument broke out within the Jewish population. Some thought that it was imperative to refuse the order and protect Vitenberg. Others argued that we could not risk the lives of the entire population of the ghetto for a single man. The Jewish underworld played its own dirty game in all of this and tried to capture Vitenberg itself. **Shooting could be heard in the ghetto.** The one who put these dark forces into play was none other than the aforementioned Desler. Vitenberg was in hiding at Oshmene Street 3, where we were storing the machine-gun. He was giving orders for how to carry out the combat operations when the Germans arrived. He did not believe that they would blow up the ghetto. He believed it was an empty threat by Kittel, even though we knew that several other ghettos had been bombed. It happened in Glubok, Volozhin, and during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Panic took hold of the population. The general staff decided that Vitenberg ought to move to an undisclosed location. **The Party and** the general staff in the ghetto held an emergency meeting. The majority of those present contended that the Resistance could not stand in opposition to its own community, even if the ghetto population was misguided and did not understand that the demand to give up Vitenberg was a step on the way to the liquidation of the ghetto. Vitenberg held that we should not give in to Kittel, even if we proved unable to convince the entire population. If the Resistance did not agree with him, he would commit suicide. But his suicide would not have solved the situation: Kittel was demanding that he be turned over alive.

172

vILNa Ghetto

Vitenberg said goodbye to his comrades. He appointed Abba Kovner, who until that moment had been his deputy and member of the general staff, to assume his position. He set off for the ghetto gates to give himself up. Kittel was waiting for him. He put him into his car, and took him to the Gestapo cellars. There he was turned over to Max Gross, the special interrogator for partisan matters. The next day, Vitenberg’s body lay in the hallway of the Gestapo. His hair was scorched, his eyes were gouged out, and his arms, bound behind his back, were broken.51

A New Day, A New Order When the Partisan Organization lost its commander on 16 July, its leadership and several other partisan fighters were subject to even greater intimidation. The Gestapo dispatched its agents to the ghetto. They kept a close eye on even the most insignificant activities of the fighters. The Gestapo demanded that the Partisan Organization turn over all of its weapons. Of course, the order was refused. Weapons were secretly transferred to other caches, and members of the general staff avoided appearing on the street. *After the failure of the Party committee in town, Albine arrived in Vilna. She was a Communist with a proven track record. She was dispatched by the Lithuanian Communist Party to rebuild the Party in Vilna. Albine stayed in the ghetto for a week, where she familiarized herself with the work of the FPo and provided instructions to the district committee of the Communist Party in the ghetto. It was a turbulent time. Several Jews had been seized in town with weapons, and people anticipated that any day now the Germans would attack in order to destroy all the remaining Jews. The FPo fighters had long realized that the best place for the partisans to fight the Germans was in the forest and not in the alleys of the ghetto. At that moment the military command was still unable to overcome the false belief that the ghetto ought to be defended in the ghetto itself. Albine defended the position that the ghetto fighters ought to redeploy to the forest and join up with Lithuanian partisan forces.*

the PartIsaN orGaNIzatIoN

173

The general staff decided to shift tactics. A new order was published with the following points: “In light of the aggressions against, and increased surveillance of the Partisan Organization after 16 July, we have an obligation to redeploy to other partisan positions.” That is, to take to the forest. The first unit was formed under the leadership of Yoysef Glazman. At dawn on 22 July 1943, twenty-five fighters were assigned to join him. Each one was given a pistol, machine-gun pieces, and automatic weapons. The partisans – their yellow patches on their breasts – marched in a column as if they were on their way to work. Their guide was Shike Gertman, a Jewish partisan from Sventsyan.52 He had just arrived from the Narotsh Forest at the order of Markov, the commander of the Voroshilov partisan brigade, to guide armed Jews out of the ghetto and into the forest. Markov had sent an emissary to Vitenberg prior to his arrest to propose that the ghetto partisans join him in the forests. He wrote to Vitenberg that “partisans must fight in the forests.” And he specified the direction they ought to take. When the group arrived at Nay-Vileyke, the Jews who worked as slave labourers at the camp there understood that they were on their way to the forest. Thirty of them joined the group. When they were ten kilometres from Vilna they escaped to the forest. They took out their automatic weapons and machine-guns, and from that moment on they marched like partisans. Near Lavarishok they had to cross a small bridge. It was already dark. Their guides managed to cross it without any hindrance. Then Commander Glazman sent the partisans across one by one. But the group was ambushed as the first ones attempted to cross. Fighting took place in the darkness. The ghetto partisans, who lacked sufficient training, were surprised by this sudden attack and were unable to assume defensive positions. The unarmed folks who had just joined the group in Nay-Vileyke were an additonal complication. The Gordon brothers and the heroic fighter Yitskhok Matskevitsh fell in battle. Roze Shereshnyevski and Rokhele Burakiski were captured alive during the fighting. The partisan Khazan killed two Germans. We later learned that five policemen were killed during the fighting. Only fourteen partisans succeeded in meeting up with Markov in the Narotsh Forest. There, they established the Jewish partisan brigade

174

vILNa Ghetto

Nekome [Revenge], which later counted some four hundred Jews, half of them from Vilna and the other half from elsewhere in the region. The day after the fighting at Lavarishok, Neugebauer came to the ghetto to arrest the families of those who had left the ghetto the day before. He also arrested and shipped to Ponar thirty-two leaders of the labour brigades from which the fugitives had escaped, along with their entire families, some eighty people in total. The work camp at NayVileyke, from where the workers had escaped, was liquidated. At the same time Neugebauer published an order warning that the family of any escapee would be arrested. If that was not sufficiently intimidating, he would also shoot everyone living in the same apartment as the fugitive, and perhaps even all the inhabitants of the building. Additionally, all working Jews were divided into brigades of ten. If one of them fled, the other nine would be shot, along with their brigade commander. **Panic consumed the ghetto. People started to keep a close eye on one another. There were cases where parents tied children to their bed so that they would not try to escape to the forest.** The situation was extraordinarily tragic. How could one head for the forest if that decision would result in numerous victims back in the ghetto? It all happened at the same time as the Gestapo was bringing the last remaining Jews from Sventsyan, Reshe, Bezdan, and elsewhere into the ghetto. The youths from these towns had not yet been registered, so the Gestapo did not know their names. Our general staff quickly organized these youngsters from the provinces. They provided them with weapons, and sent two groups of them to the forest under the command of Moyshe Mark and Shloyme Beker.

Lize Is Calling! The liquidation of the ghetto was becoming more and more likely with every passing day. On 1 August 1943 Jewish workers employed at one hundred and five German businesses were dismissed, and two thousand men and women were ordered to work at the Porubanek airfield, with an almost equal number dispatched to the train station. Two days later, when the workers arrived in these locations, they were encircled by the Gestapo and the police and were shoved unceremoniously into rail cars that had been prepared for them. The Jews attacked the armed

the PartIsaN orGaNIzatIoN

175

Germans. Around three hundred Jews were left for dead in the fields. The others had no option but to climb into the rail wagons, and on 6 August they were shipped to concentration camps in Estonia. On the way, several dozen of them managed to escape by removing the floor of the rail car and jumping from the train. Then another order for the ghetto: parents and close relatives of those sent to Estonia must “voluntarily” join them. If anyone refused to obey and escaped, all residents of the building would be taken in their place. A new transport of Jews destined to join close family members in Estonia was arranged. On 1 September 1943 the ghetto was encircled and sealed. Neugebauer came and declared: “From today nobody has the right to leave the ghetto. Work will take place in the ghetto in special workshops.” But since sixteen thousand residents was still too many, he let us know that another six thousand were to be evacuated to Vaivara and Riga, because there were special factories and work there. In order to convince the ghetto inhabitants to leave voluntarily, authorities presented them with false letters, ostensibly written by Jews at Vaivara,53 calling on their relatives to join them. But there was nobody left in the ghetto to convince. Its remaining Jews were terrified and holed up in their malines. The military command of the FPo immediately mobilized all its fighters. Two battalions were quickly put on alert. Machine-guns were assembled, and revolvers and grenades were distributed to the fighters, who awaited orders. The first barricade was established at Shpitol Street 6, but before it was sufficiently armed it was surrounded by a ring of police, and a group of good fighters was captured. After we saw that our initial efforts were for naught, defences were erected at Strashun 12. As soon as a group of Germans approached and tried to destroy one of our walls of defence, Ilye Sheynboym,54 the barricade commander, opened fire on them. The Germans called in reinforcements. Hundreds of murderers penetrated the ghetto and fired on our position at Strashun 12. Commander Sheynboym, who had fired on the Germans through a window, was the first to fall into the arms of his comrades. The fighter Reyzl Korczak took command. To counter the armed uprising, the Germans put dynamite around the walls of the building in which the fighters had barricaded themselves.

176

vILNa Ghetto

It was blown apart, and hundreds of people were buried under rocks and bricks. The Germans then proceeded to blow up every place in which the partisans had barricaded themselves. Hundreds of Jews were captured in their malines and sent to Rose Street, to the Gestapo gardens, where they were organized into a transport destined for Estonia. When the Jews of the ghetto learned that the Germans were blowing up buildings, a number of them left their hiding places to avoid being buried alive, allowing themselves to be deported to Estonia. This went on until 4 September. Every day, people were removed from the ghetto. One day, the Germans took only men, another day, women. When a woman wanted to accompany her father or spouse, Neugebauer forbade it. Several women shaved their heads and wore pants in order to have the “good fortune” to go to Estonia. Most of the Partisan Organization, along with its military command, was barricaded behind Strashun 6, in the Mefitsey-Haskole Library. That’s where our most important forces and weapons were concentrated. Ready to die to defend our honour, each of us stood guard over his post and awaited the order to pull the trigger. There was no talk of attempting to defend those who had been taken, because they believed that Vaivara was their only possible salvation. The fighters at the last barricade had a single objective: open fire on the Germans if they approached the fortifications. But the Germans never reached Strashun 6. On the evening of 4 September, after eight thousand people had been removed from the ghetto in only a few days, the German forces were ordered to leave the area of the ghetto. The next day, as if nothing had happened, Kittel and Neugebauer came to announce: “The ghetto will remain as is. Everyone will work in newly established workshops. We have received an order for fifty thousand felt-lined boots and ten thousand coats. Everything the ghetto needs will be made available so that the work can continue unimpeded. Work diligently, as if you were your own boss.”

Through the Sewers Nobody, especially not the FPo fighters, believed the assurances of the Gestapo. New groups were hastily organized in which people managed an escape from the ghetto. They joined up with comrades in the Narotsh Forest at the Jewish partisan camp Nekome.

the PartIsaN orGaNIzatIoN

177

Between 8 and 10 September 1943, armed groups slipped out of the ghetto through secret passageways. I left the ghetto along with thirty comrades on the night of 12 September. We took a predetermined route and met up with other friends at Markucie’s Manor,55 near the Pushkin Museum. The guide for these groups of fighters was Zelde Treger,56 who moved through the city without wearing the required patch, and told us where to go to evade the police. Zelde passed through the city like a whirlwind. She returned to the ghetto every two hours. Ten kilometres from Vilna, when we crossed the train tracks, we encountered the enemy for the first time. We forced our way through the German lines with only one loss, and pushed on towards our objective. On 14 September, Gens, the Jew the Germans had appointed to head the ghetto, was shot by Neugebauer in the courtyard of the Gestapo headquarters because of his relationship with the partisan resistance. The Gestapo informer Desler was chosen to replace him. But several days later this new ruler fled the ghetto with his gang because he came to understand that he would be next. The ghetto was encircled once again. Marksmen were positioned at every corner. At night, the walls of the ghetto were lit up by floodlights. Its remaining inhabitants took shelter in their malines. The FPo fighters barricaded themselves at Strashun 6, awaiting an opportune moment to escape the ghetto with their weapons. Since many bodies were strewn over the streets of the ghetto, permission was given to take them to the cemetery. Machineguns were placed underneath the bodies and made their way to the Jewish cemetery at Zaretshe. There, comrades were waiting to bury the weapons in a secret cache. On 23 September at nine in the morning, Kittel came to the ghetto to announce its official liquidation. Those remaining behind were told to pack their belongings before noon and prepare to be transferred to Estonian labour camps. Since there was no means of escape, the public made its preparations. The remaining FPo fighters were caught in the trap: they had no machine-guns and no means of forcing their way through police lines. The last two hundred fighters took to the sewers, along with their remaining weapons, in order to force their way through to the outskirts of the city and make their way to the Rudnitski Forest, a major centre of Lithuanian resistance with which they had already established contact. Access to the sewers was near Spokoyni’s workshops at Daytshe Street 31. Nobody, aside from the FPo military command, knew about

178

vILNa Ghetto

this access point, located under an earthenware stove. The fighters were lowered in groups into the dirty water, one after the other. Each group was led by a sewer worker who knew the route. The sewers were of varying height: they ranged from 1.80 metres under main roads to only 40 centimetres under secondary streets. The fighters had to crawl on their knees in wastewater. Of course, weapons and important documents were tied around their bodies as they made their way through the underground network. They wandered for four hours through the sewer pipes. Orders were given to the groups through a telephone system that informed them whether they should continue on and in which direction. When the groups were stopped, they stood in wastewater up to their necks. The partisans believed that the Germans had been informed they were attempting to escape through the sewers and were trying to drown them. Only later did they understand that the wastewater rose when they stopped in one place and blocked the flow. One group lost its way and did not know where to go. It was difficult to backtrack and sometimes even impossible because of the strength of the flow. When some fighters attempted to go against the current, the wastewater covered their heads. Some passed out, others lost their senses. There was even a suicide. It was critical to proceed carefully without whispering a word because sound could resonate from the sewers to the street through the manholes. The fighters finally reached Ignatover 5, right underneath the headquarters of the criminal Lithuanian police. It had been agreed the group should exit there. Sonye Madeysker, who lived in town under a false name, and two sympathetic Lithuanian policemen with whom the resistance had been in contact, awaited them. Soaked and disgusting, the fighters were barely able to extricate themselves from the narrow, hidden escape hole to make it to a cellar where they could rinse themselves off. Then, they were divided into groups of two, ordered to load their weapons, and headed for an old estate at Subotsh. The city was crawling with police and Gestapo agents. The fighters lost track of one another along the way. There was a clash with the local police. But the fighters managed to cross the city. They dug up the machine-guns buried at the cemetery and, with weapons strung across their shoulders like real partisans, reached the Rudnitski Forest.

the PartIsaN orGaNIzatIoN

179

Three Heroes57 Yankl Kaplan and Avrom Khvoynik, two members of the FPo military command, made their way with the last fighters of the doomed ghetto through the sewer system. They were joined by Asya Big,58 a student who served as a battalion liaison officer of the FPo. They crawled through the opening on Ignatover Street and crossed the city until they reached a predetermined meeting place at Subotsh. At the intersection of Breyte and Rudnitske, near the Casino cinema, a German patrol stopped them. The Germans demanded their papers. The three took out guns. Several German senior officials were near the theatre. Kaplan’s shot hit its mark. Max Gross, the Gestapo officer in charge of interrogating the partisan resistance in Vilna, was killed. A senior officer from Kovno was also killed, quite possibly the Sturmführer of the Gestapo there. Kaplan, Khvoynik, and Asya Big managed to divide up their bullets for different Germans. They were eager for revenge. It would have been a shame to keep even a single bullet behind for themselves. The three heroes were captured alive. They were taken to the Gestapo gardens at Rose Street, where the last Jews were being sorted before their deportation to Estonia. Kittel had three gallows erected: one for the teacher, Yankl Kaplan, another for the attorney, Avrom Khvoynik, and the third for the twentyyear-old student, Asya Big. Kittel gathered all the Jews and warned them: the same thing will happen to anyone who dares raise a hand against the Germans. He hanged the three heroes himself. **Asya swayed like a cornstalk in the centre, with Kaplan and Khvoynik on either side of her.**59

Sonye and Julian When the ghetto was liquidated and the Partisan Organization took up the fight in the forest, Sonye Madeysker, luminary of revolutionary Vilna, remained living in town with Polish papers. During the initial days of the German occupation, when communal life in town was paralysed and its Jewish population was subject to intense attack, Sonye was among the rare ones who did not lose her composure. She organized the Komsomol, the young Communists, inside the ghetto. She made contact with workers living in town. She

180

vILNa Ghetto

had been one of the most active members of the local Party committee. At the same time, she helped edit the underground Polish-language journal Sztandar Wolności [The Banner of Freedom]. After the arrest of Witos and Kozlowski in July 1943, Sonye became the senior leader of the underground organization in town. When the ghetto was liquidated, hundreds of Jewish fighters under her leadership were able to join Lithuanian partisan units. Sonye remained in Vilna. She continued to publish newspapers and political tracts intended for the Polish and Lithuanian population. After the liquidation of the ghetto, the Germans kept some three thousand people behind in three Jewish camps in Vilna. Every Sunday, Sonye went to Kailis, one of these camps, to organize groups of prisoners, provide them with weapons, and help certain prisoners escape to the forests. Julian Jankauskas, the former director of the Plakatas factory, worked alongside Sonye. He hid more than one Jew in his home and provided many weapons to the ghetto partisans. Julian was drawn to the work of the underground. He established an active group of Lithuanian workers, and enlisted some police to the cause. He even changed his appearance. He grew out his beard so that he would not be recognized. Sonye lived at Zaretshe 3 in a secret room. Julian joined her there. They both loved the world for which they were fighting. Before the Red Army managed to retake Vilna, a large Gestapo contingent surrounded Zaretshe Street. Dozens of Germans burst into Zaretshe 3. Sonye and Julian had been on the most-wanted list for some time. They defended themselves by firing on their assailants through the windows and managed to kill several Gestapo men. Julian was shot to death. Sonye kept the last bullet for herself. Unfortunately, it only injured her. The Gestapo transferred her to the hospital. There they treated her and tried to extract information from her. When she refused to utter a single word, she was taken to be tortured in the Gestapo cellars.

The Sequel in the Forest We Vilna ghetto fighters redeployed to the forest. The possibility of resistance in the ghetto had ultimately eluded us. We had not imagined that the fight would take such a turn. The idea of defending twenty thousand ghetto inhabitants as a mission independent of the general

the PartIsaN orGaNIzatIoN

181

objective of eliminating the German occupier could no longer be justified. There is no doubt that with the death of Commander Vitenberg the organization’s foundation had been dealt a serious blow. Today we must admit that the decision of the military command to allow Vitenberg to sacrifice himself in order to save the twenty thousand residents of the ghetto was a mistake. **On 16 July, when Kittel delivered his ultimatum, we ought to have immediately taken up arms. But whoever was not present in the ghetto then should not attempt to judge how we ought to have behaved at that moment. What consideration would be given to an organization that sacrificed the ghetto just to save its commander? And Vitenberg himself ? Could we imagine a person with such moral integrity deciding otherwise at such a critical hour? In the future, our grandchildren will still remember that Vitenberg, a Vilna shoemaker, hero of the ghetto partisans, surrendered himself to the executioner he despised out of love for his people.** • The ghetto fighters from Vilna were concentrated in two partisan bases in the forest: near Lake Narotsh and in the Rudnitski Forest. The Nekome encampment, situated at Narotsh, did not remain exclusively Jewish for long. The fighters were divided up among different camps in Markov’s brigade. Narotsh was more than 100 kilometres from Vilna.60 The Vilna Jewish partisans wanted to be closer to their hometown, and dozens of them joined Lithuanian bases, **such as the Vilna camp not far from the city. It was commanded by the head of all Lithuanian forces active in the forests, the Lithuanian colonel Kazimir [Sumauskas], who received our men with warmth and brotherhood.** Several folks from Vilna also left Narotsh for the Rudnitski Forest, some 40 kilometres from the city, where there were already four Jewish encampments, consisting of former members of the FPo who had escaped through the sewers. They were led by brigade commander Jurgis [Ziman]. The military camps Kamf [Battle] and A toyt dem fashizm [Death to Fascism], led by commander Berl Shereshnyevski *and Arone Aranovitsh (who was killed in battle),* did not remain independent for long. *They headed for the Natshe Forest, where* they joined up with Lithuanian units. Only two exclusively Jewish detachments remained:

182

vILNa Ghetto

Nekomenemer [the Avengers] and Farn nitsokhn [To Victory]. The commander of the first group was Abba Kovner, a dynamic young man and a strong organizer. Kovner himself participated in all critical operations. Shmuel Kaplinski, who had been an FPo instructor in the ghetto, commanded the To Victory group. His fighters, to whom he personally provided weapons, respected and loved him. The two military groups, which together included more than two hundred fighters, shared the same military command. During the first three months of their struggle, the two Jewish partisan camps concerned themselves mainly with procuring weapons. They managed to sabotage rail transports on three occasions. During their first operation, twelve rail cars and its locomotive derailed. The second operation derailed six cars packed with Germans. The third attack, on the line from Vilna to Oran, killed two hundred Nazis. The fighters destroyed three bridges at Zhegarin and near Dragutshi. At Olkenik, they blew up a German factory and helped to set fire to a depot containing automatic weapons and machine-guns in the fortified village of Konyukhi. After the Avengers managed to obtain enough machine-guns, they initiated guerilla operations on the rail lines. The partisan Yitskhok Rudnitski61 was credited with attacking twelve convoys on the main line and three on the provincial line (the small train). He joined four comrades in blowing up the electricity plant at Sventsyan. His group captured four Nazis and freed the resistance fighter Semionov from the hospital in Sventsyan. It was in the forest that Vitke Kempner, hero of the first military operation in the ghetto, showed what she could accomplish. One night in October 1943 she walked 40 kilometres to Vilna with a suitcase filled with landmines. She blew up the city’s electric station and its critical transformers. But Vitke was not satisfied. The following night, she made it into the Kailis concentration camp and managed to free sixty people, whom she brought with her to the partisan bases. Vitke set up the intelligence operations of the Nekome camp. She participated in blowing up a train near Oran in which two hundred Germans were torn apart. Along with five other partisans, she set ablaze the turpentine plant of Olkenik. She distinguished herself in January 1944 in battles at Dainove, where she single-handedly took prisoner two Gestapo agents. She helped blow up two locomotives and burn two bridges.

the PartIsaN orGaNIzatIoN

183

In November 1943, Vitke received an assignment to take important documents to the Vilna Party Committee. On the way, she fell into the hands of a German patrol. She was taken by armed guards to the Gestapo headquarters in Vilna. Thanks to her strong sense of direction, she managed to escape from German captivity. While returning to her base, she brought with her a notable activist from the Kovno underground. Grishe Gurvitsh ambushed and killed twelve Germans who were travelling in two cars. He brought back the following loot: ten guns, an automatic weapon, and a German machine-gun that he set aside for himself. He was an excellent shot. His mother, a thirty-nine-year-old woman, fought alongside him. They often took on surveillance missions. In joint operations with others, they managed to shoot eighteen Germans. One day, mother and son were encircled by a large patrol, and a battle broke out. Grishe’s mother unloaded seventy-five bullets and five grenades on the enemy. Hit by a bullet, she fell next to her son. Seeing that his mother was dead, Grishe threw himself on her murderer and cracked his head open with the butt of his machine-gun. Grishe fled. He was wounded. He swam across a river, crawled through marshy waters, and passed out somewhere in a pool of mud. A shepherd found him, and informed the partisans in the village of Pasyeko. They took him to their base to treat him. He returned to battle with his machine-gun, and he blew up two military convoys in order to avenge his mother’s blood. Khayim Lazar, one of the most active partisans in the ghetto, lived up to his reputation in the forests. During one battle against German motorized units on the road between Vilna and Grodno, he killed three officers with his machine-gun, and he and his comrades injured fifteen others. On 23 April 1944, while he was participating in a sabotage operation against a train convoy, a mine exploded unexpectedly and blew off his right hand. Among the many brave young women of Vilna, we must mention the partisan fighter Zelde Treger. She forced her way through German garrisons eighteen times in order to convey valuable documents to Vilna through her work as liaison between the partisan military command and the underground organization. Zelde never returned to the forest empty-handed. She made her way into concentration camps in order to free several people. She brought dozens of rifles from the city to the partisans. She fell into enemy hands four times: twice to the Gestapo,

184

vILNa Ghetto

once to the police, and finally to the White Poles,62 who were scouring the surrounding forests to sniff out Jewish partisans. Thanks to her calm and determination, she escaped the murderers each time and continued to pursue her missions. Dine Grinvald, one of the principal liaisons between the forests and city, was no less heroic. And what about Reyzl Korczak? This modest young woman was always among the first to volunteer and the most audacious, both in the ghetto and in the forest. And not only Reyzl. How could we not mention Khonen Magid, the head scout of the Nekome encampment, who knew in advance about the smallest enemy movement within a radius of 40 kilometres? And Srolik from Eyshishok, Nyuse Lubotski, Ruvn Rabinovitsh, Berl Yokhai, Lyove Levin, Tevke Galpern, Berl Shereshnyevski, Itsik Kovalski? One could write about each of them individually in terms of their audacity, fearlessness, and heroism in combat! These partisans of Vilna put their lives on the line to fight, and managed to survive. But how many heroes, both known and unknown, remain [buried] in the Narotsh and Rudnitski Forests?63 Let us remember their magnificent names for eternity! Let us mention here the brothers Donye and Ime Lubotski, who were sons of Borekh Lubotski, a well-known local teacher. During the fighting in the ghetto, Donye was taken prisoner by the Germans. He was tortured by the Gestapo for ten days. He asked his parents, who were in the ghetto, to provide him with poison. I remember his broken father coming to me for advice. What should he do? His wife was inclined to provide their son with poison so that he would no longer suffer under the torture of the Gestapo. But he, as a father, could not play a hand in killing his own son. A few days passed, and Donye reappeared in the ghetto. When he had been taken to be killed, he had managed to escape. His parents were not able to rejoice for long. During the liquidation of the ghetto, they were captured by Kittel. Donye managed to escape to the forest. There he was reunited with his brother Ime, the only member of his family who was still alive. He had escaped the ghetto through the sewers. Donye, who was the commander of the third group in the To Victory camp, was the most audacious of all his comrades. He was unable to remain at the base. A burning desire for vengeance consumed him.

the PartIsaN orGaNIzatIoN

185

At the end of December 1943, Donye and his group left for a village. Having learned that a notorious Gestapo agent would be there, Donye was determined to capture him! While he besieged the home where the Gestapo agent was holed up, a shot rang out. Commander Donye fell. He was brought back to the base gravely wounded, and he died there. That same day Ime returned to base from the Narotsh Forest, where he was in command of sixty men. There he fought against the White Poles. Ime arrived at the very moment a grave had been dug for his brother. The young man held himself up by leaning on his rifle. He stood on the fresh dirt, and his hot tears fell into his brother’s grave. A few days later, Ime set out with a group of partisans to saw down telegraph poles along the highway. A loud bang resounded. The poles had been mined. Ime and his comrades were torn apart by the explosion. Both brothers are buried in the Rudnitski Forest. • During the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto, some partisan fighters were dragged to the Vilna hkP concentration camp or sent to camps in Estonia. In hkP, a partisan group was organized by the teacher Leyb Opeskin and the actor Yankev Beregolski. The group procured weapons and made contact with partisans based in the forests. On 10 July 1944 a special unit of the SS sealed the camp and opened fire on its Jewish inmates, intending to kill every last one of them. The partisans fired on the Germans. Thanks to this unexpected resistance, more than a hundred Jews managed to escape to the city, where they waited for liberation. Opeskin and Beregolski fell during the battle. • The Vilna ghetto fighters who later joined the partisans in the forests of Lithuania and Belorussia entered Vilna with the Red Army during the battle for its liberation in July 1944. They were the first to break into the city and take the fight to the encircled Germans. The partisan fighters from the Vilna ghetto and the forests strode over the bodies of fifteen thousand murderers to return to their hometown. They celebrated its liberation, which coincided with the anniversary of Itsik Vitenberg’s execution.

Part Iv On Smoking Ashes The Pyres of Klooga1 On 23 September 1943 the Vilna ghetto was liquidated. Under the careful watch of the Gestapo, its last remaining Jews were taken to the Gestapo gardens on Rose Street, where they underwent a selection, some to the right and others to the left.2 Those chosen to go left were sent to their deaths. Most of them were the elderly, women, and children, about five thousand people in all, sent to the crematoria of Majdanek. *Among those selected to go left were the teachers Mire Bernshteyn and Rokhl Broydo; the director of the Real-Gymnasium, Leyb Turbovitsh; the writer Naftoli Vaynig; musical director Avrom Sliep; Dr Feldshteyn; the poet Leah Rudnitski; the actor Ume Olkenitski; the actress Esther Lipovski; and the artist Rokhl Sutzkever.* Those selected for the right, some two thousand men, were sent to camps in Estonia, and another fourteen hundred women to the Kaiserwald concentration camp in Latvia. And from there to Stutthof, Magdeburg, and Auschwitz. At the time there were twenty-three camps in Estonia, to which some twenty thousand people from different ghettos and concentration camps in Europe had been deported. Among them were eight thousand people from Vilna. *Here are some accounts from witnesses who managed to escape the pyres of Klooga, upon which hundreds of people were reduced to ash, including some who were still alive. Nisn Agolik recalls: “The front was not far off. We were marched from one camp to another. Near the town of Yevi twelve Jews started to lag behind. The German doctor Gent and several SS officers had them tossed into the sea. In Kuramey the same doctor summoned the Vilna doctors Fingerhut and Ivanter, ordered them onto their knees, and decapitated them. Then he ordered us to drag their bodies for incineration. In Fifikoni there was a marsh around the camp. The Germans had a game: bind the feet of the ‘transgressor’ and toss him in the marsh.”*

oN smokING ashes

187

Binyomen Vayntroyb relates the following: After travelling four days in suffocating train wagons, we arrived at the Vaivara concentration camp. From there, we were sent to Klooga. In the camp we ceased having our own names. Each one of us was assigned a number that had to be displayed on our back, our arm, and our knee. Our hair was shaved from the brow all the way to the nape of the neck. Women who had been in the camp since August (following the roundup at the Porubanek airfield and the first “evacuation”) were completely shorn. After a search in which even the smallest of items were confiscated, we were divided into labour brigades and sent off to work. It consisted of carrying 50-kilogram bags of cement from a factory to the railroad depot 150 metres away. We had to carry the bags while running. The women, who lived in separate barracks, were in charge of digging up rocks and dragging them to a set place. Each woman was responsible for collecting four tons of rocks daily. We worked from six in the morning until six o’clock at night, with a break of forty-five minutes for lunch. Our meal consisted of a clear soup, nothing more. After work was the ‘Appel’ or roll call. We had to stand in rows of a hundred men and not move until the overseer ordered us to return to camp. The Rottenführer, or foreman, took down the name of anyone who was not standing properly or who had somehow disobeyed orders. The SS men then summoned that person and made him lie down on a special bench in front of everyone. The bench was one metre in length, and its surface was uneven. The individual lacking discipline was bound to the bench by his hands and feet. One SS man sat on his head, while the other whipped him with an oxtail, through which a metal cord was drawn. The victim had to call out each blow himself. If he got confused in his counting, the flogging would restart at zero. Those who were sick or who were suffering from hunger oedema were sent to a hospital. When they arrived at the ward, the German doctor Bodman screamed at them: “Achtung!” [Attention!] The patients had to lay their hands on top of the covers, and if one of them did not respond to the command

188

vILNa Ghetto

quickly enough, the German doctor would teach them a lesson with a rod. At the hospital, the patients were given injections, and they died the same day. In August 1944, most of the camps in Estonia were liquidated, including Kiviöli, Eredis, and Fifikoni. We knew about this because of inscriptions we found on the cement bags that had been transferred from these locales. The most terrifying event took place on 19 September 1944 in the camp at Klooga. In the morning, we were arranged by brigade, men and women separately. We were told we were being evacuated to Germany. At the same time they selected three hundred of the strongest men and sent them under heavy guard to the forest to cut trees. The head of the camp persuaded us that the wood would accompany us to Germany. In order to boost our morale, the Germans ordered the preparation of a meal for everyone, including the three hundred men who had been sent to the forest for wood. At the same time, a new group of prisoners of war was led into the camp. When wood was brought back to our camp in trucks and the Germans had precisely arranged it on the ground, the sound of machine-gun fire suddenly rang out from the forest where the three hundred men had been sent. We did not yet understand what was happening. In the meantime we were surrounded by more and more Germans. Our smallest movement was watched over by loaded machine-guns. Thirty men were summoned from among us and directed towards the layers of logs, where they were ordered to lie on their backs, with their heads hanging over the edge. When they obeyed, a German with a revolver shot each of them in the head. When they were done with the first group of thirty, another thirty were selected and ordered to place a layer of wood over those who had just been executed and to lie down on top of it, just as the first group had. This is how four pyres were constructed, each consisting of seven layers. Those who tried to escape were executed on the spot. When those who were waiting noticed what was happening, they began to run wildly in all directions. I slipped into a nearby

oN smokING ashes

189

building and hid in the loft, along with some twenty others. The Germans were in hot pursuit. Dozens of people who found refuge in the rooms below us were shot by the SS. We remained there, holding our breath, for several days. The smoke and smell of those who had been incinerated penetrated through the floorboards. We couldn’t stop thinking that perhaps it was our building that was on fire. Suddenly, we saw a Soviet plane over the camp and the first Red Army soldiers marching in. A hundred Vilna Jews managed to survive the pyres of Klooga. The brave fighter Borekh Goldshteyn and the engineer Ratner were among them. Among the Vilna natives incinerated at Klooga were the well-known doctors Zalkindson (father and son), Gershovitsh, and Volkoviski; the director Volf Durmashkin and the actor Shapse Blyakher; the poet Hirsh Gutgeshtalt; and Zelik Goldberg, an engineer and instructor at the Vilna Jewish Technical School. The journalist Herman Kruk and the intellectual Zelig Kalmanovitsh were also among the victims.3 *When the ghetto was liquidated, Kalmanovitsh was shipped along with thousands of other Jews to concentration camps in Estonia. In July 1945, when I returned to Vilna a second time, I met up with Shmuel-Meyer Slivkin, a singer in the former Vilbig Choir. He had come from the Stutthof death camp. It was from him that I learned the precise details of Kalmanovitsh’s death. For the first few months Kalmanovitsh was assigned to hard labour alongside the other Jews, carrying bundles of rags in the textile factory that was located in the camp at Narva. Since the Jews were barely provided with any nourishment, he started to swell from starvation and could barely move. Because those who could not prove themselves useful were killed, people grew worried about Kalmanovitsh. They managed to bribe a German, and Kalmanovitsh was assigned to clean barracks. He wrote a great deal in the barracks. Kalmanovitsh’s friendship with Moyshe Lerer,4 his former colleague at YIvo and an expert in Yiddish, was quite touching. When Lerer contracted dysentery, Kalmanovitsh hovered over him like a mother. He washed him, shared his own small ration of coffee, broke off crumbs of bread to feed him. Lerer died in Kalmanovitsh’s arms.

190

vILNa Ghetto

Shortly afterwards, Kalmanovitsh also contracted dysentery, almost certainly from having taken care of Lerer. He became even more swollen with starvation than before and endured significant pain. German doctors came to the barrack. Seeing that Kalmanovitsh was sick, the head doctor ordered that he be brought to the medical barrack. Most people never left it alive. After his death, Kalmanovitsh’s body “passed through the chimneys,” that is to say, it was burned in the oven of the textile factory. One of the workers inscribed Kalmanovitsh’s name on the oven.*

How Our Children Were Murdered It was the eve of Passover 1944. Weiss came to the Vilna concentration camp Kailis, which had been created for Jews working in the Kailis municipal fur and leatherworks factory. He informed the inmates that an epidemic was raging in town, and that it was critical to dress the children well the next morning and bring them across the street to the clinic, where they would be inoculated against typhus. Many mothers suspected nothing. They washed their children, dressed them in their holiday best, and combed their hair. And then, on this sunny spring day, they brought them to the hospital that was located across from the camp. When the children were all inside and the mothers were waiting behind the camp fencing, Dr Schultze, the director of the German hospital, called Weiss at his office to inform him that the children were assembled. Five minutes later, the “Black Crow” arrived. Weiss rushed to the hospital, grabbed the children, and tossed them in the truck. The mothers who saw all of this from behind the fence screamed in an attempt to save their children. Weiss would not let them approach and ordered his men to turn their automatic weapons against any woman who attempted to get near. Several of them were not dissuaded by the shots and managed to get to the truck. They tried with all their might to get inside. The mothers pleaded to die with their children. Weiss had pity and allowed a few mothers in. The truck departed. According to the list Weiss was holding, there were still sixty children missing. He entered the block housing the workers to sniff them out. •

oN smokING ashes

191

Frume-Rive Burshteyn, an eighty-year-old grandmother, told me the following:5 When I learned that all of the children were to be brought to the hospital, I immediately understood that something was out of the ordinary. At Kailis we already had a doctor and an infirmary, so why transfer the children to a German hospital? I decided to wait to see what would happen, since that German Richter6 had already publicly stated: “Those who do not send their children will be severely punished.” When I heard the shouts from the hospital across the way, I understood the extent of the calamity. I took my three grandchildren and my niece and hid them in a maline. I ran down to the courtyard to see what was happening. That murderer Weiss and that German Richter were running around the courtyard with a list, screaming that they were still missing children. If the hidden children were not turned over immediately, they would summon an SS unit to kill all the prisoners in the camp. Seeing that nobody was obeying his orders, Weiss blew his whistle, and a swarm of Germans ran into the camp. They had been waiting behind the gate, and as soon as the whistle sounded they surged inside and scattered among the various buildings. They made all the Jews come down into the courtyard and went out in search of their malines. I was standing in the courtyard, and I thought to myself: perhaps, by some miracle, they will not find my children. But at that precise moment I heard them crying. They were dragged into the courtyard and set apart. When everyone was gathered in the courtyard, they sorted the old people and children to one side and the able-bodied to the other. Since I was no longer young, I was put with the children. How I wanted to save them! I wasn’t thinking of myself but about these innocent souls! When one of the scoundrels turned around for a moment, I took the youngest of my children (it was impossible to save the rest), and I went in the direction of the able-bodied group, who had been given an extended lease on life. Richter barred my way. “Where do you think you are going?” I told him that I was only going to bottle-feed the child and that I would return shortly.

192

vILNa Ghetto

The Jews who were set aside to live another day hid me. My two-year-old grandchild did not make a sound. Suddenly, trucks drove in. The children and the aged were loaded into them. I saw my two grandchildren get into the trucks. They were crying: “Grandma, we are afraid!” But I couldn’t save them, because the one I had managed to hide was still in danger. Richter, whom we colloquially referred to as Golosheyke, or Little Bare Neck, because of his long neck, recalled that I had gone to feed my little one, and he was frantically searching for me. A fair amount of time passed. Richter continued to torture us. He came four times a day in search of children. I hid my grandchild in the latrine under a basket. He stayed there for ten or so days. We then managed to escape from this hellhole and hide ourselves with non-Jewish acquaintances in town. • **A father told me the following about his little girl: When the Gestapo came to Kailis to steal our children, my Goldele remained calm. By virtue of her size, she could have passed as older and avoided the roundup. But she didn’t want to abandon the other children. She sang with them and organized several secret performances in the loft. Goldele would say: “I will remain with them always. If I am destined to die, then let it be all together.” When the children were dragged from cellars and malines, torn from their wailing parents and tossed into trucks, Goldele did not hide. She refused all offers of protection. In the end Weiss noticed her, and he called out to her: “Komm hier!” [Come here!] She was taken to the train station with an entire class of her schoolmates. A Polish railwayman who was accompanying the children on their last journey later visited us at Kailis and asked us who this Goldele Krzyzewski was. He told us: “In the train, the children were screaming horribly. But Goldele calmed them. She assured them that the Germans would not make it to paradise because the day was coming when they would be forced to pay. Then, revolutionary songs started to emanate from the rail cars.”**

oN smokING ashes

193

A boy recounted: On 27 March 1944, at 6:30 in the morning, Feldwebel Richter showed up in the courtyard of the hkP camp and searched its two buildings. He immediately left, and then came back with some soldiers. He told them: “You, here. You, there.” The armed soldiers took their posts. I was in the shower room, in the midst of lighting a stove to heat the water. When I learned that the block was entirely surrounded, my heart skipped a beat. When I ran out of the shower room, a truck carrying some thirty to forty policemen in dark navy blue uniforms drove right past me. I went to see my mother in her room. There were tears. I was a wreck. I dressed myself in several layers. My mother did the same. We were certain that they would come to liquidate our block. The atmosphere was foreboding. We decided to try to escape at the first opportunity. If they managed to get us onto a train, we would jump off. In the meantime the rooms were full of police and Germans. They sent the women and children to the tailoring workshop and told the men to go to their work assignments. Nobody moved: was it better to stay or to go? Suddenly, a rumour spread that this was not a liquidation. “Only” the aged and the young were being taken. What was I to do? How could I save my mother? I stayed calm, and I brought her to the shower room. I laid her down in a corner, and I covered her in blankets. I presumed that they were not interested in me because I was an able-bodied worker and not a child. Having hidden my mother, I left the bathhouse. I glanced at the entry vestibule. The ladder leading to the attic had disappeared. I asked who was up there. Tsilke Rudenski whispered back: “It’s us, come hide yourself.” I don’t know why, but going up to the attic did not appeal to me. I made my way to the locksmiths’ workshop (I was listed as a locksmith in German records). The square next to the camp gate was visible from the window of the workshop. The Germans were gathering old women and children there. The women and children were standing between the fence and the gate. They were each

194

vILNa Ghetto

carrying small bundles. Their heads were bowed. The police and the SS stood opposite them. Anyone looking through our window would be able to see whether their mother or child was at the gate. These onlookers held their heads in their hands and paced back and forth in the workshop: “Oh, my child! Oh, my mother!” I noticed them guiding Mrs Yavrov. Her son, who was standing in front of the window, started to bang his head against the wall. For the time being, they had not taken my mother. They must not have found her. I started to feel better. A few hours passed. Once they finished searching the first building, they scoured the second. Weiss went from one workshop to the next to ensure that not a single child had been hidden. Then he made it to the carpentry shop, the door next to ours. I heard a child crying. Weiss had found a baby and was carrying it in his arms. When he entered our workshop, he handed his discovery to someone else. I was terrified. I didn’t know what to do. Here was Weiss. For the first time I saw his repugnant face with the glasses on his nose. He was carrying an axe with a long handle. He ordered those who worked here to go to another room. He grabbed others by the collar and shoved them out to the courtyard. It was my turn. I was standing on my tiptoes in order to appear taller. But Weiss would not be fooled. He showed me the door, and an SS man tossed me out. I tried to run, but my path was blocked. I ran in another direction, but another agent stopped me in my tracks. That is how I found myself in front of the fence with a bunch of children. I thought that this was the end. I wouldn’t be able to escape the jaws of the beast this time. So I tried my luck. When an SS man turned his head for a second, I took off in the direction of a building. Another failure. Someone chased me down (I learned later that it was Lukosius, one of the Lithuanian leaders of the Ypatinga, who proceeded to slam my skull with the butt of his revolver). I fell on the dirt, half-unconscious. A man in civilian dress dragged me by the arm to a barrack, laughing the whole way. A small table was brought in. Weiss sat down. His chin rested on his bloodied axe. The selection began. Children were sent to the barracks, and younger women were released. A mother appeared with her two children. He seized the little ones and pushed her

oN smokING ashes

195

away. If a mother insisted on going with her child, he violently separated them. Parents were denied the opportunity of going to their deaths with their children. When my turn arrived, he pointed to the barracks. I took off again, but the Nazi SS man caught me. I hid in a corner and sought a way out. There were no means of escape. I was only looking for a place to hide myself. Suddenly, I noticed that a board was missing in the ceiling. Without thinking I pulled myself into the attic. Others crawled up after me. The attic was full. I heard motors. The “Black Crows” had just arrived. The sound of engines blended in with the crying. Dozens of children were loaded in. By nightfall, everything was over. I came down from the attic. To my great joy, I found my mother. She was still under the covers in the bathhouse. Schirrmeister Drischer, who searched every corner, had failed to notice her. One hundred and fifty children were taken from the camp that day, including the actor Beregolski ’s two little ones. Mrs Bas refused to give her child up. No matter how many times Weiss hit her, she wouldn’t let go. The “Crow” swallowed the two of them together. When another woman, Zhukovski, dared to call Weiss a childmurderer, he shot her on the spot. • Zelik Levin told me: Once, Weiss came to the ghetto to round up men to send to Estonia. Ten-year-old Shmulik Kotler ran through the ghetto in search of his father. Instead, he came across Weiss. “I am going to send you to work in Estonia!” the murderer shouted at him. “Herr Weiss,” Shmulik begged, “I am only ten years old!” “Ten years old?” Weiss repeated, examining Shmulik carefully. Meanwhile, the murderer caught sight of a Jew attempting to hide himself, and Shmulik managed to escape. Half a year later during the roundup and slaughter of Jewish children, Weiss again

196

vILNa Ghetto

stumbled across Shmulik. Shmulik and his friend Marek Levin had run away to try to save themselves. Weiss smiled: “Ah, you again! This time you will come with me,” he said to Shmulik. “And you too,” he said, grabbing hold of Marek. Shmulik began to beg, “Sir, I am fifteen years old!” Weiss’s thunderous laugh echoed through the courtyard. “You managed to gain five years in only a few months? You’re wasting your breath.” And he dragged them by their shoulders to the black truck. Shmulik was upset. He thought that his life was over. He jumped onto Weiss and began kicking the murderer in the stomach. Marek joined in and started to attack Weiss as well. Weiss reacted quickly, and, with the help of several Gestapo agents nearby, he got the children under control. Because they resisted, he did not have them get back into the truck. He grabbed them both by the neck and choked them to death. A mother recounts the following about her child: When they ordered women and children to gather in the courtyard, my Leybl said to me: “It doesn’t make sense to hide only ourselves, we must also save others.” He brought me and his brother Yosele to a storage room, covered us with two-metre cords of wood, and took off. I became restless. I was certain that they had snatched my Leybl. Only later did I become aware that after he left us he found an axe. It was the same axe that Weiss carried with him when he was hunting children. Leybl ran around with the axe and managed to gather up twenty children. A couple of parents also followed Leybl. He had all of them climb into an attic, and made an opening in the metal roofing with the axe in order to allow them to scramble away farther. Suddenly, he caught sight of two large cisterns, which contained the bath-house water. When Leybl determined that one of them was empty, he decided that it was an ideal place to hide the children. But how could he get the children up there when the cisterns were three metres off the ground? Leybl jumped down to look for a ladder and quickly returned with one. He took the children from their parents’ arms and lowered them down into

oN smokING ashes

197

the containers. He also brought the ladder into the cisterns so that nobody would stop to take notice. But someone informed Weiss that they had seen children ascending to the attic where the cisterns were located. He darted over and began searching. He did not find a thing. The ladder leading to the containers was no longer there. Just to be sure, he began to knock on the vats with his club, saying, “Children, come out, I brought you butter and sweets!” Children as young as two years old remained entirely still and managed to hold their breath. There was not a peep from the cisterns. • We later learned the following from the train conductor Josef Rincewicz, who himself drove the trains filled with children. The conductor transported the children from the Kailis and hkP camps, altogether some two hundred children, to Krakow, where they were put into a German hospital. The children underwent a selection there. Blood was drawn from some of them to supply transfusions for Germans. German specialists extracted the most delicate facial skin from the other children for use in cosmetic surgeries on wounded and burned German soldiers.

In Liberated Vilna As soon as I arrived in liberated Vilna, one of my first stops was cell #16 at the Gestapo headquarters. Sadly, that cell was famous in the ghetto. Professor Noyekh Prilutski had been held in that cell for weeks. It was in that cell that Itsik Vitenberg, commander of the Partisan Organization in the ghetto, had been tortured. The cell was infamous only to Jews. Even in prison, Jews were separated from Aryans. And suddenly I was inside the cell. I could hear the suffering cries of my friends and partisan comrades echoing within it. Its walls were covered in blood. Thousands of inscriptions were still visible on the walls. Many of the condemned engraved their own tombstone inscription on its walls. In the light of sunset, which made the red markings on the wall even more striking, I read: “Avenge us! / Itsik Vitenberg / July 16, 1943.” •

198

vILNa Ghetto

Another inscription read: “Anyone familiar with Raybove from Ban Street 9 needs to know that she murdered two innocent souls! May she be cursed to the end of time! May her grandchildren and great-grandchildren suffer, just as our innocent blood was shed. She gave us up, and we are now being shipped to Ponar. [Signed] The Trakunski Sisters.” Many inscriptions had already been erased from the walls. It is possible they were scrubbed so that there would be no evidence left behind. Those condemned to death also left inscriptions behind on the walls of the ghetto prison on Lidske Street. Here are several such farewells: You, golden days of youth I barely got to know you; Dark, endless days, When will you finally come to an end? Vilna ghetto Prison 1943 9/5 The truth must prevail. Lidske is antechamber for Ponar. Here sat Yosele, preparing himself for Ponar.

Incineration of Bodies When over one hundred thousand people had been murdered in Ponar, Himmler ordered Neugebauer, the head of the Gestapo in Vilna, to burn all the bodies so that there would be no evidence left behind. The order was accompanied by a specially printed pamphlet, one of Himmler’s secret publications, that detailed how to carry out the mass incineration. Kamermakher, a Jew who worked at the Gestapo headquarters until June 1944, was acquainted with the smallest detail regarding these murderers. He related the following to me. In September 1943, soon after the liquidation of the ghetto, when the special unit responsible for burning the bodies led by Neugebauer himself completed its training, they got to work on fulfilling their assignment. The persons responsible for the incineration of these hundred thousand people were Neugebauer, his successor Faulhaber, the infamous Martin Weiss, Kittel, Legel, Schneider, Kross, Fiedler, and a Sturmführer whose name was unknown. In reality, the entirety of the

oN smokING ashes

199

Vilna Gestapo was involved in the burning of those whom they had murdered. The German rulers apparently believed that within a few months the front would reach Vilna and that they would be driven from the city. In order to have enough workers to carry out this terrifying mission, Weiss gathered men from the prisons and transferred them to Ponar. Those transferred there were certain they would be shot. They soon learned that they had been brought there for another purpose. They were ordered to build a bunker for those assigned to burn bodies. There were several pits at Ponar. One of those pits, whose surrounding walls were covered in paving stones, was located 150 metres from the entrance to the road to Grodno. It was designated by the Germans to house the corpse-burners. Those who were brought to Ponar to build the bunker did not know that they would also be living in it. At first, they worked from dawn until dusk. When it got late they were taken back to the Lukishki Prison or to the cellars of the Gestapo. The pit was round, some 15 metres wide and 8 metres deep. It was steep throughout. The stone-laid walls were smooth, so that it was impossible to slide a finger into a crevice in order to pull oneself up. There were different sections built into the pit. There was a food storehouse, a latrine, a well, a kitchen, and two long prison barracks with plank beds to sleep on. From above, the bunker was covered with heavy wooden beams, upon which were laid stones, earth, and rubble. There were only two openings, into which ladders were placed. One ladder was designated for the prisoners. The other, of much higher quality, was for the Germans to carry out their inspections. When the bunker was ready, it was no longer necessary to return those who had built it to prisons in town every night. On the contrary, more prisoners were brought from the Gestapo headquarters and were assigned a bed in the bunker. Of the eighty people dragged off to Ponar there were seventy Jews, nine Russian prisoners of war, and a single young Pole who had been caught hiding a Jewish girl by the name of Leyele from the village of Leshnik. The bunker was surrounded by barbed wire. Behind the wire, mines had been laid, and behind the mines there was another line of barbed wire. Beyond the second round of barbed wire, there was an armed guard stationed every two metres.

200

vILNa Ghetto

Shloyme Gol, one of the last to escape the bunker at Ponar, told me: When all eighty prisoners were gathered in the bunker, the Sturmführer came down the special ladder. He was a tall, blond German with protruding gold teeth. He examined the new dwelling through his monocle, and called everyone outside. He wanted to say a few words: “As of today, you will remain here and work. It will not be so bad for you. You will have plenty of decent food. But you will need to work diligently. You will be kept busy with special work of importance to the State. There is no question that the Lithuanians perpetrated unspeakable atrocities. They murdered ninety thousand people whose corpses are rotting here. It is a disgrace to the world, and to history! Therefore, all evidence of this must be wiped away. You will dig up all the bodies and burn them on special pyres. After that, you will fill in the pits and level them out so that not even the smallest trace of what happened here remains. “We will teach you how to build the pyres. If any bone fragments remain behind after the bodies are burned, they must be ground into a fine powder and mixed in with the yellow sand. If you complete your task honourably, we will send you to work in Germany. Each of you will be permitted to choose your work according to your professional training.” Then he ordered us to go back down into the bunker on the wood ladder that was set aside for us. When we were all inside, the Sturmführer and his aides Kross and Fiedler descended the nicer ladder reserved for Germans. He organized us into a row and started up again: “As I have said, you will remain here with me to work. But in order to prevent you from trying to escape, we must chain you.” The Sturmführer took out a chain that had been prepared in advance and attached it to one of our legs to model for us how it was to be worn. Afterwards, he asked: “Who is the blacksmith here?” Avrom Gamburg, who had earlier presented himself as a blacksmith, stepped forward. Each one of us had to put our foot onto a rock. Gamburg then affixed a shackle around our boot under the watchful eyes of the Sturmführer. The space between

oN smokING ashes

201

each of the chain collars was such that one could take only an ordinary step. Then, the Sturmführer approached each of us to make certain that we were properly chained. He politely asked each of us where we were from, how old we were, and our trade. Then he continued with his speech: “You should not attempt to escape from here, because no one escapes Ponar. We will check your chains every two hours. If it is found that they have been tampered with, you will be shot. The chains must clatter as you walk, not only collectively but individually. That’s why you must raise your feet when you walk. You must work diligently, as if you were working for yourself. The smallest act of sabotage will be punished by death. You will be shot for any breach in discipline.” Afterwards, he ordered us to climb out and hoist up the ladder after the last one of us. *A German pulled up the Sturmführer’s ladder.*

Figuren7 Shloyme Gol continued his story: Four guards armed conspicuously with automatic weapons brought us to work. First, we were taken into a chamber where all the tools were kept: spades, pickaxes, shovels, pokers, crowbars, rakes, and axes. Everyone grabbed the tool he needed, and we continued on. The Sturmführer, dressed in a long leather coat, accompanied us. He ordered us to put down our tools. “In order to accustom yourselves to the work, you will not need tools at first. You will carry the rotting corpses with your bare hands.” In order to help us understand that this was not the time for us to make any trouble, he drew his whip and administered some blows. ‘“Discipline,” I said, “discipline!” We were taken to one of the mass graves. As soon as we cleared away a layer of sand, we confronted a heap of bodies tossed one on top of the other. Several workers broke out in uncontrollable sobbing and could not touch the martyrs. Under a hail of blows the work finally began.

202

vILNa Ghetto

As the days proceeded, we were permitted to use tools to dig up the bodies and carry them to the pyre. The Sturmführer told us that we had to forget that the corpses had once been human beings. We were to think of them as inanimate objects – Scheissdreck, shit – and relate to them as such, as one would to something like sticks of wood. **He forbade us from referring to the dead as “people,” “bodies,” or anything like that.** When we were counting them or reporting on our work he ordered us to refer to them as “Figuren.” • Konstantin Potanin, a prisoner of war, who found himself among the corpse-burners and managed to survive, told me the following: We grabbed the spades and marched forward. We came to a huge pit, and all the chained men like me were standing there and scraping off the top layer of sand. The stench was so strong that it was difficult to approach. The Sturmführer’s deputies Fiedler and Legel stood at the edge of the pit. They were wearing fur-lined coats and tall boots. They each had a flask of wine in their pocket. Every so often they took a swig from the bottle. Fiedler gave us our instructions. He began in German and concluded in Polish: “If you find bones, put them to the side! You are to miss nothing!” I struck my shovel into the ground and felt that it could go no further. I cried out: “A body! There’s a body here!” “It’s not a body, it’s a Figur!” Legel said, exploding in laughter before taking a swig. “If you find a Figur, clean it up so that it is perfectly recognizable.” Then he screamed again: “Faster! Put more sand in your shovel! Clear the sand from the Figur! Get closer! Closer! I’ll teach you how to work!” The Sturmführer himself arrived. Every time I saw him, he was dressed differently. It occurred to me that earlier he had been wearing white-felt boots and a fur-lined jacket, and now he was sporting different boots and a leather coat. He stopped in front of me and ordered me to cease digging. He ordered me and Mikhelson8 (who once owned a restaurant in Vilna) to carry the

oN smokING ashes

203

Figuren. Others would take our place digging. We were given a stretcher constructed of two long birch poles that were tied to two wooden planks, and the Sturmführer brought us to a second pit. I saw other chained men working inside it: Yitskhok Dogim, Beylits, Tshmelina, and Goldberg. With the help of metal spades, they were pulling the Figuren that had been disinterred to the side so that we could remove them. The Figuren lay entangled. Heads, legs, and arms are all woven together. They are on their sides, on their stomachs, and on their backs. Some are shielding their faces with their hands. Children still cling to their mothers’ necks. Here is a man and a woman who are embracing one another. Some are naked, others are dressed. Feet and fists protrude out of the ground. The clothes have lost their colour; they are all grey. The bodies are different colours: green, red, blue – every hue possible. The dyes from their clothing have seeped into their bodies in the moist earth. Other Figuren, those at the bottom of the pile, are thin as paper. Their heads are intact, but the rest of their bodies are scattered in pieces. Once, the Sturmführer caught sight of two Figuren-carriers walking somewhat unsteadily and holding their heads. He approached them and asked: “What’s going on? Maybe you are unwell?” The two detainees admitted: “Yes, we have fevers. Our heads are throbbing.” “Why didn’t you say anything? Come, I’ll take you to the hospital.” The two workers followed the Sturmführer. He took them a kilometre away and shot them at the edge of a pit especially prepared for such occasions. From then on the Sturmführer examined every detainee, taking the sick ones to the “hospital.” When the workers understood what was going on, even those with a raging fever worked to their last ounce of strength.

Division of Labour The prisoners were divided up according to the following assignments. Everyone had to develop a specialization and master it:

204

vILNa Ghetto

Figuren-digger Figuren-carrier Wood-supplier Fire-master Bone-crusher Ash-sifter Concealer of evidence Motl Goldberg (who before the war was a clerk at Shur’s paint store in Gitke-Toybe’s Alley) was appointed brigade commander, responsible for supervising the work. Goldberg had to ensure that everyone was working conscientiously and that each prisoner was at his proper assignment. Once, while digging out bodies, he recognized his wife and two children. In order to honour his dear ones, he wanted to carry them to the pyre personally, and when the bodies finished burning, he recited kaddish, the traditional memorial prayer. The Figuren-diggers: They were unskilled workers. They had a crude task: unearth the dead, remove the bodies from the pits with special hooks, and prepare them for the carriers. If two bodies were entangled, they had to be separated and placed side by side. The Figuren needed to be cleaned. Not even a speck of sand could remain behind. As for individual body parts such as heads, legs, and arms, the calculation was that two heads were equivalent to one Figur. Or four arms and two legs amounted to a Figur. Two torsos without arms or legs counted as a single Figur. When a mass grave was opened, Weiss always had to be present. Since he had murdered these thousands of people, he knew these sites better than anyone. He would sniff through the fields and point: “Hier, hier” [Here, here!]. When a grave was emptied – when all its bodies had been pulled out and burned – Weiss ordered the workers to put a few Figuren back in so that after the war, if there was a search conducted at Ponar, only a few dozen rather than a hundred thousand victims would be discovered. The Figuren-carriers belonged to the same category of unskilled labourers. In pairs, they had to haul three bodies at a time and turn them over to the fire-masters, who readied the pyre. They also needed to count how many Figuren were removed from the mass graves.

oN smokING ashes

205

The wood-suppliers had an easier job. They cut down trees from the surrounding forest and transported the wood to Ponar. The logs had to measure precisely 5 and 8 metres in length. The Germans thought of the fire-masters as those tasked with the greatest responsibility. They had to build the pyres, stack the bodies in a pyramid, and burn them. Each Figur needed to be closely examined before being placed on the pyre. Pockets were searched and anything discovered was removed. One worker stood by with pliers to rip gold teeth from the bodies. The teeth were collected in special boxes that the Sturmführer, or Weiss, later took. The bone-crushers were tasked with picking out all bones, down to the tiniest fragments, that had not been consumed by the fire. They placed them into a larger stone mortar and, with the help of a heavy iron pestle, ground them into ash, which was then taken in a wheelbarrow to the ash-sifters. The ash-sifters did not always work in the same place. They would wait next to empty mass graves beside heavy sieves. They sifted with the help of shovels: a shovelful of human ash and a shovelful of sand. Pieces of skull and bone that remained on the edges of the sieve were taken back to the mortar and ground up again. Those responsible for concealing every last trace of what took place at Ponar worked in the mass graves. They were equipped with rakes to spread the mass of ash and sand that was brought over, cover it with regular earth, and smooth it all out. Then the work was complete.

The Structure of the Pyres The pyres were designed in the following way: Three parallel channels were dug into the earth at a distance of 1.5 to 2 metres apart. They were 50 centimetres wide, 60 centimetres deep, and 8 metres in length. Three additional channels with the same measurements were dug out across the first three channels. In the middle, where the two middle channels intersected, four wooden beams measuring some 5 metres in height were placed into the ground. Their uppermost edges leaned up against one another, and they were fastened together. This way a cone-shaped chimney made of wood was formed. Up to

206

vILNa Ghetto

five blocks of wood, each measuring 8 metres in length, were placed around each side of the chimney. Then they were covered with dry, leafy branches. It was only then that the bodies were placed on top of them, heads facing outward and feet facing the chimney, in two rows. In this way, the pyre could accommodate two circles of bodies: one that was narrower and close to the chimney, and a second, wider one encircling the first. Shorter pieces of dry wood were placed on top of the bodies, which were then soaked with a black mineral oil and gasoline. That was the first layer. A second layer of corpses was then laid on top of it in the same shape, though in a somewhat tighter circle, in order to make a pyramid. **Every layer was made up of two hundred and fifty bodies, and** the entire pyramid consisted of thirty-five hundred bodies. When a pyramid was ready, twelve buckets of oil and several litres of gasoline were poured through the wooden chimneys from above. Then, three jugs of oil and gasoline were poured into the mouth of every channel. In addition to all this, incendiary bombs were dropped through the chimney and inserted into the channels. Finally, a piece of wood soaked in oil and gasoline was ignited and thrown from afar into one of the channels. The pyre instantly ignited with a horrible sound and an extraordinary explosion of fire. “As a Fire-master, I was responsible for the ignition,” Gol recounted. “It was one of my most terrifying experiences. The smoke and fumes were suffocating.” “An incinerator pyre could burn between seven and ten days. The workers had to remain next to the fire and keep an eye on it. It often happened that a leg, an arm, or a head would fall from the pyre. I had to pick them up with a shovel and toss them back onto the fire.” This was how the work was organized. The cycle was repeated periodically until fifty-six thousand eight hundred bodies were burned. This was about half the victims of Ponar.

Opening the Mass Graves Yitskhok Dogim, one of those who managed to escape the hell of Ponar, told me about the opening of the mass graves: First, we opened the mass grave dating back to the time of the khapunes. It was about 150 metres off the highway to Grodno. We

oN smokING ashes

207

knew it was from this period because of the towels and soap they had with them. The Jews had been ordered to bring towels and soap with them because “they were leaving for work.” It consisted of young men who had the patch with a yellow “J” on their chests. Most of them had their hands bound behind their backs and their eyes blindfolded. We counted nine thousand bodies, among whom were five hundred prisoners of war and priests in black cassocks. The bodies were stacked in layers, drenched in lime. The second grave contained those murdered during the assault operation of 1 September 1941: men, women, and children. They were not all naked. We found keys on those who were clothed: they still believed that they would return home. In that mass grave we found ninety-five hundred bodies **from the second ghetto dating back to October 1941.** The third mass grave contained bodies from the liquidation of the second ghetto in November 1941.9 For the first time we discovered that the murderers had killed everyone in the same way: shooting them from behind in the back of the head. *A wire was stretched across the length of the pit; the falling people would get snagged on it and drop in a straight row.* We counted ten thousand four hundred bodies there. Most of the children had not been shot. Their sagging tongues suggested that they had been buried alive. There were twenty-four thousand bodies in the fourth mass grave, the largest of all. Most of them were from the “Slaughter [Night] of the Yellow Permits.” In the same pit we also found nonJews: priests, nuns, Poles, partisans, a German in uniform, and many Soviet prisoners. In the fifth mass grave, not far from the gate, we found three thousand men, women, and children. All of them were naked, murdered by a bullet to the back of the neck. The five thousand bodies in the sixth pit also were completely naked. There was a special grave for those arrested for political reasons – fifty-one men brought from Lukishki Prison. I recognized my brother-in-law Shmuel Shats, who was dragged from the ghetto for being a Communist. Two specific mass graves contained those were executed during the Kovno Aktion of 5 April 1943. All were completely naked – men, women, and children.

208

vILNa Ghetto

The freshest graves contained Jews killed during the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto and discovered in malines. Before the period in which bodies were incinerated, I saw groups of people being brought to Ponar to be shot, including four hundred Jews from Vaivara. Later, I witnessed thirty to forty Poles and fifty Roma murdered. While the Germans killed, we were granted a furlough. We had to crawl back down into the bunker and wait out the shooting there. The cries of the victims often penetrated the stone walls of our bunker. While I was laying bodies on the pyre, I recognized my family: my mother, my wife, three sisters, and two nieces. I recognized my wife by her necklace, which I had given her as a wedding gift. When my wife was burning on the pyre, I tried to tear the necklace that contained two small pictures of her and me from her neck, but the fire had already engulfed her.

The Tunnel under the Ponar Bunker From the moment workers were lowered into the bunker they understood that their fate was sealed. Escape was impossible. During work hours, their every move was watched, and they were chained together. The bunker was surrounded by two rows of barbed wire, and between them the ground was mined. Only a single narrow lane was passable. A guard armed with an automatic weapon watched over it, and every two metres around the perimeter of the bunker there was an SS man posted to keep watch on the prisoners. Finally, a special patrol came down to inspect the chains every ninety minutes. The Sturmführer’s top priority was that nobody escape from this place so that there would be no possible witnesses. When the eighty men completed their duties, the Sturmführer himself would incinerate them on the pyres, and he would return to Berlin. He had already killed Oberscharführer Fiedler. He knew too much, and he was no longer necessary. Despite it all, some in the bunker continued to develop a plan to escape from this hell. Yitskhok Dogim and Shloyme Gol10 initiated this undertaking. They joined up with Yuri Farber, a prisoner of war who was an engineer, and another pair to dig a tunnel of 30–35 metres in length, extending from

oN smokING ashes

209

the bunker beyond the barbed wire into a pine forest.11 *Farber was in charge of the route and the construction of the tunnel; he had a compass that had been stolen from a German.* They worked exclusively at night, while the others, exhausted from a day of difficult work among corpses, were fast asleep. In the shed where the foodstuffs were kept, they dug a concealed well-shaft some 2.5 metres deep. The tunnel started from the bottom of the shaft. There were no tools in the bunker. They dug with their bare hands and with wooden pegs. When their hands were bloodied, they dug with spoons. They dug 20 metres of tunnel with spoons!12 The excess sand was deposited under the bedsteads and between the floorboards of the rooms, as well as on top of the ceiling of the mess. With each day, the floor got higher, but because the bunker was deep, nobody took notice. The five comrades (later, others joined them) erected makeshift scaffolding along the entire length of the tunnel so that its sandy walls would not collapse. They were nearly buried alive on more than one occasion. But their will to survive was so strong that Dogim managed to provide electricity to the tunnel. He diverted the current from a German watchpost, and brought it to the tunnel thanks to a hidden wire. The most difficult task was determining the proper direction for the tunnel. How should it be dug it so that its exit point would not be too close to the guard posts, or lead to a mass grave? There were mass graves all around the bunker, beyond the guard posts. While digging out the tunnel, they came directly into one such grave. The route of the tunnel had to be adjusted, and the digging continued. After a long period of dangerous work that lasted almost three months, the tunnel was ready. On 29 May 1944,13 at four o’clock in the morning, when the inspectors left the bunker, Dogim woke everyone up and said: “The tunnel is ready. Whoever wants to escape from here should follow my command …” He sorted them into groups of ten. Each group had a commander. *They quickly managed to tear free of their chains. A day earlier they had filed through the cuffs that were fastened around their boots, and in place of the steel cuffs they substituted a wire to hold the chains in place so that when the time came they would be able to free themselves.* Dogim was the first to go down into the tunnel. The groups of ten, each with its commander, followed. When they were all on their way Dogim severed the electric wire so that it would be dark, and he began to dig through the last layer of earth. A stream of fresh air penetrated into

210

vILNa Ghetto

the tunnel. The glow of the pyre was visible from afar. Dogim gave the order: “Go!,” and, one after another, eighty men snuck into the forest. Guards were on patrol not far from the exit of the tunnel. At first, the prisoners moved very cautiously. But suddenly, there was a rustle: they had stepped on some dry branches. The guards heard and opened fire. The burst of gunfire illuminated the entire area. The free prisoners took off. They passed the barbed wire and the mass graves as they ran towards the perimeter fence. Shots cut them down. Men fell. A group of eleven managed to join the partisans in the Rudnitski Forest.

Graves of Loved Ones in Ponar **That a human being is stronger than death is something I only full realized today, 18 July 1944, when I visited the graves of more than a hundred thousand people at Ponar. I myself am incapable of fully understanding how I am able to record here my experiences there so matter-of-factly, how I can write at all about what I saw there.** My mother, my child, my friends are all at Ponar. **But at the same time, no one is there.** Their bodies were burned on the pyres, and their bones were so carefully ground that no material trace of their existence has been left behind. I realize that my heart, too, was consumed by the pyre. Something else is beating inside of me. It may be hatred. The journey to Ponar is so beautiful! To the right, the blue Viliye sparkles. The fir trees, captivating in the setting sun, draw you in from afar. Is this really the gateway to Hell? Is Hell this beautiful? Thousands and thousands of people travelled down the same path. • Three partisans accompanied me: Shloyme Gol, Dogim, and Glazer. For four months, chained at the foot, they were forced into the terrifying work of excavating and burning bodies. They were three of eleven survivors who managed to gnaw their way through the earthen tunnel underneath the bunker. •

oN smokING ashes

211

Now we approach the spot where our loved ones were reduced to ash. We find ourselves in front of the first gate, to the left of the road to Grodno. It is the gate through which the “Black Crows” used to pass. A German sign is still affixed to it: “Eintritt auch für deutsche Offiziere streng verboten!” [Entrance strictly forbidden, even to German officers!] We pass through the barbed-wire gate, and we are engulfed in a forest of pine trees. One hundred steps in, Gol points out to me: “This is the site of the last mass grave, which we opened just before our escape. According to our estimates, thousands of bodies must still be here.” With a clenched jaw, I ran towards the grave. A terrible stench beat me back. I was standing before an immense pit, approximately 50 feet [15 metres] in diameter. In the middle, there was an island of bushes. A long trench led down to the pit. As we approached the pit the trench descended sharply down into it. “I was led down this trench into the mass grave to be shot on 6 December 1941,” Glazer pointed. He was forced to undress. Because his underpants were torn, he was permitted to keep them on. Any decent clothes were immediately scooped up by the surrounding soldiers. At the time the trench was deeper than it is now, about 6 metres deep. Perhaps it was filled in later with the bodies of those murdered before they made it to the pit. They were made to go down six at a time, and from the bushes in the middle of the pit, Glazer caught sight of automatic weapons pointed towards them. Schweinberger, along with two other Jew-snatchers, stood on a mound. They were observing everything going on in the pits through binoculars. When Glazer heard the order “Fire!” he dropped to the ground. He heard six shots. Three people fell on top of him, and their warm blood splashed across his face. Lying under the bodies, he saw others being slaughtered in groups of six. A young girl, who survived the first bullet, begged the murderers: “You killed my mother! Kill me too!” When the shooting ended, Glazer ran away. He never imagined that he would return to Ponar, or that he would have to escape again … We are down in the pit. Half-rotting pieces of torn currency, scraps of paper, and documents from the ghetto litter the sand. Here is a child’s shirt with a red monogram on the collar. From the oily scraps of thick paper, it is evident that the victims brought food with them – bread and a slice of fat. Here is an abandoned lipstick, a twisted shoe, torn

212

vILNa Ghetto

photographs, scraps of decaying prayer shawls, and a pair of tefilin that a pious Jew wore on his last journey. Gol was at home here. He jumped into the mass grave. Since he was already used to handling corpses with his bare hands, he pulled several bodies from beneath the light layer of sand and attempted to see whether he recognized the victims. “They are all from the Kailis and hkP camps because their bodies are still fresh. It’s easy to recognize them.” Suddenly, Gol cried out: “It’s Dr Feygus!” And indeed we recognized this well-known Vilna physician. He had been murdered a few days before the arrival of the Red Army in Vilna. I came across Leyzer Rudnitski’s graduation diploma from a ghetto school that reads: Vilna ghetto Culture Department Children’s Welfare Division Number 9 It certifies that “Rudnitski, Leyzer,” completed his elementary schooling in the ghetto and is signed by ghetto officials: Director of the Culture Department: [The signature is illegible.] Inspector of Schools: R. Broydo School principal: [illegible] Vilna ghetto, 194314 Gol found a Yiddish poem on a half-decomposed body whose grey hair suggested that it was a Jew between fifty-five and sixty years old. It was written in pencil on an unsealed, half-torn page. The body was not recognizable. Black face, empty eye sockets. The poem addresses itself to his daughter Sorele, who was murdered even before her father. Here is the poem: Had a venomous snake bitten into my heart, It would have choked on a poison More powerful than its own.

oN smokING ashes

My beloved child, you are gone, My long-awaited butterfly, my lamb, You are gone and you are not coming back, Sorele, you’ve left your father and mother forever. Heart and soul soaked in blood, The soul fades away, but the heart? The heart explodes In pain and suffering due to your absence. Why, Almighty, do you Mistreat parents so? You stole the joy that is childhood, You transformed two people into nothing more than a rag. Why, for what, for whose sin? I would prefer to be blind So as not to see the coming summer and its beauty – Sunbeams, flowering trees, Lilacs, peonies, and roses, That used to delight the soul of my beloved child. If I had the strength, I would take up a sword And strike it all down together with my life Because I have nothing left to live for. I want to become deaf So as not to hear the singing of Soviet songs, Or the bird trilling in the trees Whose music gnaws away at me. And the pain in my heart has become so strong That tears fall and pierce the cup That will never again be full. I want to die, to be reunited with my child’s soul. That would be a consolation. And if, after my death, I could Squeeze my child against my heart,

213

214

vILNa Ghetto

I would be the happiest Of all the dead, Who ever died in this world. • The corpse-burners took me through the fields of Ponar. They showed me the new pits from which they had disinterred the dead. It is hard to determine how many graves are still there. Not far from the train tracks, about a kilometre from the highway to Grodno, was a ruined footbridge, leading to a mass grave. My companions told me that people were forced to run over the footbridge and descend into the pit. As they ran, the guards shot at them and the victims fell into the pit. Things were done slightly differently in every mass grave. Every mass grave had its own story. “Where is the human ash?” I ask Dogim. Dogim, the builder of the Ponar tunnel, took me into a ditch and scratched the earth with the help of a stick. Under the top layer of yellow sand I noticed a grey, sticky substance. I took a little ash in my hand and pressed it to my heart. The Germans destroyed every building, all the tools, and even the barbed wire that surrounded the mass graves. All that remained of the bunker where the eighty corpse-burners had lived was the large circular pit lined with cut stones. Dogim thought back to the way in which he had organized their escape. We are now in front of that extraordinary tunnel that the corpse-burners dug out by the spoonful. It would have been possible to tunnel through the earth in such a way only at a time of extreme tension when seized with an incredible desire to live. **On the way back Gol asked me: “Have I told you the story of the pregnant woman? When four hundred Jews were brought here from Vaivara – men, women, and children – there was a pregnant woman in labour among them. She was shot like all the others. When their bodies were still warm, they were dragged to the pyre to burn. They all were naked. Blood was dripping from the chest of the pregnant woman. Her eyes were open. It almost looked as though she were alive. When the flames enveloped her, her fetus emerged from her womb. The white flames ignited it like a wick, and together they were consumed by the inferno.” **

oN smokING ashes

215

The Cast-Out Letter On 20 July 1944 an old Polish woman sought me out in liberated Vilna to turn over a letter she had found a month earlier on the road to Grodno, which was also the way to Ponar. The letter appeared on two rose-coloured sheets, written in pencil in Polish. It was addressed: “Deliver to Jewish hands.” The woman had hidden the letter, as she tells it, in a bottle, and now she felt the urgency of the request from those condemned to death. That is why she was now delivering it to a Jew. My friends and I read the letter. We read it and we shuddered. Since we had spent two years in the ghetto, perhaps nothing should have shocked us. But actually we knew very little about the tortures inflicted upon fellow Jews by the Gestapo before they were killed. Here is the letter, slightly abridged. The original is in the Vilna Jewish Museum. This bloody document speaks for itself. A request to fellow Jews: Dear brothers and sisters, We are turning to you with an important request. First, forgive us any hurt we may have caused you during our lifetimes. We don’t know why such punishment has befallen us, why they are robbing us of our lives. That they plan to kill us isn’t even the whole story. They tortured our children in the most bestial manner. Little girls of eight years old were forced into sexual relations. Mothers had to be present to ensure that their daughters did not cry. Our children were murdered in the most bestial manner. Then, they made the mothers undress, lined them up against a wall, tied their hands above their heads and tore out their hair. They pierced their tongues with pins. **They relieved themselves on them.** They smeared excrement over their eyes. They ordered the Jewish men to expose their private parts and they stuck burning hot wires into them until they turned black. They used to tell us: “You’ve lived enough. Now we are going to slaughter you all. But murder is not big deal. We are also going to torture you. You won’t want to stick around waiting for Stalin any more.” They cut off our fingers and toes. We were not allowed to bandage our wounds, so blood flowed freely. They tortured us like this for four days, and then they sent us to Ponar. We were forty-five people in a single hideout. Through the sewers we

216

vILNa Ghetto

made contact with another group of sixty-seven people, adults and children. We were in contact with Marisia, a Polish widow and mother of three children. We gave her our belongings in exchange for her providing us with food. After two days, she betrayed us to the Germans. They tortured us just as I described above and sent us to Ponar. We are tossing this letter on the road to Ponar in the hope that good people transfer it to Jewish hands after human decency returns. If Jews manage to kill even a single one of the murderers to avenge the hundred and twelve of us, they will have performed an honourable deed on behalf of our people. We implore you with tears in our eyes: Avenge us! Avenge us!! I write in Polish because if someone were to find a Yiddish letter, they would likely burn it. We hope a decent person will read a letter in Polish and turn it over to Jews who managed to survive. We bid farewell to you and to the world, demanding vengeance. Gurvitsh and As 26 June 194415 • I am once again in my hometown. We are rushing to the malines, furnished with shovels and sacks. Abba Kovner, commander of the Jewish partisan group Nekome, whose fighters were the first to enter the city and take the battle to the Germans hiding behind their barricades, is here. So too is the writer and partisan Shmerke Kaczerginski. We escaped from the ghetto together, weapons in hand, to make it to the forest and fight the enemy. Vitke Kempner, heroine of the first resistance operation, who in May 1942 transported a bomb out of the Vilna ghetto and derailed a German military convoy near Nay-Vileyke, is also among us. So too are the courageous partisans Zelde Treger, who made eighteen round-trips between the forest and the ghetto to save lives, *and the heroine Ruzka [Korczak], one of our most admirable fighters.* As little as a year ago our brothers lived in the same narrow streets we walk today. Our fate is engraved on every inch of earth, on the smallest cobblestone. It was from here, Daytshishe Street 19, that Itsik Vitenberg, commander of the Partisan Organization in the ghetto, was sent to

oN smokING ashes

217

his death. The Germans used dynamite to blow up our second-to-last barricade here, at Strashun Street 12. Hundreds of people are still buried beneath the ruins. We stop. We are silent. Every brick has its own story to tell about those lying beneath it. **I hear someone call out to me: “Hello …” It was Eisen, the teacher. He had just returned to Vilna. A priest hid him in a church. He asks me: “Comrade Sutzkever, what about a Jewish school? Have you given it any thought?”** Our cultural treasures are buried in some ten locations. It is difficult to determine what still remains. A cache is buried beneath the ruins of Daytshe Street 29. Everything was burned to the ground at Vivulski 18, the former headquarters of YIvo. We are not likely to find a thing there. When the Red Army was on the outskirts of Vilna, the Germans discovered the hiding place at Strashun Street 6 and made a bonfire in the courtyard to burn the documents. The only thing that survived the flames is a letter from Avrom Reyzen. The edges of the letter are burnt. Only the signature of the poet and ten lines are legible. The maline at Strashun Street 1, underneath the building where I lived in the ghetto, is completely intact. Three-quarters of the holdings in the maline at Strashun Street 8 were saved. We managed to hide about two thousand books from the Strashun Library there. Among them were the only extant copy of a book, or extremely rare volumes. And then we come to one of the most important malines on Shavler Street 6. The maline is located in a sub-cellar, several floors underground, and is connected to the sewer system. Gershn Abramovitsh, who constructed the maline, accompanies us. We search together. Here are posters from early Goldfaden plays. And there are the index cards prepared by Dr Alfred Landau for his Yiddish dictionary. Here is the box containing Sholem Aleichem’s letters. Nearby are manuscripts by Bialik and Gorky, Mendele Mokher Sforim and Yehoash. And there is the manuscript of Bergelson’s “Der toyber” [The Deaf Man].16 It is stuck to the record book, the pinkes, of the Gaon of Vilna’s kloyz. In a corner, to the left, we unearth the sculptures. Most of them were the property of the Sh. An-ski Museum. In the darkness we recognize Ilya Ginsburg’s17 bust of Tolstoy. The discovery of “David” by Antokolski came about as follows: a hand appeared after we managed to remove the first layer of earth. I took hold of it and jumped back in horror. It was not a plaster hand. It turns out

218

vILNa Ghetto

that after the liquidation of the ghetto, Jews took refuge in this maline. One of them died, and he was buried next to Antokolski’s sculpture.18 • I walk through Vilna. I come to the Green Bridge. It was destroyed and is lying in the water. A temporary bridge made of wood boards has been erected next to it. As I cross this narrow footbridge, I see the body of a German Feldwebel trapped between the iron remains of the bridge lying in the water. It is one of Schweinberger’s men, with a gleaming swastika on his breast. The waves wash over him, passing over his head. And opposite him, on the bank of the Viliye, an armed Jewish partisan stands guard. Written in Moscow Summer 1944

Sutzkever, the young Yiddish poet, prior to the war (Courtesy of the Sutzkever family)

Sutzkever’s mother, Reyne (Courtesy of the Sutzkever family)

Sutzkever’s literary identification card for the Soviet writers union, Vilnius, 1940. The new Soviet authorities required any writer who wished to continue publishing to join. (arC 4*1565, manila envelope 69-1-5, Sutzkever Archive, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem)

Jacob Gens, ghetto representative

Beloved Yiddish teachers in Vilna ghetto, left to right: Dovid and Borekh Lubotski, Mire Bernshteyn, and Yankev Gershteyn

Emblem of the Ghetto Theatre, Vilna, designed by Bentsye Mikhtom, Sutzkever’s friend from the literary group Young Vilna (From Leyer Ran, Yerushalayim de-Lite ilustrirt un dokumentirt)

Poster for a performance of a literary-musical evening at Vilna’s Ghetto Theatre, including presentation of works by Sutzkever and other prize winners, 6 March 1943 (Vilna Ghetto Poster 1943-03-06/07, 74.34 cm × 50.5 cm, acc. no. vzm 1216, Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History, Vilnius)

Sutzkever on a balcony in the Vilna ghetto with fellow writer Shmerke Kaczerginski, 1943 (rG 121, Personalities, YIvo Institute for Jewish Research, New York)

On a balcony in the Vilna ghetto, 1943, left to right: Shmerke Kaczerginski, Rokhl Krinski, and Sutzkever. They were among the group of Jewish intellectuals assigned by the Germans to the Rosenberg Task Force in Vilna. They worked secretly to rescue Jewish manuscripts, books, and other cultural and religious objects from the Nazis. (rG 121, Personalities, YIvo Institute for Jewish Research, New York)

Handwritten copy of Sutzkever’s poem “Take Up Arms,” Vilna ghetto (Judaica Collection, Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania, Vilnius)

Abba Kovner, member of the military command of the FPo, Vilna ghetto, who warned the Jews “not to go like sheep to slaughter” (rG 120, Poland Vilna 8, YIvo Institute for Jewish Research, New York)

Three partisan women, left to right: Vitke Kempner, Reyzl (Ruzka) Korczak, and Zelde Treger (rG 120, YIvo Institute for Jewish Research, New York)

Itsik Vitenberg, military commander of the United Partisan Organization (FPo) in the Vilna ghetto. He died in July 1943. (Portrait of Wittenberg, 1945, acc. no. vzm 1819, Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History, Vilnius)

Berl Shereshnyevski, member of the FPo, Vilna ghetto

Shmuel Kaplinski, instructor in the FPo, Vilna ghetto, and later a commander in the partisan unit To Victory

The false identity card of the partisan Sonye Madeysker, who passed as a Polish Roman Catholic and was a valuable link between the ghetto and partisans beyond its walls

Sketch of the bomb with which Vitke Kempner, Yitskhok Matskevitsh, and Moyshe Brauze conducted the first partisan operation, Vilna ghetto

Ilye (Yehiel) Sheynboym, killed in action on 1 September 1943 commanding the barricades at Strashun Street 12 in the Vilna ghetto (rG 120, Poland Vilna 5, YIvo Institute for Jewish Research, New York)

Ime Lubotski, partisan fighter killed in action in the forest near Vilna

Sketch of the bunker that housed the body-burners at Ponar

A mass grave at Ponar. The Germans did not have time to burn all the bodies.

Julian Jankauskas, a Lithuanian who provided weapons to the FPo and hid Shmerke Kaczerginski’s wife

T H E M O S C O W YEARS (1944–1946)

Editor’s Introduction

This volume is the only edition of Sutzkever’s Vilna Ghetto that also includes additional materials by the same author, which I have titled The Moscow Years (1944–1946). As the afterword explains, Sutzkever and his wife, Freydke, were airlifted from the forest near Vilna, where they had lived as partisans since their escape from the ghetto on 12 September 1943, and taken to Moscow in March 1944. Part I contains the author’s diary entries related to his testimony at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal in February 1946 and the official court transcript (translated from the original Russian) of that testimony. I make several corrections to that translation, which I note in a brief introduction, but otherwise leave it as it appeared when it was published in 1947. Part II consists of three essays by Sutzkever that illuminate his time in Moscow. These deal with leading writers and cultural figures – Ilya Ehrenburg, Peretz Markish, and Shloyme Mikhoels – with whom he interacted in those intensely busy years. Written in Tel Aviv in the 1960s, they explore the political environment in which Sutzkever’s Vilna Ghetto was commissioned by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JaFC), written, and edited. Except for Sutzkever’s testimony before the Nuremberg tribunal, all translations are my own. JC

Part I T E S T I M O N Y AT N UREM BERG

Nuremberg: Diary Notes

1

Editor’s Introduction In February 1946 Abraham Sutzkever was selected by the Soviet authorities to serve as a witness at the Trial of Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. He was recommended by Ilya Ehrenburg, the renowned Soviet journalist and writer, and Shloyme (Solomon) Mikhoels, the Yiddish actor and theatre director, who were both members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JaFC). Sutzkever was added to the official slate of Soviet witnesses only hours before its departure from Moscow for Nuremberg, and only after an interview with officials from the state security apparatus. Sutzkever’s diary notes from those winter days of February 1946 are a raw account of the awesome responsibility he felt as an official witness. Readers are provided with an intimate glimpse into his anxieties, his rage at coming face to face with ordinary Germans, and his bitter satisfaction at witnessing bombed-out remnants of German cities. Sutzkever had considered smuggling a weapon into the proceedings to assassinate his tormentors before the eyes of the world, so strongly did he feel about this historical moment when he would confront the murderers of his people. Sutzkever did not know whether he would ultimately testify at Nuremberg until the evening before he was called to the witness stand, and this is reflected in the diary’s anticipatory tone and frustration. Its most moving moments describe his profound desire to testify in Yiddish (“As far as I’m concerned, there is no greater obligation”). The court’s last-minute decision to require him to testify in Russian, one of the trial’s official languages, was a bitter disappointment. We also learn that Sutzkever deliberately declined invitations to be seated during

238

the mosCow Years

his testimony because he considered his words “a kaddish [memorial prayer] for the dead.”2 JC On the 20th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials against German war-criminals I opened my diary and consulted my notes about my testimony at Nuremberg for the first time. These notes are presented here precisely as they were written then, with only minor corrections. [A. Sutzkever]

Moscow, February 16, 1946 Managed with great difficulty to make my way from Vilna to Moscow today. Were it not for Kravetski, the administrator of the Vilnius Philharmonic, there is no way I would have got hold of a ticket and I would have missed out on the entire affair. In Moscow, a commotion. Everyone is looking for me. Ehrenburg3 called me twice at home. Teumin4 from the Sovinformburo5 was certain that I missed the train. I am beside myself. How could I have missed the chance to appear as a witness at such a world-historic trial? I call Khomich,6 upon whom my testifying depends. His response leads me to conclude that I’ve arrived too late. I set out for the Committee [JaFC]. Freydke [Sutzkever’s wife] is on edge, although she believes that ultimately I will be sent. I ring Ehrenburg. I’m feeling a bit guilty because he proposed me to serve as a witness, and in the end I was late. He takes my call and remains calm, suggesting that I keep calling the Committee. In the evening, I return home to considerable excitement. The Committee called four times requesting me to come immediately. That is to say, maybe I am not too late? I rush out with my pack of materials. An official record is taken of my testimony that lasts five hours.

February 17 The minutes of my testimony are already complete. I am driven all over Moscow in a taxi and provided with clothes. I am to be at Khomich’s by six tomorrow morning. Then the flight to Nuremberg. I haven’t been

NuremberG: DIarY Notes

239

this overcome by an experience for quite some time. I stood for ten minutes in front of my apartment and did not recognize it. I feel the terrible responsibility of my upcoming journey. I pray that the souls of the martyrs find expression in my words. I want to speak Yiddish. Absolutely Yiddish. I spoke about this with Ehrenburg, with Chief Counsellor of Justice Smirnov,7 and with everyone else. I want to speak the language of the people whom the accused attempted to exterminate along with their language. Let them hear our mame-loshn. Let them hear our language, and may Alfred Rosenberg explode in astonishment. May my language triumph at Nuremberg as a symbol of its unshakability!

February 18 Vnukovo airport. In flight. We are nine witnesses and two official chaperons. The witnesses include: the world-famous scholar Iossif Abgarovitsh Orbeli,8 an Armenian; Nikolai Ivanovich Lomakin, the Orthodox priest of Leningrad who remained in the city throughout the siege; Dmitriev, a professor of art, also from Leningrad; Dr Yevgeny Kivelisha, a former prisoner of war from Proskurov who was in the Rogova prisoner-of-war camp; Dovid Iossifovich Budnik, a Jew from Kiev, who escaped Babi Yar;9 two Belorussian girls saved from Auschwitz and Majdanek; Yakov Grigoriev, chairman of a collective farm in the Pskov region that the Germans burned along with all its inhabitants; and [Stanislav] Tarkovski, a former prisoner of war from the military hospital of Slavuta.10 The Belgian military attaché is also flying with us.11 We land in Minsk. There, we are taken to a guest house. During that night’s meal, Orbeli raises a glass to the coexistence of all peoples with the Jews. This academician makes a strong impression. He has a Jewish way of seeing things. When he tells me, no, he is an Armenian, I am still inclined to believe he is a Jew. The priest is a character right out of Gogol. Full of Russian folksiness, he makes patriotic toasts and keeps crossing himself. When the priest learns that the woman serving us hails from his hometown of Kaluga, he is covered in kisses and plied with liquor.

February 19 The road from the guest house back to the airport in Minsk is blanketed with snow. Our car can barely move. We summon a brigade of Germans.

240

the mosCow Years

They plod through the snow and clear the route for us. We fly onward. The sky, which a moment ago was clear and sunny, is now saturated in clouds. The airplane is flying three kilometres above the ground. But just at this moment it descends lower. The panes slowly defrost. I see the landscape beginning to change. We are flying over Germany. Its villages – red-coloured, two-storey houses. The plane descends even further. In every village – a red-brick church in the style of the Middle Ages. Everything is red, saturated with our blood. The landscape is man-made. No natural forests. Everything is fenced in, divided into square plots. We land in Landsberg. There is a storm in Berlin. Landsberg – a big city in ruins. It now belongs to Poland. The Polish language on German territory sounds strange to me. The Landsberg airport. We wait in a hut. The priest is having a conversation with the Belgian military attaché, translated by the academician Orbeli. The priest wants the attaché to concede that without Russia, England, and America would not have been able to defeat Germany. The attaché is a diplomat. He is attempting to extricate himself from the situation. Then, the priest asks about the relationship between the Belgian people and their King Leopold [who surrendered to the Germans in May 1940]. Here the attaché also tries to be diplomatic and says that soon the Belgians will vote on this matter. The results of the vote this evening, says the diplomat, will reveal the attitude of the Belgian people. We all will find out soon enough. But the priest wants the attaché to play the prophet and predict which parties will win: the right or the left. The attaché responds that he personally believes that the more democratic parties will prove victorious. But he takes no responsibility if he errs in his predictions. We drive in a convoy towards Berlin. The [German-]Polish border is 70 kilometres from Berlin, in Kostrzyn [Küstrin]. We are searched. We continue onward. We are already in Herzfelde, a suburb of Berlin. We come to a beer-house. A blond Germanic beast of a woman with an irritatingly ugly false smile brings us mugs of beer. Her name is Frau Schulze. A three-year-old child is playing with a doll nearby. The three-year-old is already a German girl down to the smallest detail. Her eyes cut through me as if they were a knife. How many Jewish children were incinerated and strangled with a smile by such younger and older Schulzes!

NuremberG: DIarY Notes

241

Night. Berlin. It’s not so long ago that the brown plague frolicked here. In the ghetto it was hard for me to imagine myself ever setting foot here one day. We enter the Soviet zone. After a formal dinner we are taken to the hotel. How courteous are the Germans around us! The servant-woman in my room guides me in, and points out that I have my own pillow. Bedding is in short supply. A plate with characteristically German inscriptions hangs in the kitchenette of the hotel room: Der größte Schatz für einen Mann ist die Frau, die kochen kann. The greatest treasure for a man is the woman who can cook. And above – a large inscription: Die Sonne mit uns, as if the Germans knew that there would be a zone – a Soviet zone, an American zone, and others.12 I fall into bed. My tears are choking me.

Berlin, February 20 Berlin. I persuade myself that the Russian designation of the city as a Зверинная берлога [beast’s lair] is very appropriate. Even now, when the city has been turned on its head, it gives off that impression. I take a taxi through the city. The closer to the centre, the clearer are the accomplishments of the “flying fortresses.”13 It has already been several hours since we navigated all through the zones. There are few people on the streets. Hundreds of Germans roam around the ruins, sorting bricks, cleaning and arranging then. Almost every German is carrying a backpack or pushing a small wheelbarrow. They are gathering pieces of wood, bread, and anything else they might find useful. The city centre is a ruin. The American and British pilots were artists. The paved streets are almost entirely intact – the brick buildings were reduced to rubble and lie agape on the side of the road.

242

the mosCow Years

We come to the famous Brandenburg Gate. Hitler held his parades here. A vast emptiness all around. Amid the nothingness  – ruins. Alexanderplatz still has something of its former grandeur and looks like an old, worn-out whore who is still trying to look young. The Tiergarten, Frankfurter Allee are a wreck, full of debris. Capsized boats obstruct the Spree. A pleasant ruin has been made of you, Berlin! But it’s not enough. May you be cursed for all eternity and never rise again! In the courtyard of the Soviet government ministries our escort shows us the building where the German capitulation was signed. A grey, two-storey building towards the right, in the courtyard. It is likely we won’t fly to Nuremberg today. The weather is bad, and planes are not taking off. I stride through the streets of the capital and gaze at faces. Once again I am convinced that the Germans are very talented idiots. I would not care at all if not a trace was left of this land and its people. I learn that German workers receive 500 grams of bread (white) per day. Those who are not working, 400 grams. Several newspapers are published here. Deutsche Volkszeitung (Communist), Zeitung für das deutsche Volk, and others. Barely a word is printed about the Nuremberg Trials. Instead, I find articles about Luther, Heine (in the Communist paper), and poems by upstart German poets.

Nuremberg, February 21, 6 p.m. Our plane just landed in the former den of thieves, where Alfred Rosenberg, now under arrest, proclaimed his anti-Jewish laws. The name “Nuremberg” will be part of history for all eternity: the Nuremberg Laws, the Nuremberg Trials. Symbolic: the place from where the order went out to exterminate the Jewish people now hosts the trial of these same criminals. And I, perhaps the only remaining Yiddish poet in occupied Europe, appear now at the Nuremberg Trials, not only to testify, but as a living witness to the immortality of my people. I noticed this in Berlin, and now it is even more distinct: the buildings here are not attached to one another as they are in Moscow, for example. Every building is distinct from its neighbour. The architecture – MiddleAge Gothic. I am most pleased by the buildings that lie in ruins. There is more movement in the streets here than in Berlin. There are as many American soldiers roaming around as there are German

NuremberG: DIarY Notes

243

civilians. There are also a few foreigners. There is a sense that something important is taking place in town. We are staying in the Grand Hotel. One of its wings was torn off by a bomb. In the evening Soviet chief prosecutor Rudenko14 paid me a visit. He asked me how I was and said that today he will allow me to rest. Tomorrow we will address any questions that relate to my appearance as a witness at the Nuremberg Trials.

Nuremberg, February 22 Rudenko was informed that I wanted to testify in Yiddish. He will consult today about this special matter with the chief prosecutor, Johnson.15 If it is at all technically possible I will speak in Yiddish. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the only obstacle. In truth, it is the first opportunity for someone to testify in Yiddish at the trial. I pray to God that a translator will be found. In the meantime I am making notes regarding the materials I brought with me. The more I observe the Germans with their dull, servile, abject faces – the more it becomes understandable to me why Hitler emerged here of all places. Fundamentally, Hitler delivered a lot to them: he massacred and drove out the Jews from Germany. Their belongings were confiscated by the “Chosen Race”; he seized vast territories, and appointed the Germans as Herrenvolk, the master race. What more did they need? The masses enjoyed being led. Why should they think for themselves if in Nuremberg or Berlin there was a Hitler who knew better and was smarter than the entire world? Interesting: last month, elections were held in Bavaria. Almost 90% of votes went to the Christian Democratic Party and the “apolitical party,” the latter consisting of former Nazis who are now supposedly impartial … Communists and Socialists managed to garner only a few votes. One witness from our delegation, the academician Orbeli, was called to testify today. He spoke for around 15 minutes about how the Germans destroyed cultural-historical monuments in Leningrad. I was told that his testimony made a strong impression. He spoke with intelligence and countered the defence cleverly. I still don’t know when I will be called to testify and whether the language question has been resolved? I am anxious because I have my doubts about whether a translator will be found.

244

the mosCow Years

It turns out that the Americans bear the greatest hatred towards the Germans. At the tribunal in Nuremberg there is a restaurant where all the prosecutors, judges, and translators eat during breaks. On the door it is written: Entrance to the restaurant is strictly forbidden to Germans, regardless of their position (that includes German defence attorneys, translators, and so on). The following question is making the rounds of the American press: are American soldiers permitted to marry German women? It’s been forbidden up to now. Even Mrs [Eleanor] Roosevelt, who is now returning from her trip through Germany, believes that American soldiers should not be allowed to marry German women. Observed the following this evening: an American soldier started up with a young German woman near our Grand Hotel. Together with a buddy, the American soldier beat the German woman, and she fell unconscious on the street. Germans passed by, casting an angry glance, but didn’t dare intervene.

February 23 It is still not clear when we will be called to appear. It is quite possible that some of our testimony will not be delivered. Any day now matters will be clarified. In any case, if I do not testify it will not be my fault. Truthfully, it will deeply upset me, but what can one do? I took a walk this evening in Nuremberg. Half-ruined Gothic and pre-Gothic churches. The city smells of the Middle Ages. Old castles and forts everywhere. I read the German newspapers. The talk is all about Denazification Law #8. That is, the removal of former Nazis from public life. For instance, firing someone for having collaborated with Hitler, like the world-famous conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra. The American press writes that thousands of previously active Nazis are still employed by the city of Nuremberg. Someone active in city administration attempted to explain in the German newspaper Nürnberger Nachrichten that there are not a thousand, only nine hundred of them. Germans are now divided into several categories. Nazis and members of the military are being fired and some of them arrested. That’s why they’re going a little easier on “the fellow travellers.” They even have a right to join political parties. Youths are also handled

NuremberG: DIarY Notes

245

differently. Every organization, club, and workplace must have seven tried and true anti-fascists. There must be no fewer than five present at every meeting. Our testimony is becoming more complicated. I just learned that only four of us are likely to appear at the trial (aside from Orbeli, who already gave his testimony). Which four? Am I fated to be included? God only knows.

February 24 We took our first real walk through Nuremberg today. The city is a lot more damaged than I initially thought. Eighty percent is in ruins. And most strikingly: the Americans first started bombing Nuremberg in January 1945. The entire bombardment lasted no more than eight days. The thousand-year-old city was destroyed in those eight days. The person who is guiding us around Nuremberg, a German with a limp, boasts that until the Second World War the city had a population of some two million Germans. He makes a point of showing us bombedout buildings: here is where Hitler greeted a parade; there is the tavern where he drank beer and plotted the plague; here is the five-hundredyear-old St Sebastian Church; a bit further on is the Frauenkirche; on a hill to the left, the green crumbling two-storey house, where Albrecht Dürer,16 the German painter, sculptor, and author of a book on city fortifications, lived and worked. Not far from the dwelling there is a huge bronze memorial for Albrecht Dürer. The memorial is blackened. The pedestal has been smashed. And the master’s eye has been severed by shrapnel. Two thick fortress walls surround the entire city, in a circle of some eight kilometres. Between them is a deep trench. On top of the defensive walls – towers. We visit the oldest cemetery in Nuremberg. There we see the grave of Dürer and Dürer’s painting on the wall of a chapel. We also see sculptures by Graf in the chapel. The coffins lie some 8 metres below the grave markers in solid, redbricked catacombs. Bombs broke through the tops of several graves, and we can peer down at the coffins. The bronze bas-reliefs on the grave markers are interesting, completed in the 16th century in Vischer’s famous foundry.

246

the mosCow Years

Upon returning to the hotel I learn the following: it has already been decided that from our group, only four witnesses will testify: Yakov Grigoriev, the priest Nikolai Ivanovich Lomakin, Tarkovski, who was rescued from the German military hospital, and I. I hope they will not overturn the decision. • The witness Dovid Budnik, an electrical engineer born in 1911 in Byelotserkov, now living in Kiev, tells me: In 1941 I was mobilized into the Red Army. On 19 September the Germans besieged Kiev. After a few days I was captured and forced into a labour brigade. I managed to escape. During a second raid on Khreshchatyk I was taken to a camp on Kerosin Street. There were three thousand Jews there. They provided no food for five days. Children up to the age of sixteen and people older than fifty were subject to a selection. They were taken away and after a short time only their clothes returned. I went through a number of selections and was sent to the Syrets camp near Kiev.17 In the Syrets camp there were several thousand people of differing nationalities, among them two hundred Jews from Kiev. Its commandant, Radomski,18 and his dog, Rex, were especially depraved in their punishments. For instance, he used to order his victim to crawl up a tall poplar tree, tie a rope to the top of the tree, and then toss down the rope; then he ordered his minions to saw the tree at the base of its trunk, and to pull on the rope – until the victim at the top of the tree fell and died. On 18 August 1943, the Germans selected one hundred prisoners, among them sixty Jews and the remainder Ukrainians and Russians, and took us to Babi Yar. They beat us while forcing us down into a trench, affixed chains to our feet, and locked us in a bunker. They ordered us to dig up the dead and burn the corpses. Our commandant’s name was Tapeyde. A few days later another three hundred and fifty people arrived. The Germans referred to us, the corpse-burners, as Figuren, the same word they used to refer to the dead. Every day dushegubkes (mobile gas vans) would enter Babi Yar and unload sixty to seventy people who had been gassed to death.

NuremberG: DIarY Notes

247

We used to hear desperate screams from inside the dushegubkes. When their doors were opened, a few people remained half-alive. The Germans would finish them off with a bullet. There was only a single occasion when someone from Kirovgrad managed to stay alive. In the dushegubke he moistened his shirt with urine and put it over his nose and mouth, so that the gas could not penetrate through it. When we burned all the bodies, around eighty thousand of them, we saw a second group of forced labourers building two large ovens. That’s when we understood that the ovens were for us. There was an underground organization operating in the bunker from its earliest days that set the goal of escaping. On the night of 29 September 1943, we managed to open the door of the bunker with the help of a master key found on one of the dead. With great relief we escaped and attacked Germans. After a short struggle, during which a number of Germans were killed, we scattered into the valley. The corpse-burners in the second bunker tore open their door and launched themselves at the German guards with pickaxes at the same time. Flares lit up the sky. Fourteen corpse-burners survived. Among them: Vladimir Davidov, Yankl Kaper, Leonid Ostrovski, Valdimir Kuklia, Khayim Vilkins, Leonid Doliner, Ziame Trubakov, Brodski, Dovid Budnik, Volodye Kotliar, and Senia Berliand.

February 25 The chance that I will appear as a witness is diminishing. I am the only one who has not yet been confirmed. Aside from me, everyone in our group already knows whether he will appear or not. It is certain that Tarkovski, Grigoriev, and the priest will testify. My fate will be decided today. Tomorrow is the last day of the Soviet prosecution. I feel as though there are some hesitations about my testimony. There’s nothing that can be done! It does not depend on me. Frankly, I am annoyed. But what can I do? Stop! Just now I was visited by Chief Counsellor of Justice Colonel Smirnov! Tomorrow, I must testify, but  … in Russian! Will I pass the test? Will I meet the obligation to history, to my people? God only knows!

248

the mosCow Years

February 26 I waited in court an entire day, but I was not called. There wasn’t enough time. Smirnov says I have to be prepared for tomorrow.

Nuremberg. At the Trial. 11:45 a.m. Wednesday, February 27, 1946 I have just concluded my testimony before the Nuremberg Tribunal. The words are still glowing on my lips, words that I shrieked out before the entire world and for future generations. I was shaken to my very core. It was without question the most powerful experience of my thirtysome years of life. I spoke for thirty-eight minutes (including the questions put to me by Colonel Smirnov). It cannot be other than Divine Providence who put Russian in my mouth. I myself was not certain that I would manage to express my full feelings and memories in that language. It is still difficult for me to take stock of my feelings. Which is stronger, my sorrow or my desire for revenge? It seems to me that greater than either is the radiant, powerful feeling that our people lives, that it has outlived its executioners, and that no dark force can annihilate us. In a Jewish twist of fate, a Yiddish poet, perhaps the only one still alive from the ghettos of Europe, has come to Nuremberg to cast judgment on the Rosenbergs and the Franks, and in so doing perhaps also on the surviving remnants of fascism in other countries. Colonel Smirnov, the Soviet chief counsellor responsible for questioning me before the Court, chatted with me beforehand about the huge responsibility resting on my testimony at the tribunal. “You are the first Jewish witness,” Smirnov told me: “You must speak in the name of millions of victims. You must tell the world how German fascism slaughtered your brothers.” This huge responsibility occupied my every brain cell. For two nights before my appearance I could not shut my eyes. I saw my mother running naked over a snow-covered field. The warm blood from the bullet wound that pierced her heart trickled onto the floor of my room and encircled me like a ring. It is determined that I will speak Russian (the official languages of the tribunal are English, Russian, German, French). I am not entirely

NuremberG: DIarY Notes

249

confident that my command of Russian is enough to communicate the workings of my innermost soul. I called upon the angel of language to come to my assistance. When the marshal (that’s what the American soldier who brings in witnesses is called) escorted me into the courtroom and I saw to the right, only 3 metres away from me, the cage with the devils inside it, my fear evaporated and I felt that here I was their accuser and their conqueror. After the chairman of the tribunal, Lord Lawrence,19 had me swear an oath, chief counsel Smirnov approached to question me. I twice rejected the marshal’s invitation to sit down in the witness stand, as was customary. I spoke standing, as if I was saying kaddish for the dead. I limited my remarks to Vilna, to that which I personally had witnessed and experienced. I spoke about the German system of mass murder, which was entirely planned in advance. I spoke about the khapunes responsible for ferreting out and seizing Jews. For every Jew they got their hands on and turned over they were paid up to ten rubles by the Sonderkommando. I spoke about the assault on Novigorod Street and how the Germans forced me to dance naked around a bonfire while holding a Torah scroll. I told them about the scholar Noyekh Prilutski who was murdered, about the former chairman of the Vilna Jewish community, Dr Yankev Vigodski, about my YIvo colleague Pinkhes Kon, and the Yiddish actors Maurice Lampe, Khash, and Kadish. I told them how I had recognized one of my mother’s shoes from a pile of those belonging to those who had been killed, and how my newborn son was murdered in the ghetto hospital. I spoke about how, during a pogrom in the second ghetto, Schweinberger shot his dog and ordered the Jews to dig it a grave and cry over it. Yes, I admitted, at that moment we really cried over the fact it was a dog that had been buried there and not Schweinberger. And I pointed with my finger at this band of Schweinbergers who were now under arrest and on trial. The news correspondents latched on to my words and everyone turned to stare at the criminals. Finally, I read the first lines of a document that I found in liberated Vilna in the office of the Gebietskommissar Hans Hingst regarding trade in the clothing of murdered Jews. Here are those few lines from the document:

250

the mosCow Years

Vilna. Resources Centre for Raw Materials. 30 November 1941. To the District Commissar in Vilna. Pursuant to your order, the old Jewish clothing from Ponar is at present being disinfected by this establishment and delivered to the administration of Vilna. At the request of Lord Lawrence I read the document aloud again and turned it over to the tribunal. I was told by those working at the Tribunal and journalists that I spoke persuasively and self-confidently. Streicher,20 whose entire fortune abroad was reduced to a stick of chewing gum that the Americans tossed his way, stared at me like a green frog. Frank21 removed his dark glasses for a while, and measured me with his bloodshot eyes, as though he were thinking: “You just wait. I’ll get my hands on you yet.” Alfred Rosenberg, thief of Jewish cultural treasures, nervously jotted something down on his papers. Hitler’s deputy Kaltenbrunner,22 who had fought, according to his defence, for “humanitarian treatment in the concentration camps,” was bent over the rail of the dock, as though he were looking for his underlings so as to punish them for not having tossed me into a furnace when they had the chance. Soviet Counsellor of Justice Lev Shenin squeezed my hand, and told me it went very well. State Counsellor of Justice Zorya told me the same thing. My reading of the German document about Jewish clothing from Ponar had made a strong impression. Counsellors of Justice Zorya and Raginski told me that it was significant that the Tribunal had me turn over the document. It was the first occasion in which a witness appeared with his own evidence. Smirnov was extremely satisfied. He told me that Ehrenburg would also be pleased.

March 1 Done with Nuremberg. Just arrived in Berlin. We are awaiting better weather. We will probably fly to Moscow the day after tomorrow. Only five members of our delegation were called. The academician Orbeli. The peasant Yakov Grigoriev, whose house was set on fire by the Germans in the village of Kuznetsov (in the Pskov region of western Russia). His entire family – a wife, two children, and a nephew – were

NuremberG: DIarY Notes

251

burnt to death. At the last moment, Grigoriev managed to grab his eleven-year-old wounded son, Lioshka, jump out a window with him, and escape. Seventeen people were burnt to death in the house from which Grigoriev and his son fled. I am told that Grigoriev, a simple Russian peasant and chair of the Proletarski Trud collective farm, spoke well. The defence had nothing to ask him. The third to appear was Dr Kivilsha: he spoke about the murder of prisoners of war in Uman, Zhmerinka. I was told he did not speak for that long. I was the fourth to testify, and the fifth was the Leningrad priest Lomakin. Lomakin, whose smooth appearance does not inspire much confidence, appeared at the trial in full costume: a black silk cassock down to the heels, fastened at the back with sparkling buttons, and on his chest two large “gold” crosses adorned with “diamonds” that blinded everyone in the courtroom. He also wore a brand new medal “for the defence of Leningrad.” But aside from his glamour, his trembling hands (were they shaking on purpose?), and a voice that occasionally broke (he cried deliberately), his testimony did not make much of an impression. His words did not come across as sincere or heartfelt. Also, his patriotic “Happy Ending,” that everyone was united in defence of Leningrad, was not on the mark. I got the impression that the moral weight of a type like Lomakin is negligible. One can expect anything from such kinds of people. That he hated Jews was self-evident from his tall tales. For instance, he told us that Jewish women in Leningrad came to beg of him: “Father, accept us into the Orthodox church.” “Why did they do this?,” I asked him, as if I believed his every word. And Lomakin answered: “The women complained that they wanted to renounce the Jewish faith because the Jews showed themselves to be cowards during the war.” There are now eighty Jews living at Streicher’s former farm, all rescued from the death camps. A blue flag23 hangs from the house. The youths are learning how to work and preparing themselves for the journey to Palestine. In a questionnaire that the Americans gave the Jews to fill out there were three questions:

252

the mosCow Years

1. Do you want to remain in Germany? 2. Do you want to remain in Europe? 3. Where do you want to emigrate? Everyone answered no to the first question. So too with the second question. As to the third question, people responded: “Either to the Land of Israel or the crematoria.”

March 6, 1946 7:30 p.m. Managed to fly from Berlin to Moscow.

Testimony at the Nuremberg Trials

1

Editor’s Introduction What follows is the official court translation of Abraham Sutzkever’s Russian-language testimony published by the International Military Tribunal. An audio recording and partial film record of Sutzkever’s testimony is on deposit at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The entire testimony lasted thirty-eight minutes. The trial transcript fails to note that Sutzkever was invited not once but twice to sit; he chose to deliver his testimony standing. The transcript also does not transmit that after Sutzkever was asked by the Soviet prosecutor whether he was an eyewitness to attacks on Jews in Vilna and he responded “Yes,” an eleven-second silence followed, adding to the dramatic tension of the moment. I corrected the court translation of Sutzkever’s testimony only when it was clearly mistaken, and in the following limited cases: • The original translation mistranscribed the names of the Nazi perpetrators Hingst, Murer, and Schweinberger as Fincks, Muhrer, and Schweichenberg. • The trial transcript referred to the “scientist Moloch Prilutzky” instead of the “scholar Noyekh Prilutzky.” • The reference to the “well-known writer and editor, Grodnensky,” was corrected to refer to the Yiddish writer [A.I.] “Grodzensky.” • The translation misstated the name of the Lukishki Prison and Market as Lutishcheva or Lukshinaia. In his testimony Sutzkever employed Russian names for local streets rather than the Yiddish ones in his memoir. The official court translation of people’s names also diverges in places from my transliteration of Yiddish names in the memoir.

254

the mosCow Years

When Sutzkever returned to Moscow following his testimony he was invited by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to deliver a public address on 14 March 1946 about his experiences in Nuremberg. He spoke for several hours without notes to a packed auditorium, which overflowed onto the adjacent streets. His memories of that talk appear in his essay “With Shloyme Mikhoels,” which is included in this volume. JC

Wednesday, February 27, 1946 Morning Session mr CouNseLLor smIrNov: Your Honors, I would like to recall to you certain figures which I mentioned yesterday afternoon. I am speaking about the number of Jews who were exterminated in Poland and Czechoslovakia. I allow myself to remind the Tribunal that the figures I mentioned yesterday, which were based on the report of the Polish Government, show that 3 million Jews in Poland have been exterminated. In Czechoslovakia out of 118,000 Jews only 6,000 remain. I would like to now pass on the report of the Yugoslav Government and will quote one paragraph, which the Tribunal will find on Page 75 of the document book, third paragraph: “Out of 75,000 Yugoslav Jews and about 5,000 Jewish emigres from other countries who were in Yugoslavia at the time of the attack – that is to say, out of a total number of about 80,000 Jews – only some 10,000 persons survived the German occupation.” I beg the Tribunal to call to this Court a witness who will confirm these data. He is Abram Gerzevitch Sutzkever, a Jewish writer, who together with his family became a victim of the German fascist criminals who had temporarily occupied the territory of the Lithuanian Soviet Republic. I beg the Tribunal to allow me to question this witness. [The witness, Sutzkever, took the stand.] the PresIDeNt: What is your name? abram GerzevItCh sutzkever (wItNess): Sutzkever. the PresIDeNt: Are you a Soviet citizen? sutzkever: Yes.

testImoNY at the NuremberG trIaLs

255

the PresIDeNt: Will you repeat after me: I – and mention your name – citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – summoned as a witness in this Trial – do promise and swear – in the presence of the Court – to tell the Court nothing but the truth – about everything I know in regard to the case. [The witness repeated the oath in Russian.] the PresIDeNt: You may sit down, if you wish. [Editor’s note: The witness stood while giving his testimony.] smIrNov: Please tell me, Witness, where did the German occupation find you? sutzkever: In the town of Vilna. smIrNov: You stayed in this town for a long time during the German occupation? sutzkever: I stayed there from the first to nearly the last day of the occupation. smIrNov: You witnessed the persecution of Jews in that city? sutzkever: Yes. smIrNov: I would like you to tell the Court about this. sutzkever: When the Germans seized my city, Vilna, about 80,000 Jews lived in the town. Immediately the so-called Sonderkommando was set up at 12 Vilenskaia Street, under the command of Schweinberger and Martin Weiss. The man-hunters of the Sonderkommandos, or as the Jews called them, the “Khapun,” broke into the Jewish houses at any time of day or night, dragged away the men, instructing them to take a piece of soap and a towel, and herded them into certain buildings near the village of Ponari, about 8 kilometres from Vilna. From there hardly one returned. When the Jews found out that their kin were not coming back, a large part of the population went into hiding. However, the Germans tracked them with police dogs. Many were found, and any who were averse to going with them were shot on the spot. I have to say that the Germans declared that they were exterminating the Jewish race as though legally. On 8 July an order was issued which stated that all Jews should wear a patch on their back; afterwards they were ordered to wear it on their chest. This order was signed by the commandant of the town of Vilna, Zehnpfennig. But 2 days later some other commandant named Neumann issued a new order that they should not wear these patches but must wear the yellow Star of David.

256

the mosCow Years

smIrNov: And what does this yellow Star of David mean? sutzkever: It was a six-pointed patch worn on the chest and on the back, in order to distinguish Jews from the other inhabitants of the town. On another day they were ordered to wear a blue band with a white star. The Jews did not know which insignia to wear as very few lived in the town. Those who did not wear this sign were immediately arrested and never seen again. On July 17, 1941, I witnessed a large pogrom in Vilna on Novogorod Street. The inciters of this pogrom were the forenamed Schweinberger and Martin Weiss, a certain Herring, and Schönhaber, a German Gestapo chief. They surrounded this district with Sonderkommandos. They drove all the men into the street, told them to take off their belts and to put their hands on their heads like this [demonstrating]. When that order had been complied with, all the Jews were driven along into the Lukishki Prison. When the Jews started to march off, their trousers fell down and they couldn’t walk. Those who tried to hold up their trousers with their hands were shot then and there in the street. When we walked in a column down the street, I saw with my own eyes the bodies of about 100 or 150 persons who had been shot in the street. Blood streamed through the street as if a red rain had fallen. In the first days of August 1941 a German seized me in the Dokumenskaia Street. I was then going to visit my mother. The German said to me, “Come with me, you will act in the circus.” As I went along I saw that another German was driving along an old Jew, the old rabbi of this street, Kassel, and a third German was holding a young boy. When we reached the old synagogue on this street I saw that wood was piled up there in the shape of a pyramid. A German drew out his revolver and told us to take off our clothes. When we were naked, he lit a match and set fire to this stack of wood. Then another German brought out of the synagogue three scrolls of the Torah, gave them to us, and told us to dance around the bonfire and sing Russian songs. Behind us stood the three Germans; with their bayonets they forced us towards the fire and laughed. When we were almost unconscious, they left. I must say that the mass extermination of the Jewish people in Vilna began at the moment when District Commissar Hans Hingst arrived, as well as the referent, or reporter on the Jewish problems, Murer… the PresIDeNt: Which year? sutzkever: 1941.

testImoNY at the NuremberG trIaLs

257

the PresIDeNt: Go on. sutzkever: Under the direction of Hingst and Murer, the Germans surrounded the old Jewish quarter of Vilna, taking in Rudnitskaia and Jewish Streets, Galonsky Alley, the Shabelsky and Strashouna Streets, where some 8 to 10 thousand Jews were living.2 I was ill at the time and asleep. Suddenly I felt the lash of a whip on me. When I jumped up from my bed I saw Schweinberger standing in front of me. He had a big dog with him. He was beating everybody and shouting that we must all run out into the courtyard. When I was out in the courtyard, I saw there many women, children, and aged persons – all the Jews who lived there. Schweinberger had the Sonderkommando surround all this crowd and said that they were taking us to the ghetto. But, of course, like all their statements, this was also a lie. We went through the town in columns and were led towards Lukishki Prison. All knew that we were going to our death. When we arrived at Lukishki Prison, near the so-called Lukishki Market, I saw a whole double line of German soldiers with white sticks standing there to receive us. While we had to pass between them they beat us with sticks. If a Jew fell down, the one next to him was told to pick him up and carry him through the large prison gates which stood open. Near the prison I took to my heels. I swam across the River Viliya and hid in my mother’s house. My wife, who was put in prison and then managed to escape later on, told me that there she saw the well-known Jewish scholar Noyekh Prilutzky, who was almost dead, the president of the Jewish Society of Vilna, Dr Jacob Wigotzky, and the young Jewish historian, Pinkus Kohn. The famous artists Hash and Kadisch were lying dead. The Germans flogged, robbed, then drove away all their victims to Ponari. On 6 September at 6 o’clock in the morning thousands of Germans, led by the District Commissar Hingst, by Murer, Schweinberger, Martin Weiss, and others, surrounded the whole town, broke into the Jewish houses, and told the inhabitants to take only that which they could carry off in their hands and get out into the street. Then they were driven off to the ghetto. When they were passing by Wilkomirowskaia Street where I was, I saw the Germans had brought sick Jews from the hospitals. They were all in blue hospital gowns. They were all forced to stand while a German newsreel operator, who was driving in front of the column, filmed this scene.

258

the mosCow Years

I must say that not all the Jews were driven into the ghetto. Hingst did this on purpose. He drove the inhabitants of one street to the ghetto and then the inhabitants of another street to Ponari. Previously the Germans had set up two ghettos in Vilna. In the first there were 29,000 Jews, and in the second some 15,000 Jews. About half the Jewish population of Vilna never reached the ghetto; they were shot on the way. I remember how, when we arrived at the ghetto … smIrNov: Just a moment, Witness. Did I understand you correctly, that before the ghetto was set up, half the Jewish population of Vilna was already exterminated? sutzkever: Yes, that is right. When I arrived at the ghetto I saw the following scene: Martin Weiss came in with a young Jewish girl. When we went in farther, he took out his revolver and shot her on the spot. The girl’s name was Gitele Tarlo. smIrNov: Tell us, how old was this girl? sutzkever: Eleven. I must state that the Germans organized the ghetto only to exterminate the Jewish population with greater ease. The head of the ghetto was the expert on Jewish questions, Murer, and he issued a series of mad orders. For instance, Jews were forbidden to wear watches. The Jews could not pray in the ghetto. When a German passed by, they had to take off their hats but were not allowed to look at him. smIrNov: Were these official orders? sutzkever: Yes, issued by Murer. smIrNov: Were they posted? sutzkever: Yes, they were posted in the ghetto. The same Murer, when he visited the ghetto, went into the shops where the Jews were working for him and ordered all workers to fall down on the ground and bark like dogs. On Atonement Day [Yom Kippur] in 1941 Schweinberger and the same Sonderkommando broke into the second ghetto and seized all the old men who were praying in the synagogues and drove them to Ponari. I remember when Schweinberger went to the second ghetto and the man-hunters seized the Jews. smIrNov: Who were these hunters? sutzkever: The soldiers of the Sonderkommando who seized the Jews and whom the population called “the hunters.” smIrNov: So they were the soldiers of the Sonderkommando, whom the population called “hunters”?

testImoNY at the NuremberG trIaLs

259

sutzkever: Yes, that is so. These hunters dragged the Jews out of the cellars and tried to drive them to Ponari. But the Jews knew that nobody returned alive and did not want to go. Then Schweinberger began to shoot at the inhabitants of the ghetto. I remember that there was a big dog at his side; and when this dog heard the shots, it jumped at Schweinberger and began to bite his throat like a mad dog. Then Schweinberger killed this dog and told the Jews to bury it and to cry over its grave. We really cried then – we cried because it was not Schweinberger but the dog that had been buried. At the end of December 1941 an order was issued in the ghetto which stated that the Jewish women must not bear children. smIrNov: I would like you to tell us how, or in what form, this order was issued by the German fascists. sutzkever: Murer came to Hospital Street 6 and said that an order had come from Berlin to the effect that Jewish women should not bear children and that if the Germans found out that a Jewish woman had given birth, the child would be exterminated. Towards the end of December in the ghetto my wife gave birth to a child, a boy. I was not in the ghetto at that time, having escaped from one of these so-called “actions.” When I came to the ghetto later I found that my wife had had a baby in a ghetto hospital. But I saw the hospital surrounded by Germans and a black car standing before the door. Schweinberger was standing near the car, and the hunters of the Sonderkommando were dragging sick and old people out of the hospital and throwing them like logs into the truck. Among them I saw a well-known Jewish writer and editor, Grodzenski, who was also dragged and dumped onto this truck. In the evening when the Germans had left, I went to the hospital and found my wife in tears. It seems that when she had had her baby, the Jewish doctors of the hospital had already received the order that Jewish women must not give birth; and they had hidden the baby, together with other newborn children, in one of the rooms. But when this commission with Murer came to the hospital, they heard the cry of the babies. They broke open the door and entered the room. When my wife heard that the door had been broken, she immediately got up and ran to see what was happening to the child. She saw one German holding the baby and smearing something under its nose. Afterwards he threw it on the bed and laughed. When my wife picked up the child, there was something

260

the mosCow Years

black under his nose. When I arrived at the hospital, I saw that my baby was dead. He was still warm. The next day, I went to my mother in the ghetto, and I found her room empty. A prayer book was still open on the table and a glass of tea, not yet touched. I learned that in the night the Germans had surrounded this house, seized all the inhabitants, and driven them off to Ponari. In the last days of December 1941 Murer gave a present to the ghetto. A carload of shoes belonging to the Jews executed at Ponari was brought into the ghetto. Among them I recognized my mother’s. Shortly afterwards the second ghetto was liquidated, and the German newspaper in Vilna announced that the Jews from this district had died of an epidemic. On 23 December 1941, in the night, Murer came and distributed among the population 3,000 yellow tickets, the so-called Ausweise. Those who had these tickets were allowed to register their relatives; that meant some 9,000 persons. At that time about 18 to 20 thousand people lived in the ghetto. Those who had these yellow tickets went to work the next day; and others, who remained in the ghetto without these tickets and did not want to go to their death, were slaughtered in the ghetto itself. The rest were driven away to Ponari. I have a document which I found after the liberation of the town of Vilna, concerning the Jewish clothing from Ponari. If this document interests you I can show it to you. the PresIDeNt: Do you have the document? smIrNov: I do not know of this document either, Mr President. sutzkever: [Continuing] This document reads as follows – I will read only a few lines … [The witness read the document in German, and only part of it was translated. It was later identified as Document USSR-444.] smIrNov: Witness, as you have read this document, you must hand it over to the Tribunal, as otherwise we cannot judge this document. sutzkever: Certainly. the PresIDeNt: Will you tell us first of all where the document was found? sutzkever: I found this document at the district commissioner’s building in Vilna, in July 1944, when our city was already liberated from the German invaders.

testImoNY at the NuremberG trIaLs

261

the PresIDeNt: Where did you say it was found? sutzkever: In the building of the District Commissar in Vilna on Gedemino Street. the PresIDeNt: Was that the building occupied by the Germans? sutzkever: Yes, it was the headquarters of the German District Commissioner of Vilna. Hans Hingst and Murer lived there. the PresIDeNt: Well, read the part of the document you were reading just now; we did not hear it. sutzkever: Certainly. “To the District Commissioner at Vilna: Pursuant to your order, the old Jewish clothing from Ponari is at present being disinfected by this establishment and delivered to the administration of Vilna.” the PresIDeNt: Will you hand it in, please? smIrNov: Please, Witness, I am interested in the following question: You said that at the beginning of the German occupation 80,000 Jews lived in Vilna. How many remained after the German occupation? sutzkever: After the occupation about 600 Jews remained in Vilna. smIrNov: Thus, 79,400 persons were exterminated? sutzkever: Yes. smIrNov: Your Honours, I have no further questions to ask of the witness. the PresIDeNt: Does any other Chief Prosecutor want to ask any questions? sIr DavID maXweLL-FYFe: No questions. mr . DoDD: No questions. the PresIDeNt: Does any member of the defendants’ counsel wish to ask any questions? No? Then the witness can retire. [The witness left the stand.]

P a r t II T H R E E R E M I N ISCENCES

Editor’s Introduction

The following three reminiscences, written by Sutzkever in Tel Aviv in the 1960s, provide a window into the social and political environment that greeted him upon his rescue from the forest and his arrival in Moscow in March 1944. It was in this environment that he drafted his chronicle of the Vilna ghetto. In the first essay Sutzkever describes his relationship with Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg as among his closest friendships in Moscow. It was Ehrenburg, a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, who penned the article about Sutzkever in the leading Soviet newspaper Pravda (Truth) (29 April 1944) that attracted attention to the fight of Jewish partisans against German fascism. Ehrenburg extended the initial invitation to Sutzkever to chronicle his experiences in the Vilna ghetto for The Black Book, for which he served as editorial director on behalf of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JaFC). Sutzkever would later expand on these reminiscences for his book. Ehrenburg also recommended Sutzkever as a Soviet witness at the Nuremberg Tribunal. As the essay demonstrates, Sutzkever’s respect for Ehrenburg did not diminish even after questions were raised about how he managed to escape the purges that eliminated so many other members of the JaFC. I then provide selections from Sutzkever’s reminiscences of Yiddish poet Peretz Markish and Yiddish actor and director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre Shloyme (Solomon) Mikhoels. These excerpts demonstrate the degree to which Sutzkever confronted a landscape dominated by self-censorship and fear of betrayal in Moscow. The revolutionary enthusiasm of early Soviet Yiddish writers was tempered when a number of leading Jewish writers and intellectuals were arrested and disappeared in the 1930s. Although conditions relaxed during the Second World War as the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee took up the struggle against Hitler, the campaign against Jewish writers and intellectuals picked up again

266

the mosCow Years

once the war was over. Mikhoels was murdered at Stalin’s order in a staged traffic accident while he was visiting Minsk in 1948, and Markish was among those Yiddish writers arrested and subsequently executed on 12 August 1952, a purge that liquidated the most influential voices of Soviet Yiddish culture and that came to be known as “The Night of the Murdered Poets.” Sutzkever, who had shunned involvement in Communism as a young writer in Vilna, determined that he had not escaped one murderous totalitarian regime to fall victim to another in Moscow. Although he took up Ilya Ehrenburg’s request to contribute to The Black Book and appeared at public events organized by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, his friendships with fellow Yiddish writers and cultural figures in Moscow convinced him that free creative expression was not possible there. Moreover, his deep frustration with local Communist officials in Vilnius over the Jewish Museum he co-established immediately after the city’s liberation persuaded him that Jewish materials were not safe anywhere in the Soviet realm. When it became possible for Jewish refugees in the Soviet Union to be repatriated to Poland, Sutzkever took advantage of this opportunity to leave, making his way to Łódź, and then to Paris, before settling in Tel Aviv. Readers should be aware that these essays were published in Israel in the 1960s, in the depths of the Cold War, and with the retrospective knowledge of the murder of many of his closest acquaintances in Moscow by Stalin’s regime. They offer Sutzkever an opportunity to resist any impression that he had been a fellow-traveller. In the essays on Mikhoels and Markish he establishes himself as one who resisted the political expectations that had already co-opted them: he cites, for example, his failure to acknowledge Stalin in his speech of 2 April 1944 to the third plenum of the JaFC, soon after his rescue from the partisan forests, and his breaking the taboo on stoking Jewish nationalism by speaking of the Jewish longing for Jerusalem in public remarks after his testimony at Nuremberg. At the same time, these intimate portraits reveal Sutzkever’s admiration for those who arranged for his rescue, welcomed him and Freydke to Moscow, and continued to test the limits of Yiddish self-expression under the watchful eyes of the authorities, and in some cases, one another.

three remINIsCeNCes: eDItor’s INtroDuCtIoN

267

In tribute to Soviet Yiddish writers’ significant contribution to and sacrifices for modern Yiddish culture, and to the temporary haven Moscow provided to him, Sutzkever served as co-editor of A shpigl af a shteyn (A Mirror on a Stone, 1964), an anthology of Yiddish poetry and prose by twelve murdered Soviet Yiddish writers. JC

Ilya Ehrenburg

1

My First Acquaintance and Years Earlier For more than two full years in Moscow, from April 1944 to May 1946, I read Ilya Ehrenburg [1891–1967] with only brief interruptions, often for hours at a time, during the day, in the evening, and often well into the night, until I gave myself up to my dreams. I read Ehrenburg the man perhaps even more than his works. (In fact, we read each other.) I remembered with delight from my youth his Julio Jurenito [1922], Thirteen Pipes [1923], and perhaps another book of his translated into Yiddish. Their author had left a deep impression on me. He was a fascinating and complicated person. We became true friends. And when one loves another person, one also loves that person’s work, even that which one has not yet had the chance to read. It may be more precise to say that rather than “reading” Ehrenburg I truly “got to know him.” He became closer to me than all the Jewish and non-Jewish writers and artists I knew in Moscow. With the exception of Mikhoels [see pp. 292–301 below in this volume], I considered Ehrenburg my closest friend. And this friendship, I must admit, was mutual and productive. And it continued in various forms, mostly in a heartfelt exchange of letters, until a half-year before his death. When Ehrenburg was seventy years old I delivered a lecture about him in Melbourne. Actually, I spoke about my memories of him. People complained that I was too generous … Ehrenburg the Jew defied their expectations. This is human nature: one is more inclined to derive pleasure from inhumanity. The prehistory of our friendship began before either of us knew it. When? Where? How? Let’s lay it all out: On 29 April 1944, Ehrenburg published an article about me with the title “Triumph of a Human Being” in Moscow’s Pravda.2 The article, which took up a half-page of Pravda in the midst of the war, created

ILYa ehreNburG

269

quite a stir. One might even go so far as to say it made history. Jewish Muscovites told me that they had not seen such open, inspiring praise for the fighting Jew on the pages in Pravda in quite some time. The article was immediately translated into several other languages of the Soviet Union. If Pravda was printing this, then one needed to look anew at the contribution of Jewish partisans, not only in Moscow but also in the forests of Belorussia and Lithuania. Hundreds of congratulatory notes, telegrams, and all kinds of requests were sent to me, care of Ehrenburg’s address at the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. They came from natives of Vilna and elsewhere who were homeless or in exile in central Asia. They were sent by Red Army soldiers, officers, and generals at the front. Even those letters that just asked me to take care of myself would have been worth publication. They were unique documents. Some were written on newspapers, wrapping paper, receipts, and on the margins of pages torn out of books. Among the pile of letters I will never forget two. The first was written in a blotchy blue script on rustic linen, probably torn from a shirt, and the second on birchbark, trimmed in the form of a postcard, from the northlands of the midnight sun. I should add that Ehrenburg’s article made me quite popular in Moscow. I already had managed to meet up with the most important Yiddish writers there. The article brought prestige not only to me but to them as well. Russian writers started to call on me, especially those of Jewish heritage. My poems were translated into Russian. Students from the university arranged to meet with me. Publishers and theatres sent out inquiries about publishing my books and having me try my hand at writing plays. I was given an apartment in the Moskva Hotel on Okhotny Ryad, where Ehrenburg was then living. Justas Paleckis, the Lithuanian president-in-exile and later its real president, introduced me to him. I had befriended Paleckis in 1940 when Vilna was “added” to Lithuania, before the country became Soviet. He was a Lithuanian poet and journalist who, during his time in prison as a young man, had learned from his Jewish friends how to speak and read Yiddish. He had even translated a few of my Yiddish poems into Lithuanian back then. When Paleckis learned that I was alive in the Narotsh Forest, he was the main factor in arranging for a plane to be sent to fetch me out of the war zone to bring me to Moscow. •

270

the mosCow Years

This is how Ilya Ehrenburg began his “Triumph of a Human Being”: “A few days ago, the poet and partisan fighter A. Sutzkever was airlifted out of the forest. I had heard about Sutzkever’s poetry for quite some time, both from a famous Austrian writer and from the Polish poet Julian Tuwim.” Who was the famous Austrian novelist? Would you believe the following? In 1938 Joseph Roth3 spent some time in Vilna. He, the Jew and convinced monarchist (he boasted about it openly), was sent by a Paris art press to write about the architecture of Vilna’s churches. Joseph Roth, the refugee from Austria, had married a black woman later in life and the couple had children. He was also a determined alcoholic. I met him at the apartment of my friend Yoysef Tshernikhov. 4 When I was introduced to this author of Job as a young Yiddish poet, the inebriated Joseph Roth insisted that I read him one of my poems. Overwhelmed by the moment, I bashfully read my early poem “Bashafung” [Creation].5 In 1939 Ehrenburg met Roth at a gathering of writers, and Joseph Roth told him about “a new star in Vilna” and proceeded to recite a few lines from my “Creation.” Ehrenburg even remembered a line of the poem: “A forest. A country. A world …” Remarkably, this is how Ehrenburg first came to know of me. The Soviet censor might have erased the name Joseph Roth – after all, he was a monarchist– but “a famous Austrian writer” was permitted in print. Incidentally, Joseph Roth was no longer alive. When the Germans took Paris he had committed suicide.6 Ehrenburg came across my name in a similar coincidence through Julian Tuwim.7 Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, I was in Warsaw. My friend the artist Nosn Kozhen, a lifelong friend of Y.Y. Trunk,8 introduced me to the great Polish-Jewish poet at Café Ziemianska. He sat down next to our table, and Kozhen kept insisting that I read the poem that I had recited to him earlier when we had gone for a stroll in Warsaw. When I asked Tuwim whether he knew any Yiddish, he answered that Moyshe Broderzon9 had taught him a little mame-loshn. Amid the din of the café, I read him an early poem with a strong rhythm (I didn’t yet have any mature poems): “Es klapn di shleyfn” [My Temples Are Throbbing].10 Tuwim gave me a warm slap of the shoulder:

ILYa ehreNburG

271

“Wspaniali wiersz!” [An extraordinary poem!] Then he disappeared. Tuwim also turned out to be a good advocate. Later, when he encountered Ehrenburg somewhere, he mentioned me to him as a new poet. And because Julian Tuwim was politically kosher, his name was not erased from the pages of Pravda. How remarkable and fortuitous were these connections! During our initial discussions, Ehrenburg immediately revealed who had told him about me. And while he was blessed with a good memory, he also took a strong interest in my poem “Kol Nidre,” which I composed in the Vilna ghetto in 1943. While still in the ghetto, I sent it and some other compositions of mine with a Jewish partisan to the Narotsh Forest, and it made its way from there to Moscow. Ehrenburg had the poem translated into Russian. He delivered a talk about the poem in the Moscow Writers’ Club in which he compared it to a Greek tragedy. And in the Pravda article about me he included a mention of “Kol Nidre.”11

Ilya Ehrenburg in “The Good Years” I knew Ehrenburg during “the good years,” when his words were like flaming foxes running through the battlefields, igniting hatred and a demand for vengeance against the Germans. In his strong desire for vengeance he included his hatred for everything, including his own demons. His powerful articles against Germans and Germany, later collected in several volumes under the title Voine [War], contributed significantly to the victory over the enemy during the Second World War. Their sincere emotion and call for vengeance against the “murderers of peoples” – Ehrenburg’s phrase – connected all Soviet writers. He loved to quote himself: “The writer must not only answer for his every word, he must also answer for his silence.” Answering for silence is markedly more difficult than answering for what has been said or written. Especially now, when silence is sealed with a layer of earth. Nobody knows what the laws of the world-to-come have to say about the penalty for remaining silent during this lifetime. The poet Shmuel Halkin12 was correct when, upon his liberation from a [Stalinist] camp, he said: “The anguish of silence exceeds the anguish of crying out.”

272

the mosCow Years

During the war, Ehrenburg truly was the most popular and beloved writer in the Soviet Union. The Red Army loved him, and students revered him. Young talents turned to him again and again. With his European taste and refined sensibility for that which was authentic and original, he immediately detected whether a young visitor clutching a manuscript was a “born poet” or a peddler of banalities. That is how, for example, he discovered the talented young poet Gudzenko,13 who was a Jew with a Ukrainian name. He arrived as a complete unknown from the front, and in only a few months a booklet of his poems was published with a collegial and enthusiastic preface by Ehrenburg. Ehrenburg also sought out and assisted young talents in the fine arts. He loved painting and appreciated it as much as he did poetry. He recognized the artistic intuition of his wife, Lyubov Mikhailovna, herself a talented painter beloved by French art circles. Her portraits – she also painted me – revealed that she was under the influence of Chaim Soutine’s strange and wild colours. In Vilna I had a neighbour, Binyomke the tailor, a character right out of Sholem Aleichem. He told me the following story in his own special way: “Yesterday I took my wife and kids to enjoy ourselves in Verek.14 Suddenly, a brute with a stick appeared out of the trees. What could we do? We had to run away, because all ten of us were outnumbered.” So too with Ehrenburg. Even in “the good years” Ehrenburg with his million friends was also alone. Even he had to escape from all kinds of thuggish attacks directed against him. He fled to the writer’s desk, where his best friend was his black poodle, Souzo. He would write with his right hand while stroking the dog on his knee with his left hand. His best friends in the Soviet Union had already been liquidated. He read me wonderful poems from a handwritten manuscript bound in green snakeskin. They were the last confessional poems of Osip Mandelshtam,15 written in involuntary exile. They reminded me of Kulbak’s “Wolfish Poems.”16 I do not remember whether Mandelshtam’s poems were brought to Ehrenburg by a fugitive who had somehow escaped or perhaps someone who had been freed. Lyubov Mikhailovna told me I was among the very few to whom her husband read from the poems. Isaac Babel,17 Boris Pilnyak,18 and many others – their names were no longer uttered among the living. Ehrenburg’s sole remaining friend from his days of youth was Boris Pasternak.19 Ehrenburg loved both him and his poetry. He was also jealous of him in a collegial way for not

ILYa ehreNburG

273

giving a damn about Zhdanov20 when he was still alive and ruled like a despot. The friendship between Pasternak and Ehrenburg was broken. I do not know the reason. I know only that Ehrenburg was deeply hurt by it. At a party that Pavel Antokolski21 organized in my honour at his home, Pasternak and Ehrenburg did not exchange a word. It is difficult to explain friendship in the complicated circumstances back then. I know of the following case: Ehrenburg’s close friend, a fellow worker at the Soviet Information Bureau (Sovinformburo) with whom he was on very familiar terms, an agreeable, intelligent person, came to his apartment to beg for forgiveness. What had happened? Ehrenburg published an article in a Moscow art journal about the French Impressionists. Stalin’s chief artist, the art-commissar Gerasimov,22 was not pleased by it. He responded with an accusatory article stating that Ehrenburg had desecrated the memory of great Russian artists. And that was not all: Gerasimov had gathered protest-signatures from those versed in artistic matters. He demanded such a signature from Ehrenburg’s friend. The latter believed he had no other choice and signed. But then, a small miracle: Pravda did not print Gerasimov’s article – Ehrenburg was too beloved. The article with the signatures was merely posted to the wall of the editorial offices. Ehrenburg received his friend with a brotherly slap on the shoulder: “You would have been an idiot not to sign. That would have played into Gerasimov’s plans to expel a Jew from the Information Bureau.” The secret of friendship is like the secret of poetry: no matter how hard we try, it is impossible to explain all its complicated elements. As I mentioned earlier, we lived in the same hotel for quite some time, until he received his postwar residence located at Gorki 8. We often used to meet over breakfast. At one of those breakfasts, Ehrenburg introduced me to the ruler of Mongolia, Choibalsan.23 He was short and rotund, with a copper Buddha face and a chest full of medals and insignia. When I told him where I was from and how many Jews had been killed by the Germans and how many Jews still remained in the world, he told me in a broken Russian: “How many did you say remain? Around ten million? That’s not a people. I have fifty million, and that’s also insignificant. Ha, ha, ha.” When Ehrenburg was in the mood to see me, he would call or simply knock on the door three times. One time those three knocks in the middle of the night startled my wife and me.

274

the mosCow Years

“Marshal Govorov,24 Defender of Leningrad, is at my place. Get dressed and come over. We will hear interesting things.” I am still grateful to Ehrenburg for those three knocks in the middle of the night. The marshal, who was in his late 30s, perhaps the youngest marshal in the Red Army, described what had taken place in Leningrad during the German blockade. I was aghast. Was his passionate delivery encouraged by the vodka or by his depictions of episodes from the starving city under siege? Not a single mouse, cat, or dog remained in Leningrad. Parents ate dead children. Leningraders simply disappeared until capital punishment was declared for cannibalism. People knew that they were not buying beef when they visited the butcher. One could recognize cannibals through their appearance. Amidst these dramatic episodes that Marshal Govorov re-enacted like an accomplished actor, I could not get out of mind his description of how the German command headquarters near Leningrad was destroyed. All efforts to discover where the German headquarters was located had proved unsuccessful. Until … a blunder, a coincidence that possibly determined the fate of the city. It happened like this: Several ordinary Germans were captured by the Soviets. This kind of thing was a daily occurrence. Their pockets and clothes were searched, and nothing special was discovered. The search team wanted to leave. But one of them caught a glimpse of a piece of bread wrapped in a torn German newspaper in the pocket of one of the prisoners. He unfolded the crumpled newspaper and saw a picture: the German headquarters near Leningrad. A celebration of military brass in honour of the imminent fall of Leningrad. The picture was photographed, enlarged, and from the interior architecture of the room and the edge of a half-curved window long-time residents of Leningrad recognized the building. The Russians dispatched airplanes, and the building, together with its military staff, was levelled. • Despite his busy schedule, Ehrenberg always made time for me. I often read him my Yiddish poetry, and, apart from the Hebrew words, he understood. He also begged me to read him Hebrew poetry.

ILYa ehreNburG

275

“I don’t understand Hebrew, but I love its prophetic sound.” On more than one occasion I recited poems by Bialik and Tchernichovsky25 that I knew by heart from my school days. He returned the favour by reading the poems of Machado and Lorca in Spanish. They were his favourites. He would also read me his Russian poems in manuscript. I managed to translate several of them into Yiddish, and to this day they are preserved in my personal files. Whenever I spoke highly about his Julio Jurenito [1922] and Thirteen Pipes [1923] he derived no pleasure from my compliments. “I can churn out dozens of such books. They are more sins of youth than mature literature. It’s better to read my poetry …” Ilya Ehrenburg began his literary career with mystical poems. During the war he once again took up the short lyric. He published two volumes of poetry, Svoboda [Freedom, 1943] and Stikhi o voine [Poems about War, 1943] and was persuaded that the poet in him was no less talented than the prose writer and journalist. The two volumes do not especially distinguish themselves. His prose is more refined, polished, and often poetic. Nevertheless, his poems spoke to me more than the poetry of Simonov, Shchipachev, and Surkov,26 who were then in fashion. His close friend Vasily Grossman begged me half-seriously to compliment Ehrenburg more often for his poetry. It was a way to raise his mood. Whenever I told Ehrenburg about the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry, about my experiences in the Vilna ghetto or in the forest, he would always jot down important points in pencil. He adored the Jewish partisans. Later he wrote a story called “Smert’ geroia” [Death of a Hero], about the tragic fate of Itsik Vitenberg, the commander of the partisan underground in the ghetto. Ehrenburg’s popularity with readers at front and in the hinterlands aroused a fair amount of jealousy. Writers such as Mikhail Sholokhov27 and Aleksey Tolstoy28 made their hostility towards him well known. They could not reconcile themselves to a Jew being the strongest interpreter of Russia in wartime. There were occasions when “colleagues” openly referred to him as “Ehrenburg” in order to accentuate his lineage. But the jealous hatred was not strong enough and too pathetic to diminish and discredit him, especially after it became known that Stalin himself had rung Ehrenburg.

276

the mosCow Years

Lyubov Mikhailovna told me how it came about: her husband was sitting at his writing desk, and, as always, his left hand was stroking his black pet, Souzo, who was resting on his knee. The phone rang. He put the receiver to his ear. Stalin was on the line. The writer’s left hand went pale and stiff on the black dog. “I have just finished the first part of your Padenie Parizha [The Fall of Paris]. An amazing book. Why aren’t you writing the sequel?” Ehrenburg responded: “The second part is just about ready to go to press, but the publishers are afraid to publish it.” “It’s war. You have to push them,” Stalin responded. At the crack of dawn, representatives of the most important Moscow publishing houses were at Ehrenburg’s door inquiring about publishing the second half of Padenie Parizha. They had been afraid to publish it because they did not know Stalin’s attitude towards General de Gaulle and France. Ehrenburg had self-respect and dismissed them all. He published the book with the Sovetskii pisatel [Soviet Writer] press, to whom he had not previously proposed the book.

The Jew Officially, Ilya Ehrenburg was a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. His name appeared – and, as it turned out, without so much as his permission being asked – on all important appeals and declarations by the Committee. On 2 April 1944, he delivered a powerful speech to the assembly of “representatives of the Jewish people” in the Hall of Columns at the House of Trade Unions. At that gathering of three thousand people I was among the few speakers, if not the only one, who did not mention Stalin’s name in my remarks. I concluded my account of our catastrophe as follows: “The entire world needs to know that in the forests of Lithuania and Belorussia from where I have just arrived, hundreds of Jewish partisans are fighting – proud, brave avengers of the blood of their brothers. In the name of the victims and in the name of the surviving remnant in the forests around Vilna and in underground caves in the city, I call on you, Jews of the world, fight and avenge their deaths.”29 Why do I mention my refusal to utter Stalin’s name? The fires of the ghetto singed me to the core and burnt out of me any fear I had of authority. I had already lived through enough to speak my mind openly, without anxiety. Interestingly, I was applauded no less than those who

ILYa ehreNburG

277

concluded their remarks with Stalin’s revered name. Ehrenburg, with his innate disgust for platitudes, also tried in this instance to stand out from the crowd. He concluded his powerful remarks as follows: “History will tell that more than anything we came to love the homeland and justice. Long live the Soviet Union, long live your peoples, your orchards, your children, your Stalin!” After my appearance in the Hall of Columns and especially as a result of my concluding remarks there, Ehrenburg’s opinion of me grew. Incidentally, Der Nister30 was pleased for the same reason. But other Jewish writers there that evening were scared by my boldness. And during the meal after the meeting they distanced themselves from me. As I mentioned earlier, Ehrenburg was a member of the Jewish AntiFascist Committee. But he did not hold it in high regard. He referred to it ironically as the anti-Jewish committee. I do not know how close he was with Soviet Yiddish writers or familiar with their work. He often asked my opinion about the work of this one or that one. With approval and fondness he read about the poetry of Shmuel Halkin. As for the Anti-Fascist Committee, he complained that it was merely a foreign agent. The truth is that in those years Ilya Ehrenburg himself was a oneman Jewish anti-fascist committee. He did as much for Jews and for Jewish dignity as any official. He obtained permits for a number of  Jewish youths to live in Moscow. He adopted a twelve-year-old Jewish partisan girl from Pinsk, whose entire family had been murdered by the Germans.31 He intervened on behalf of my request to free four heroic Jewish partisan women from Grodno who were under arrest for contacts with Germans. He responded to hundreds of letters of inquiry and requests from homeless Jews and attempted to locate any possible surviving relatives. He sent thousands of rubles to strangers, who poured out their hearts to him in moving letters from every corner of the land. When Lyubov Mikhailovna was in the midst of painting my portrait, I came every day of the week to sit for her. One time she told me that her husband was lying agitated in bed. What had happened? She hesitated a moment and then continued: a month earlier a Jewish Red Army soldier had come from Kiev to Moscow and with rage confided to Ehrenburg that there were plans to construct an open-air market at Babi Yar, the site of the mass grave of the Jews of Kiev. Such a desecration could not be allowed.

278

the mosCow Years

Ehrenburg dispatched a letter to the then-leader of Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev, to relate to him the gruesome history of the place, requesting an investigation of the matter and, if it was true, to forbid the building of a market over a mass grave. Today a response had arrived from Khrushchev’s office: “I advise you not to stick your nose into matters that don’t concern you and to focus instead on writing good novels.” Ehrenburg was the only writer in Moscow who was interested in the last remaining Hebrew poet in the Soviet Union, Elishe Rodin. Thanks to Ehrenburg, he lived to hold in his yellow, quivering hands his volume of poetry La-Ben [To My Son], published in Tel Aviv.32 And was Ehrenburg satisfied? For those who do nothing, that which other people do is never enough. I have mentioned only a few moments that I happen to be aware of, that I know about for certain. But there are dozens of other occasions when Ehrenburg courageously stood up for fellow Jews, especially for Jewish youths, that I heard about both in Vilna, in Moscow and in my later wanderings. Ilya Ehrenburg was no less a Jew than he who passionately declares: “I am a Jew!” Even Pasternak [born to an assimilated Jewish family] was not really an ethnic Russian … Incidentally, neither I, nor any of my friends heard in Moscow that Boris Pasternak had converted.33 Ehrenburg developed a close poetic friendship with Julian Tuwim. He was inspired by Tuwim’s pamphlet We, Polish Jews. He was especially moved by Tuwim’s fantasy about a new Poland in which the ghetto’s Star of David would be transformed into a great symbol that Polish soldiers would wear on their chest next to the Virtuti Militari, Poland’s highest military award. Tuwim’s poetic call “Accept me, brothers, to this honoured communion of innocently shed blood” made a deep impression on him. Ehrenburg was disappointed when I confessed, having borrowed the pamphlet from him and read it, that I found Tuwim’s poetry far more persuasive.

Lines from a Diary I kept a diary beginning in July 1944, during the fight to liberate Vilna and my scramble back to my hometown in an armoured car, together with the president of Lithuania, Justas Paleckis. I cite the following lines

ILYa ehreNburG

279

that have a connection to Ehrenburg. They convey precisely what I was thinking and feeling then: I came from Voskresensk to Moscow. It’s impossible to sit in the opera house as Vilna is being liberated. I must rush to my hometown and bear witness to our catastrophe. I must “consume my earthly time to the last drop,” as I once wrote in a poem. Back in Moscow – directly to Paleckis. He was very warm. He was experiencing the profound events along with his people. He was seeking a way to get out of Moscow and back to Vilnius, but he was having trouble finding a solution … It turns out that he too is on his way there now. He takes note of my request: Good, Avramke (that’s how he referred to me), we will drive or fly together. Around an hour later we meet at the Cheka. He is upset. I am called into the office and told that Ehrenburg has just arrived from Vilna and his impression of Lithuanians is not high. Ehrenburg conveyed that the Jews were exterminated by the Lithuanians and not the Germans; that in the Rudnitski Forest, the most important site of the partisan movement in Lithuania, he met only two non-Jewish partisans; that he had seen only Jewish partisans patrolling Vilna; and that all of Vilna’s Lithuanians had retreated with the Germans. Paleckis was deeply offended by Ehrenburg’s impressions. “Sutzkever, talk things through with him, and clarify the truth for him. I know that Ehrenburg admires you and takes your opinion seriously.”34 I tell him that I will call Ehrenburg to clarify matters … Then the telephone rings: Ehrenburg is on the line. He found out where I was and asks that I come to see him. He has greetings for me. Ehrenburg brought news from Vilna. Greetings from my friend Leo Bernshteyn. From all the Jewish partisans. He entered Vilna just as they cleared the streets. A Jewish partisan approached to search him. He told her his name, and the young woman burst out in tears of joy. What was his opinion of the events? He repeated the same thing that Paleckis had related in his name … About the city itself he told me: “Aside from Paris, it is the most beautiful city in the world.

280

the mosCow Years

Beauty such as that in the Red Church (he meant the Church of St Anne) I haven’t seen for quite some time.” He spoke with fondness about the Poles: “When I asked the Jews I encountered who had saved them, they responded: Poles.” He asked me about the word on the street among the Jews of Moscow. I informed him of the Jewish delegation that met with [senior diplomat Maksim] Litvinov.35 Litvinov had solicited Jewish demands for the peace conference that was in preparation after the war. Shakhne Epshteyn36 and Mikhoels demanded Crimea as a Jewish centre. “Drop it!” the diplomat answered: “If a territory is what you want, wouldn’t Palestine do the trick and be endorsed by Jews abroad?” Ehrenburg was pleased by the answer. If a territory was in the cards, he said, then it must be Palestine. I told him my opinion, and he agreed with me. I bid farewell to all of my acquaintances on the phone. Markish made me promise to write to him about the first Jews I came across in Vilna. Bergelson sent kisses through the phone. When Nusinov37 learned that I was going abroad, he arranged that I call on him for just a few minutes. He had an urgent matter for me. I rushed over to him dripping in sweat. He wanted me to join the group advocating for Crimea. I should see that Ehrenburg also be recruited into it. I told Nusinov bluntly: I believe that there should be no propaganda against Palestine. Just the opposite, I am certain that the most important Jewish centre after the war will be the Land of Israel. He looked at me surprised and dropped the matter. Our conversation ended with me reciting my two poems to him: “Frozen Jews” and “The Ghetto Fiddler.”38 Here is a copy of my letter, written to Ehrenburg after my return to liberated Vilna, the Jerusalem of Lithuania. I present the letter here slightly edited:39 Dear Ehrenburg, Greetings from Vilna. For two weeks I have trembled walking its narrow streets. I’ve managed to dig up cultural treasures, and I have been to Ponar. I found nothing there aside from ash. Vilna’s Jews were murdered, exhumed and incinerated. Human ash is

ILYa ehreNburG

281

sticky and grey. I filled a pouch of ash (it could be my child or my mother) and keep it by my side. Of the thousands and thousands in Vilna today there are only two hundred Jews. And there are not more than four hundred Vilna Jews in total remaining. Recently Jews from Kovno arrived here. The Kovno ghetto was torn asunder and torched on July 13, the same day that Vilna was retaken. While the Germans tossed Jews attempting to flee into the pyre, an orchestra played on the side. In one place, two hundred Jews were hiding in a cement hideout. The Germans were unable to set it aflame. So they diverted a water pipe and drowned all the Jews. My dear friend: the Jews love you and send you their warmest regards. Your articles and speeches about Vilna made a strong impression here. Yes, the part of the Smolensk museum that I managed to hide two years ago is safe.40 As for my own writing I am doing very little of it here. I am incredibly busy, even overwhelmed. I spend an entire day digging through in a single cave seeking hidden materials. Your comrades, the Jewish partisans, are helping out. Yours, A. Sutzkever Warm regards to your wife and to our colleague Vasily Grossman

The Black Book Our contact grew closer when I accepted Ehrenburg’s offer to join the literary commission that was responsible for the creation and publication of The Black Book, an act of indictment against the Germans for having murdered a third of our people. He would seek my advice regarding all kinds of documents, especially those from Lithuania. I myself wrote a few hundred pages in Yiddish for The Black Book about the Vilna ghetto that were translated into Russian. Ilya Ehrenburg collected an amazing amount of material about the destruction of the Jewish people. Members of the Red Army brought him diaries, wills, pictures, poems, documents that they had discovered in hundreds of cities and towns where Jews had been slaughtered. Partisans presented him with descriptions of Jewish heroism. He showed me a prose piece in Greek about the destruction of the Jews

282

the mosCow Years

of Greece and a poem in French written on cigarette paper in a death camp. I also remember a drama of some two hundred pages in Hebrew, in which the anonymous author depicts his family by the smoke of the crematoria. I remember the handwriting. I was unable to confirm who wrote it. The diaries included several by children saved in convents. Above all, Ehrenburg showed and asked me to read and translate for him word for word the poems and chronicles written in Yiddish. He sorted it all, organized it in three giant albums for which he had built special shelves next to his writing desk. The Black Book that Ehrenberg assembled and edited was supposed to be published in three large volumes in ten languages. His closest collaborator was Vasily Grossman. The first volume was already typeset in Russian at the State Literary Publishing House for Literature when “one fine day” I received the following letter from Ehrenburg: Dear Avram Gertsevitsh, According to the decision by S.A. Lozovskii, The Black Book will now be published directly by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Therefore your work on the literary commission that I established to prepare the book for publication has concluded. As to the materials you composed, you are welcome to use them as you see fit and to publish them. I thank you warmly, Avrom Gertsevitsh, for your contribution to the work of the commission. I am convinced that the work you completed will not be lost to history. With respect I. Ehrenburg The collapse of the commission to publish The Black Book followed Aleksandrov’s article in Pravda titled “Tovarishch Ehrenburg oshibaetsia” [Comrade Ehrenburg Gets It Wrong],41 in which he attacked Ehrenburg for blurring the distinction between German fascists and German democrats. After that article, which announced the new Soviet policy with regard to Germans and Germany, the window had passed to publish The Black Book, and Ehrenburg’s thirst for revenge against the “murderers of peoples”42 died down, at least in public. The spur to revenge remained deeply embedded within his heart.43

ILYa ehreNburG

283

A Bullet in Hermann Goering In February 1946 I appeared as a witness against the murderers of peoples at the international tribunal in Nuremberg. Again, I have Ilya Ehrenburg to thank for this. He (and Mikhoels) suggested my candidacy to Molotov.44 Ehrenburg had previously attended several sessions of the trial as a journalist. He had been shocked by the expressionless Germans who, only yesterday, were masters of Europe. He was no less disgusted by their defence. On several occasions he related an episode from Nuremberg in which he had asked a German journalist: “Do you still offer a Heil Hitler with an outstretched arm as a greeting?” His interlocutor responded with idiotic sincerity: “No, that is now forbidden.” In the nightmarish nights before I flew to the trial in Nuremberg a fascinating thought occurred to me: shoot Goering at the trial! Since I still had my revolver from my time in the forest along with six unused bullets, I could easily bring it with me. And, according to Ehrenburg, aside from the marshal who was stationed next to the bench holding the accused, I was led to believe that it was possible to get within a metre of the defendant. I was possessed by the idea as if by a dybbuk, and there was no rebbe in Moscow to exorcise it … With every minute it took more concrete form and I worked out a precise plan, down to the last detail, of how to put a bullet into Goering. I did not confide my plan to anyone. I was careful not to reveal even the slightest hint of it to my wife. In the end, I decided to probe Ehrenburg’s soul. After all, it was he who had suggested me as a witness! Very carefully, as if I were speaking regular words without any special intention, I said to him: “You know what I’m thinking, Ilya Grigoryevich? Isn’t there a witness set to appear at the Nuremberg tribunal who could shoot Goering …” Ehrenburg measured me with the penetrating wisdom of his glance. I don’t know whether he completely understood what I was getting at, but he certainly felt that I was up to something. He responded calmly, with drawn-out syllables: “If you, for instance, Avrom Gertsevitsh, were to do such a thing you would accomplish nothing. Nobody would believe that you shot Goering at your own initiative. The Russians would accuse

284

the mosCow Years

you of having perpetrated the act at the request or instruction of the Americans, and the Americans would contend that you carried out a Russian order. Don’t forget that you are a Soviet citizen. Were such an act to be carried out by a citizen of a third nation, both great powers would believe that he was a free person, free in his actions …” His answer confused and disarmed me. I did not bring the revolver and the six bullets with me to the Nuremberg Trial. A Yiddish poet taking revenge on a German supreme commander was not to be. Rather, Goering managed to ingest poison that a demon-girl smuggled to him through a kiss.45

Farewell I saw Ehrenburg for the last time in May 1946, just before my return to Poland from the Soviet Union. It was at his new home on Gorki Street 8. I was invited for lunch. Around the table were his wife, Lyubov Mikhailovna, their daughter, Irina, whose husband had fallen in battle, and the partisan girl from Pinsk whom they had adopted. I told him that I was flying to Poland, but that my dream was the Land of Israel. After the meal, sitting in his office decorated with paintings by Modigliani and Picasso, he poured two additional glasses of liqueur, and we drank to friendship. “I would like to send a gift to the university in Jerusalem through you.” “What, for example, Ilya Grigoryevich?” “The materials for The Black Book. I fear for them here.” Later, the Jewish world accused him of having had a hand in the arrest of Soviet Yiddish writers. I researched the matter for years, and I am convinced that there is no substance to the accusation.46 1967

Peretz Markish and His Circle

1

(Excerpt from a longer essay) I had never set eyes on Markish2 [1895–1952] prior to my arrival in Moscow in 1944. I was still a teenager, studying in a Hebrew-Polish gymnasium, when Markish caused a stir in Vilna and Warsaw. My teachers hid both Markish and Yiddish poetry from me. But his halo shone over Yiddish poetry in Poland until the Second World War. My older colleagues, those who had seen and heard him, looked up to him as a legend. They could cite by memory several lines of Markish’s poetry, those that excited them with their beauty and wildness, like a dream chiselled in diamond. I was jealous of those who had the privilege of being close to such a poet, to have had the chance to see and hear him declaim his verse. If God had dreamed up a model for the creative process, something we refer to as a poet, it was probably blessed with a face, a heart, and a talent like Peretz Markish – or at least that was what I thought back then. And when a friend lent me Markish’s volume Stam [Just So, 1921–22] I also lovingly conceived of him as a legend. But he was not necessarily my poet. … In 1933, when I visited Warsaw for the first time, Markish’s echo still resounded within the walls of Tlomackie 13.3 There were many stories and anecdotes about the poet, and I don’t remember who related the following to me: After one of Markish’s lectures at the Yiddish Literary Union, the room was bursting with such excitement that he received a half-hour applause. The only one who remained in his seat was Vaysenberg.4 When he was asked what he thought about Markish’s imagery, he responded: “Think of a village on a summer night. Suddenly, a spark drifts onto

286

the mosCow Years

a tall haystack. The inferno is so incredible that it appears as though even the stars in heaven have been consumed by the flames. But a few minutes later the fire dims. That was Markish’s talk.” • … It was only in the Vilna ghetto that I happened across Markish’s books, and experienced both our people’s fate and my own in the dark reflection of his poetry. I could hear the voices of those lying dead in the mass graves of Ponar crying out to me from his poem “The Mound.”5 Its images tore at me with their prophetic vision, revealing the mystery of our mass extermination. It was similar to the way bodies surface in a cemetery after an earthquake, and in them you recognize your closest friends, your parents, and the source of creation itself … … In the ghetto, the diabolical nightmare of “The Mound” was poetically logical. Its logic lived precisely where I was dying. My poisoned heart beat to the labyrinthine rhythm of Markish’s poem … • … July 1943. Shike Gertman, a young partisan, arrived in the Vilna ghetto from the Narotsh Forest. Fyodor Markov, the commander of the Voroshilov Brigade, dispatched him to connect with the Jewish partisans behind the ghetto gates. I handed Shike my poem “Kol Nidre.” I asked him to forward it to Peretz Markish in Moscow, if that was possible. It was unlikely that I would live long enough to experience freedom again, but perhaps my poem could survive, a poem that bled out of me in the ghetto. In September I once again encountered that blond-haired heroic fighter in the Narotsh Forest. He greeted me joyously: “‘Kol Nidre’ is in the hands of Peretz Markish in Moscow …” Shike fell in battle a short time later. March 1944. After an unbelievable odyssey by plane, I arrive with my wife in Moscow. Justas Paleckis, the president-in-exile of Lithuania and a friend of the Jews who spoke fluent Yiddish, welcomed us to the headquarters of the Lithuanian partisans on Frunze Street 15:

Peretz markIsh aND hIs CIrCLe

287

“Whom do you want to see?” Paleckis inquired of us. My wife was the first to call out: “I want to meet Dovid Bergelson …” “For starters, I would like to take a bath,” trying to buy time lest I give the wrong answer, “and then I want to meet Markish.” Markish called on me at Hotel Moscow that very evening. I was standing face-to-face with the legend. His steel eyes, glowing with an inner fire, dissolved into tears. Though his eyebrows were already grey, his face appeared to be sculpted from marble. Yes, my poem “Kol Nidre” had made its way to him from the partisan forests. It was read at a special gathering at the Writers’ House. The name of the poem’s author had been withheld, because I was still in the ghetto, and there was a fear that the Germans would track me down if they found out about me. Ilya Ehrenburg devoted an entire lecture to the poem and compared it to Greek tragedy … It would appear shortly in the collection Tsum zig that Markish himself edited. When I accompanied Markish home a young woman stopped and gazed at him admiringly. I overhead her whisper to her girlfriend in Russian: – He is like Byron! • Markish chaired my formal welcome in the Writers’ House that same week. In his greetings he remarked: “People used to point at Dante and say: this man was in Hell! But Dante’s Hell was a paradise in comparison to the hell experienced by this poet who managed to save himself …” His off-the-cuff remarks contained the same rhythmic emotion of his lyrics. While speaking, he grimaced in sorrow. It was as though the distant pyres of Lithuania singed him to the core … • … In July 1944, upon my return to Vilna, I wrote to Markish with my initial impressions of the liberated and murdered city. He wrote back to me from Moscow: “No words can provide a sufficient response. I want to smash my head against a stone. We are bound, probably until the end of days, to read this kind of ‘literature’ about our great calamity. It is our fate, and we will not escape it. I had wanted to come to Vilna,

288

the mosCow Years

and then it occurred to me that to visit its sacred ashes would amount to a kind of desecration.” In the end, he ended up coming to Vilna to inhale its sacred ashes. The Jewish partisans, the few thousand Jews who managed to survive, took him in as a brother. As a result of this trip, sorrow and heroism enriched his epic poem about the war, “Milkhome” [War] (1948).6 He wove an array of interesting ghetto heroes into it. He even referred to them by their real names, including Hirshke Glik and Naomi (a young woman from Vilna, a partisan) … • … The crisis for Yiddish writers in Moscow (and Russian ones as well) came about after Aleksandrov’s pitiful article in Pravda, “Comrade Ehrenburg Gets It Wrong” [14 April 1945]. Aleksandrov took Ehrenburg to task for his alleged blind hatred of the German people. Why hadn’t he differentiated between Nazis and anti-fascists, between criminals and proponents of peace and socialism? As a result, an entire section was removed from Markish’s poem “War,” those in which he hurls curses at the German people. In their place he inserted new fragments in which he praised Russia and her “brotherhood” with other nations. At the time one needed to guard against even a single errant word. Blame would not fall on the censor. Ultimately, the axe would come down on the writer. The Party line was both the law and capricious. It was like walking a tightrope … … Even in the more lenient years of 1942–1945, when the chains of Soviet dictatorship were loosened, Yiddish writers had to keep a close eye on the compass, and wherever the needle of Russian literature pointed, that’s the direction Yiddish was expected to follow … … And just as those remaining in the ghetto did not believe that they would escape further murderous roundups, so too did the Yiddish writers in Moscow not believe that they would fare better than Kharik, Kulbak, Tsinberg, Litvakov,7 and tens of others whose bones lay frozen in the Siberian taiga … •

Peretz markIsh aND hIs CIrCLe

289

… The tragedy of Soviet-Yiddish writers is not only that their tongues were sliced out and that their very lives hung on a single word, but especially that they had to distance and disassociate themselves from their most refined works, written in the “good years” during and after the Revolution … • … At the end of 1944, I proposed an article for [the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee’s paper] Eynikayt [Unity] to Bergelson, one of its editors. I had submitted the same article, “The Liberation of Underground Museums,”8 at precisely the same time to Mirskaya, the secretary of Literatura i iskusstvo [Literature and Art]. She was a close friend of Boris Pasternak. A Vilna Jew by the name of Shambadal translated it into Russian. He was Sholem Aleichem’s Russian translator, too. The article appeared in the Russian journal that same week. It was word-for-word what I had submitted. I put the journal in my pocket and made my way to Bergelson on Kropotkin Street. “You know, I had to abbreviate your article, cross out certain names. We don’t know whether they are our friends or our enemies. Your approach is not reliable.” “I’m somewhat baffled by your comments, Comrade Bergelson. Here is my article, printed today in Russian. Take a look. There wasn’t a single word eliminated.” I showed him a copy of the journal. His face turned yellow, like desert sand. There was a thin foam on his lips. It was an expression I had previously not witnessed. “If so,” he started to gasp heavily, “I must immediately dash to the printer to restore your article to its previous form. The Yiddish must not be different than the Russian …” And this great Yiddish prose artist dashed to the subway. The wind blew his fur hat off his head as if the wind itself wanted to catch a glimpse of Bergelson beneath his mask. •

290

the mosCow Years

I was destined to be a witness when there was an attempt to liquidate Markish, and that was still in the so-called good years. I managed to intervene on his behalf, and I consider it my obligation to relate the following: At the beginning of summer 1945, Lozovskii, the head of the Soviet Information Bureau, called to request that I pay him a visit.9 Lozovksii greeted me warmly at his office. He remained seated. He was dressed in a grey uniform with golden epaulettes, and above him on the wall there hung an oil painting of the “leader of the great land,” painted by Gerasimov. The leader was smiling at a child he was holding in his arm. After some polite and friendly discussion, he informed me of the good news: the Lithuanian government, with his approval, had decided to honour me with the Stalin Prize. I felt as though a net had been cast over me. A laureate of the Stalin Prize would never be given permission to leave for Poland … “I am deeply honoured,” I feigned happiness, “but I don’t understand how I am worthy of such an honour. My ghetto poems never appeared in book form, and I do not believe the jury even reads Yiddish …” “That’s not important,” Lozovskii interrupted my uncomfortable prattle. “Present the manuscript of your poems in Yiddish, they will be read, they will be translated …” When I thanked him again and tried to leave, Lozovskii got up from his chair, touched the desk with his finger, and stared me in the eyes: “Yes … tell me, just between us, what is your opinion of Peretz Markish? Is it true that he wrote counter-revolutionary poems in Poland? And are you aware that here in Moscow he wrote a long poem in which he insults the Red Army?” He removed a blue sheet of paper from his desk drawer and handed it to me. “Please read it and tell me what you think …” … A precise translation into Russian followed the Yiddish text. The letters were bigger in those places where Markish’s lines had allegedly insulted the Red Army. I was curious who had denounced Markish. The text continued on the reverse side. I was not audacious enough to proceed to turn it over without Lozovskii’s permission. I let go of the sheet, and fate intervened in such a way that the paper happened to flip over on its own, so that

Peretz markIsh aND hIs CIrCLe

291

I was able to catch a glimpse of those who had signed. They included . I will not provide the name of the Shakhne Epshteyn and second one, because he too was eventually a victim, shot in August 1952. I explained to Lozovskii that from the moment I heard the name Peretz Markish he had been the symbol of Yiddish revolutionary poetry. I added that in the poetic fragment he showed me I did not catch even a trace of indictment of the Red Army. Russian Jews, who were pursued and tormented by the Germans, sought out “a place, a safe place for the night, a roof over their heads” in central Asia, and with the help of the Red Army they had found such a place. As I concluded my testimony on behalf of Markish, a young woman appeared from another room carrying with her a document in which everything I had just said was typed out. She had been listening in on my every word, and transcribed it all in her secret office. I signed it, said my goodbyes, and left. What was I to do? Tell Markish or not? Perhaps Lozovskii was testing me to determine whether I would tell anyone? Perhaps it was a ploy to ensnare me along with Markish? There was no certainty that my approval of Markish would be accepted! I have to admit that the fear was even stronger. A few days before my departure for Poland, when I bid farewell to Markish at his home, I revealed the entire affair to him. He sank into his armchair and hunched over in deep dismay and evident terror. “I am well aware that they have been anticipating my untimely death for many years. But now, after the war, I hoped that things would be different …” … We left and took our final walk together through Moscow, pausing at Pushkin’s memorial. I said to him: “I stood up for you to Lozovskii. But now I am leaving. Be strong, be careful and take care of yourself.” 1962

With Shloyme Mikhoels

1

(Excerpt from a longer essay) My acquaintance with Shloyme (Solomon) Mikhoels [1890–1948] began three years before we met in person. At the beginning of summer 1941, a short time before the German army invaded and cut Russia in half, I received a letter in Vilna from Mikhoels in Moscow. He had a request of me: could I do him a favour and send him a copy of Yehoash’s Yiddish translation of the Bible? “In Vilna it must still be possible to find such a Bible …” His sentence ended with ellipsis. I must admit that I understood the meaning of the ellipsis only when I was airlifted out of the Narotsh Forest and brought to the Soviet capital at the end of March 1944. Incidentally, I learned later that Mikhoels had requested the same Bible from another Yiddish poet in Vilna. During our first meeting, in the office of the Yiddish State Theatre on Malaya-Bronnaya, Mikhoels embraced me as if I were an old friend and recited the blessing for those who are freed from imprisonment … Then he took me by the arm, guided me to an armchair next to his desk, and said: “Thank you for the gift. Your Bible arrived a few days before the war broke out … During the evacuation of Moscow it accompanied me to central Asia and then back. Only now are we even. You sent me a Bible, and I intervened to have them send an airplane to fetch you from the partisan forest in order to bring you here. How can one say that the two gifts are not comparable? In such times an airplane is the best commentary on the Bible …” Still today, I have no idea what Mikhoels meant when he used the word “commentary,” but the manner in which he said it made a strong

wIth shLoYme mIkhoeLs

293

impression on me. I immediately felt a strange intimacy with him. And I can say that the feeling was mutual … • On the eve of my appearance at the Hall of Columns at the third meeting of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee on 2 April 1944, Mikhoels came to the editorial offices of Eynikayt at Kropotkin 10. He arrived while I was reading the speech I had prepared to Dovid Bergelson. Bergelson held a pencil, and, while listening to my horrifying account of the destruction of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, he was taking notes for himself. A short time earlier, when I had told this master of Yiddish prose about the fate of his childhood friend, the martyr Z. Kalmanovitsh, and about his other friends from Vilna who had died, he sobbed and choked back his own tears: “It’s as though a gravedigger is covering my heart with earth …” But now, while listening to my account that would soon travel from Moscow over the entire world, a different Bergelson was sitting next to me. The furrow in his brow had already taken the Party line, and the pencil in his hand was like a Party baton conducting his conscience … For a while he made the pretence of being an innocent listener. That is to say, were there to be complaints about me later, he could claim not to have heard anything … But then I had the impudence not to praise the “Father of the Nations.” By the way, I was the only one at the gathering to dare such a crime. After my remarks, Feffer2 was too afraid to approach and speak to me … Mikhoels, with his intelligent gaze and keen sense, found a way out of the situation. And standing between us, dressed in his dark coat with his cane over his arm (his hat was tipped down all the way to his dusky, whisky-coloured eyes), he theatrically declaimed: “Bergelson (he put the emphasis on “son”) is only an authority on himself. But you, Avrom, you converse with the dead.” • … Late June 1944. A voice on the phone: “It’s Mikhoels, an urgent matter. If possible, please come over immediately. I’m waiting for you in my office at the theatre …”

294

the mosCow Years

When Mikhoels rings you … I jumped into a taxi. I was stunned. The foyer was packed, as if for a performance. But these were Jewish members of the Red Army, partisans, those who had escaped from death camps, actors from Birobidzhan, and Jews who had lost everything. They had made their way from central Asia to Moscow and did not have even a place to stay. They were all drawn to the mystical name: Mikhoels. This one needed advice. That one wanted to send a message to the militia in order to receive permission to remain in Moscow. Others brought along a last will from someone who had been murdered, or a description of a Jewish town that had been destroyed. Some came to complain that they were not being permitted to return to their Moscow apartments because new residents had moved in. There were also those who came to speak about the overt anti-semitism of high officials. In those years, aside from being the director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre and the chairman of the [Jewish] Anti-Fascist Committee, Mikhoels was considered one of the most eminent figures in the Soviet Union. I can say with full confidence that he gave time to everyone who called on him. He provided them with advice, letters and support, perhaps even more than he should have. When I entered his office, I immediately focused on a man who was stooped over and dozing. He was sitting next to the desk, leaning on a cane. I had already seen him with Mikhoels several times. His name was Tshetshik, an actor well past his prime. He was a shadow of his former self. This Tshetshik with a pockmarked, mousy face was there to keep an eye on this great actor. It was said in Moscow that this playedout Tshetshik was playing an entirely different role around Mikhoels, arranged by the NkvD. Mikhoels undoubtedly noticed that I was not comfortable with this man. He tugged on Tshetshik’s cane, woke him from his nap, and asked him to be so good as to go fetch some cigarettes. And then he turned to me and said: “Let’s get to the point. I prepared a contract for you to write a piece for my theatre. I’ve already talked it over with our administrator, Comrade Fishman, and he also is on board. It stipulates that you receive five thousand rubles right away. You will receive additional payments with each act you submit. It’s all written down. I wouldn’t dream of cheating you …” I was astounded by the remarkable deal: “Comrade Mikhoels, why do you think I’m capable of composing a play? It’s true that I’ve experienced

wIth shLoYme mIkhoeLs

295

quite a bit of drama, but unfortunately that did not transform me into a playwright.” He was already putting on an act when he responded: “What are you talking about? How do you know you can’t write plays? Did you ever try your hand at it and fail? I am confident you can do it! Write me a play about Itsik Vitenberg, the commander of the Vilna ghetto partisans. Write it in the same way you told us about it recently at the theatre … I can’t get the scene with the bomb out of my mind, the one your comrade secretly assembled in the ghetto in order to carry out an act of revenge against the Germans. When you portray how your friend manufactured a bomb, think of the Maharal creating the Golem …” The comparison made an impact on me, and I began to shudder: “Good, I accept … I want to see what flows from the inkwell. But this is a complicated matter. Itsik Vitenberg, the commander of the Vilna ghetto partisans, was a Communist, but his military command included Zionists, Bundists, and others. If I were to portray a meeting of the partisan command, all those heroes would need to be given a voice, and the audience would hear their opinions about peoplehood and the world … The censor would never allow it.” Mikhoels broke into a fit of laughter as a result of my words, as if bronze bells were tolling. And suddenly his voice changed, his eyes sharpened and saddened. He leaned in to me, and he explained: “Avrom, you are mistaken. Here, the censor plays no role because a self-censor inhabits the mind of every writer. The censor has not yet made it into your head. That’s why you must get to work on the play immediately.” “Comrade Mikhoels, let’s say that I begin writing. How will this all end?” The eminent Soviet actor provided me with some professional advice: “The ideal end is death …” … On the eve of the liberation of Vilna in July 1944, just a few hours before I left Moscow for my hometown, I submitted the first act during a meeting with Mikhoels. When I returned to Moscow from the ruins of my city a few months later I read him the second act. Later Mikhoels ceased inquiring about my plans for the subsequent acts, and I stopped writing. When I tried to make excuses for why I wasn’t holding to our agreement and finishing the play, he revealed a secret: “My priority is the contract … Our theatre must show the powers that be that it is active, productive, and is constantly soliciting

296

the mosCow Years

new productions. Were I to stage every play that I had contracted from a writer you would be able to attend a première at the State Theatre every evening …” • … Mikhoels asked me to rush over to his apartment. He was, as usual, serious. The situation was as follows: he had complained to a senior official about the injustice inflicted upon Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union and asked for his assistance in repealing such policies. Even this high official had been brainwashed with terrible yarns about unpatriotic Jews … Mikhoels told him about me, a Yiddish poet, a partisan, a trustworthy witness, who could provide him with a heroic portrait of Jewish avengers in the ghettos and in the forests … The high official responded that he would like to hear the full truth from my own lips. Mikhoels gave me a brotherly slap on the shoulder and said: “Avrom, let’s pay him a visit together. Let him hear the whole truth directly from you. I’m waiting for his call to set the day and time for the meeting.” On the way home I accidentally ran into the historian B. Mark3 and revealed my secret to him. He turned pale: “What are you talking about?” I was calm. I was not afraid of the impending interview. The ghetto years had consumed any fear I had of other human beings. • Around ten days later Mikhoels and I set out for the fortress that was located on Red Square. The amazing procedure for getting inside included a medieval guard and checkpoint every ten steps; it would make for a wonderful article. But let’s abbreviate things here: The prominent man sat at a black desk in a plush red armchair. The floor, covered with a thick Persian rug, swayed with our every step. On the table, ten or so pipes and a picture of Stalin to the side so that both he sitting in the armchair and those sitting across from him would have the pleasure of being in Stalin’s presence. The man, dressed in a grey jacket done up to the neck, got up and approached us. Mikhoels introduced me to the high official: “This is Avrom Gertsevitsh, the Yiddish poet and partisan.”

wIth shLoYme mIkhoeLs

297

We sat down at the black table. The heavy-set man with a very lively, intelligent face exchanged some pleasantries with Mikhoels, asked about his wife, exchanged names of acquaintances, and offered us Kazbek cigarettes. He himself puffed on a pipe. Then Mikhoels turned to me: “Tell him about the heroism of our contemporary Maccabees …” I started to speak. Although my Russian was not very impressive, the  power of my experiences atoned for any mistakes. I told him about the Vilna ghetto; about our commander, Itsik Vitenberg, and his tragic fate; about our first sabotage operations in Lithuania undertaken by a young woman from the ghetto; about Jewish commanders who established a partisan movement in Lithuania and Belorussia; and also about partisan life in the forest, where my comrades were frequently killed by non-Jewish partisan bullets. And while I was speaking, I came to realize that I was no longer sitting opposite the high official but pacing over the soft carpet, and that instead of speaking in Russian my tongue had rebelled and that I was speaking Yiddish … I apologized, and switched again to Russian. The powerful official motioned with his hand and said in Russian: “It’s nothing. Speak Yiddish. I understand.”4 I followed his advice. My descriptions of the destruction and heroism rattled him to the core. His pupils were moist. For a moment he was transformed into a ghetto Jew with a yellow patch … When I later told him about a commemorative event for Peretz that those condemned to death organized in the seven bloody streets of the ghetto, the official awoke from the horrifying hypnosis of my words and knocked his pipe against the table: “Peretz is the greatest Yiddish writer! I’ve told you many times, Solomon Mikhailovitsh, perform Peretz! He manages to penetrate the soul of a people. His ideas are both national and universal.” Mikhoels responded: “I perform Sholem Aleichem, but in truth I adore Peretz.” And with that, our reception with the high official in his government office on Red Square concluded. I can’t be sure whether my words had any effect. Mikhoels, however, squeezed my hand and was happy. •

298

the mosCow Years

… And now I want to tell you about an entirely different dramatic episode. I had thought to omit it so as not to come off as boastful, which I detest in others and even more so in myself. But since the Yiddish poet Moyshe Knapheys already mentioned the episode in an article,5 it’s somewhat easier for me to write about it. I am confident that people will not suspect me of attempting to portray myself as a hero. After my return from Nuremberg, where I testified at the famous trial against the murderers of our people, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in Moscow organized an evening at which I was asked to speak about my appearance and about my impressions of the trial. The official announcement in Eynikayt stated: On Thursday, 14 March, in the Conference Room of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (Kropotkin Street 10) there will be a meeting with the poet a. sutzkever Comrade Sutzkever will share his impressions of the Nuremberg Trials and his trip to Germany. Entrance is free. 7 p.m. I was a bit late arriving to the meeting, but as soon as I exited the subway I saw that the entire street was packed with people, and police on horseback across the width of the street were not allowing anyone to pass through. My first thought was that there must be a fire in the area. I noticed Shmuel Halkin in the crowd and asked him where the fire was. “What are you talking about?” he answered affably. “Moscow’s Jews have come out to hear you.” Markish, who was standing nearby, corroborated his words. How strange. I had never drawn such an audience. Since the police on horseback were not allowing anyone through, I remained between Halkin and Peretz Markish. I thought to myself: be patient. Without you, the meeting with Sutzkever cannot happen. Suddenly, Shloyme Mikhoels appeared in the open gate of the building facing us. He was signalling to those keeping order that I should be allowed through …

wIth shLoYme mIkhoeLs

299

It was a struggle, but I managed to wade through the crowd and make it in. People were hanging off the railings leading to the conference hall. They lined the walls of the room. The first row was reserved for Ehrenburg, Lozovskii (who was in charge of the Sovinformburo), the Jewish General Kreizer, Professor Etinger,6 and Der Nister. On stage were Mikhoels, who was chairing that evening, Dovid Bergelson, and Major-General Kats.7 Mikhoels opened the evening and introduced me: “The Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever was a witness to how the Germans, may their names be blotted out, murdered our brothers and sisters in Europe. With his appearance at Nuremberg as a witness on behalf of the prosecution and with his indictment of the Goerings and the Streichers, he enacted vengeance upon the infamous murderers of our people.” I could not get Mikhoels’s introductory words out of my mind for the entire duration of my remarks over the next couple of hours. The audience was riveted. For those who had been unable to get into the room there was a loudspeaker. I did not know how to conclude. I could have continued speaking for another hour or two. I paused, and then turned to Mikhoels: “Dear Comrade Mikhoels, in your introduction you remarked that as a result of my testimony in Nuremberg I enacted revenge upon the murderers of our people. But how am I to derive any satisfaction from such revenge when my mother was reduced to ashes in Ponar, and the Jerusalem of Lithuania is devoid of Jews. That is why I believe that the greatest revenge upon the murderers of our people will be that moment when I, and we all, realize our own free Jerusalem!” To convey such an idea with such unexpected words was even for me no small matter. At first, the audience was frozen in fear, joy, and bewilderment. But after a few moments the crowd erupted into such enthusiastic applause that even I was frightened. The applause also could be heard by those Jews on the steps, hanging off the railings, and listening outside. The poet Knapheys, who was in attendance, wrote about this moment in his article: “There was sudden consternation on the dais. Mikhoels was uncomfortable. Sutzkever was voicing the longing of the martyrs. Jewish life would be rebuilt in the homeland, in the object of our diasporic dreams, in the Land of Israel … Shloyme Mikhoels,

300

the mosCow Years

People’s Artist of the ussr , who had introduced Sutzkever, suddenly took the microphone back from him. The audience held its breath. It was a moment of great suspense. When Mikhoels opened his mouth to proclaim the evening’s proceedings concluded, the hall none the less broke into a storm of ovations once again.” I should add that this description is not entirely accurate. Mikhoels did not cut me off. To continue speaking was no longer necessary because there was nothing left to say. Rather, when the audience recovered from its shock and expressed its enthusiasm for Jerusalem with strong applause, Mikhoels, somewhat stunned, stood up and said in Russian: “The evening is concluded.” Professor Etinger, one of the leading heart specialists in the Soviet Union, later a victim of the Doctors’ Plot,8 and the kind of wonderful person one encounters rarely in life, this dear man approached me after my appearance, guided me into a corner, and said: “The word ‘Jerusalem’ has been hidden in our hearts for thirty years, like pearls at the bottom of the sea. When you dared pronounce the city’s name, you awakened these pearls as if with a magical incantation, and they are now surfacing for all to see …” • In King Lear, the tragedy about sundering a kingdom, Mikhoels performed his own tragedy. But he did not have any heirs to whom he could bequeath his realm … There are two scenes from Mikhoels’s performance of Lear that are seared into my memory. The first is the storm scene in the field at night, when the unfortunate king is transformed into a human animal and taps madly on his forehead. The betrayed king senses the full measure of his age, the illusoriness of his reign, which will expire together with his soul. And so he cries out: Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? [III, iv, 28–32]9

wIth shLoYme mIkhoeLs

301

And the last scene, when his beloved daughter Cordelia dies in his arms and Mikhoels’s Lear is torn with misery: Cordelia “is dead as earth! Lend me a looking-glass; if that her breath will mist it, why then she lives!” Later in that scene, when he is convinced that his beloved daughter is no longer alive, he begins to curse: “A plague upon you, murderers, traitors, fools all! I might have saved her. Now she’s gone for ever!” “Cordelia, Cordelia! My poor daughter is dead. There is not a spark of life remaining in her.” “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and thou no breath at all!” Binyomin Zuskin,10 who idolized his older friend, told me that whenever Mikhoels played this role he would think of the death of his first wife whom he loved passionately. And once, after a performance of Lear, Mikhoels remained in character, wandering the city with outstretched hands. He was found the next day half frozen in a snowbank. Whenever I think of Mikhoels, I imagine him in the previous scene: in the field at night in the midst of a storm, his hand insanely slapping his forehead. Such was the fate of this great artist, of majesty betrayed, when on 13 January 1948 shadows from Moscow chased him down in Minsk and turned red from his blood. 1962

Ona Šimaitė, Lithuanian librarian, a Christian, whose home in Vilna functioned as a safehouse for Jews; she hid Jewish books and documents provided to her by Sutzkever and his colleagues. (LNb rkrs, F15–561 lap. 3, Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania, Vilnius)

Sutzkever with his wife, Freydke, in Moscow, soon after their rescue from the Vilna forest, at the headquarters of the Lithuanian partisan movement. They are examining materials saved from Vilna, April 1944. (Courtesy of the Sutzkever family)

Sutzkever’s handwritten diary notes about Itsik Vitenberg, commander of the FPo, and Berl Shereshnyevski, secretary of the Communist Party in the ghetto (arC 4*1565 13 53, Sutzkever Archive, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem)

Sutzkever in Vilna after the city’s liberation, summer 1944 (Courtesy of the Sutzkever family)

Sutzkever with his rescuer Janowa Bartoszewicz, summer 1944 (Courtesy of the Sutzkever family)

With the young artist Shmuel (Zalmen) Bak in Vilna after its liberation (rG 223.1, Vilna Ghetto Materials, Sutzkever-Kaczerginski Collection, YIvo Institute for Jewish Research, New York)

A group of partisan fighters during the liberation of Vilna, with Abba Kovner standing in centre (rG 223.1, Vilna Ghetto Materials, Sutzkever-Kaczerginski Collection, YIvo Institute for Jewish Research, New York)

Sutzkever amid the ruins of the Vilna Synagogue courtyard (Shulhoyf ), summer 1944 (Courtesy of the Sutzkever family)

All that remained of the Gaon’s Study House, Vilna

Sutzkever at the ruins of YIvo, Vilna, summer 1944 (rG 223.1, Vilna Ghetto Materials, Sutzkever-Kaczerginski Collection, YIvo Institute for Jewish Research, New York)

A ghostly Yatkever Street, Vilna, after the war (From Leyzer Ran, Yerushalayim de-Lite)

From the beginning of a letter mailed by Sutzkever from Vilna to Ilya Ehrenburg, describing his first impressions of the liberated city, July 1944 (arC 4* 1565 1 1371, Sutzkever Archive, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem)

Left to right: Sutzkever, Israel Zeligman, and Gershn Abramovitsh in Vilnius, July 1944, in the weeks after liberation, gathering up materials concealed in ghetto malines (rG 223.1, Vilna Ghetto Materials, Sutzkever-Kaczerginski Collection, YIvo Institute for Jewish Research, New York)

Sculptures, posters, and materials rescued from malines and placed in late July 1944 in the Jewish Museum of Art and Culture, Vilnius, co-established by Sutzkever (rG 223.1, Vilna Ghetto Materials, Sutzkever-Kaczerginski Collection, YIvo Institute for Jewish Research, New York)

Sign for the Jewish Museum co-established by Sutzkever in Vilnius in Lithuanian, Yiddish, and Russian (From Leyzer Ran, Yerushalayim de-Lite)

Examining rescued materials, Vilnius, from left to right: Shmerke Kaczerginski, Arn Kushnirov, E. Gershater, Sutzkever, Elye Gordon, and Abba Kovner (rG 223.1, Vilna Ghetto Materials, Sutzkever-Kaczerginski Collection, YIvo Institute for Jewish Research, New York)

Sutzkever (right) at a meeting of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JaFC) in Moscow, 1944 (Still from a film, FV2833_RG604595, Russian State Film and Audio Archives, Moscow)

Freydke Sutzkever with members of the JaFC, Moscow. From left to right: linguist Elye Spivak; Yiddish poet Itsik Feffer; Dr Boris Shimelovitch, director of the Botkin Hospital in Moscow; Yiddish writer Dovid Bergelson, sitting; two unknown men; Freydke Sutzkever; Shloyme (Solomon) Mikhoels, director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre; and Shakhne Epshteyn, secretary of the JaFC and editor of Eynikayt (Courtesy of the Sutzkever family)

Sutzkever (standing) with fellow writers in Moscow, from left to right: Peretz Markish, Shmuel Halkin, Itsik Feffer, Ben Zion Goldberg, Dovid Bergelson, Arn Kushnirov, Chaim Grade, and Shmuel Persov (Courtesy of the Sutzkever family)

Sutzkever with Freydke and their daughter, Reyna, Moscow, 1945 (Courtesy of the Sutzkever family)

Sutzkever testifying at the Nuremberg Tribunal, February 1946 (Still from a film record of Sutzkever’s testimony at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, 1946, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC)

Citation for Sutzkever’s receipt of the medal For Victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945, 2 April 1946. The award caused him more damage than honour, and contributed to his being denied visas to the United States several times. (arC 4*1565 47, manila envelope 69, Sutzkever Archive, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem)

Portrait of Sutzkever taken in Moscow (Courtesy of the Sutzkever family)

aFterworD “Written in Moscow, Summer 1944” Justin D. Cammy and Avraham Novershtern

The clinical note – “Written in Moscow, Summer 1944” – that concludes Abraham (Avrom) Sutzkever’s Vilna Ghetto conceals the dramatic circumstances of its composition. The summer of 1944, when its author turned thirty-one years of age, marked the final period of the Second World War, one that deepened consciousness and understanding of the Holocaust even as the Germans desperately accelerated their efforts to liquidate the remaining Jews of Europe and cover up their crimes. The note inserted by Sutzkever indicating the place and time of composition is only partially accurate, since for at least part of the summer of 1944 Sutzkever was not in Moscow but back in Vilna, the city that had been his home for most of his life and in whose ghetto he had been confined for some two years. How had Sutzkever escaped the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto in September 1943 and made it all the way to Moscow in wartime? And what were the specific circumstances under which this Yiddish poet, who had been best known before the war for lyrics celebrating nature and the wonders of the creative process, wrote a chronicle about the destruction of his community?

1. Until the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Abraham Sutzkever’s life1 had been singularly devoted to the mission of Yiddish poetry in one of the cultural capitals of the Yiddish world. He was born in 1913 in Smorgon, today a borderland town in Belarus, where his father dealt in leather. Despite these prosaic origins, his family had deep roots in the intellectual traditions that distinguished Lithuanian Jewry. Sutzkever’s maternal grandfather was the author of a work of

320

Afterword

rabbinical philosophy, and his father spent his time away from the factory consumed by religious study. Even in Smorgon the Sutzkevers drew pride from their proximity to Vilna, a city whose status as a centre of Lithuanian (Litvak) Jewish culture transcended its borders. Vilna’s reputation derived from its contributions to layer upon layer of modern Jewish culture, from dedication to and innovations in rabbinical scholarship modelled by the Vilna Gaon (the genius Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman, 1720–1797) to Jewish enlightenment thought, from Hebrew and Yiddish literature and publishing to modern Jewish politics. The Jewish-socialist Bund had been founded in town, and one of its sons, Hirsh Lekert, was an early martyr to the revolutionary cause. During the First World War the Russian army expelled hundreds of thousands of Jews from their homes, the Jews of Vilna among them. The Sutzkevers suddenly became refugees. The formative landscape of Sutzkever’s boyhood shifted to Siberia, where his family fled to escape the fighting. Although its dislocation proved tragic (his father died of a heart attack there, and his older sister contracted a brain inflammation that would later take her life), the little boy came to experience Siberia as a landscape of wonder, where his poetic sensibility was awakened. By the time his widowed mother moved the family back to Vilna, the city, now Wilno, had come under the control of the newly independent Republic of Poland. Poland’s gain was Lithuania’s loss; although both countries earned their independence in the wake of the Great War, Lithuanians could not forgive the fact that they had been denied Vilnius, a city they considered their historic capital. Vilna’s interwar Jewish community of intellectuals, writers, artists, and political activists was energized by what one scholar referred to as “genius of place,” the city’s tradition of combining respect for the past with a dynamic vision of the future. Its Yiddishists pointed to Vilna’s impressive array of interwar institutions to promote the city as a model for the ambitions of secular Yiddish culture.2 Their self-confidence was buoyed by the fact that Vilna was a multinational city consisting of Poles, Jews, Lithuanians, Belorussians, and Russians. Jews constituted a third of its almost two hundred thousand residents, and Yiddish remained a dominant feature of their political, cultural, educational, and domestic lives. While Vilna was only the fourth largest Jewish community in Poland, what it lacked in numbers it more than made up for in its qualitative contribution to modern Jewish culture.

Afterword

321

Local Jews built up their own institutions and culture as a matter of national dignity and self-reliance. By the 1930s, Vilna boasted five daily Yiddish newspapers, a Yiddish school system that included a high school and teachers seminary, the Polish headquarters of the Yiddish PeN club, and the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIvo), which served as the Yiddish-speaking, national centre for advanced research into eastern European Jewish history, folkways, and culture. When YIvo’s new building was dedicated in 1933 on a tree-lined street in one of the city’s newer, middle-class neighbourhoods, it was, in the words of historian Lucy Dawidowicz, “the Ministry of Yiddish” for a transnational community of Yiddish-speaking Jews: Everything about the YIvo – its location, its landscaped setting, its modern design, the gleaming immaculateness of the place – delivered a message. I interpreted it to mean that YIvo had class, was no moldering institution, but a place from which distinction and excellence would issue. Even more: the YIvo was no seedy relic of the past; it belonged to the future. Soon I came to realize that the look of this building signified even more. The founders of the YIvo were determined to raise the status of Yiddish and its culture not just among Jews, but also – perhaps especially – in the worldwide scholarly community.3 Sutzkever came of age as a teenager and young adult in an environment in which the community’s leading figures modelled respect for Jewish culture and languages. Although he was educated in a Polish-Hebrew gymnasium (and later fell in love with the Polish Romantics while attending lectures at the city’s Stefan Batory University), he published his first Yiddish poems in a songbook of the Yiddishist scouting movement Bin (The Bee), founded by the linguist and YIvo director Dr Max Weinreich. Among the oaths he swore upon his initiation as a scout was one to “serve Yiddish culture.”4 Beginning in 1934, Sutzkever grew into a leading voice of the local Yiddish literary group Yung-Vilne ( Young Vilna), publishing in its magazine and befriending other group members such as Chaim Grade and Shmerke Kaczerginski, who would go on to make their own significant contributions to both Yiddish and Holocaust literature. Although he was initially denied membership in Yung-Vilne because his audition

322

Afterword

materials did not meet the group’s expectations that poetry serve a socio-political cause (that is, it was not sufficiently leftist), his talent was undeniable and the decision was soon overturned. During the 1930s Sutzkever eagerly recited his verse at Yung-Vilne’s public events, and immersed himself in the study of Old Yiddish literature under YIvo director Weinreich’s personal tutelage. At the same time, he felt a particular kinship with the more established New York Yiddish modernist poets known as the Inzikhistn (Introspectivists), who regularly published him in their journal committed to art for art’s sake. Before the German invasion of Vilna in June 1941, Sutzkever published two volumes of poetry – Lider (Poems, 1937) and Valdiks (Woodlore, 1940). They solidified his reputation as one of the most innovative and independent new voices in Yiddish poetry. His lyrics fused neo-classical and Romantic influences with modernist experimentation, and his belief in poetry as a contemporary form of spiritual expression was remarkable for such a young writer. Over time, his writing was celebrated by Yiddish critics at home and abroad for the musical polish of its lines and his experimentation with language, even as Sutzkever’s art was regarded as somewhat aloof for not taking up the challenges posed by mounting anti-semitism, Polish nativism, and the dire material conditions of Jewish workers as his peers more obviously did. For instance, his ambitious early cycle Sibir (Siberia) overturned foreboding preconceptions of Siberia in the popular imagination; his childhood years there allowed him to see a land filled with exciting new sounds and light, where expanses of white snow became a blank slate upon which he inscribed his poetic genesis. Valdiks, which appeared when the Jews of Warsaw were already under German occupation and during the brief months when Vilna was an island of freedom trapped between Hitler and Stalin, dwelt on the transcendent beauty of nature. The dissonance between the ecstatic mood of this volume (“Every moment without a hymn is a shame to me”) and the tragic events taking place beyond its pages is stark.5 Between October 1939 and June 1941, Vilna changed hands multiple times. Polish Wilno was occupied by the Red Army in October 1939, then turned over to the Lithuanians, who re-established Vilnius as their capital, only to find it reoccupied by the Soviets in June 1940, now as the capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic.6 Throughout this unstable period the Jewish population ballooned to some seventy

Afterword

323

thousand people, as it absorbed a surge of refugees escaping areas of German-occupied Poland. The Jews of Vilna attempted to go on with their everyday lives despite the abnormal times. Jewish theatre performances, diverse cultural events, and even a commemoration marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Y.L. Peretz (considered one of the founders of modern Yiddish literature) formed part of the city’s lively local cultural scene. When Stalin’s commissars returned to Vilnius in spring 1940, the community had to adjust to the demands of a totalitarian regime that now stood as the only bulwark against an even more lethal foe. On the one hand, the Soviets established the first-ever chair in Yiddish studies at the city’s university. On the other hand, all Jewish newspapers and publishing fell under the control of Soviet censors, and a number of major local Jewish cultural figures were arrested and disappeared, including Zalmen Reyzen, one of Yung-Vilne’s mentors and editor of the city’s most prestigious Yiddish daily. Prior to the war, Sutzkever had deliberately eschewed ideological commitments and was known to have been highly suspicious of Communism. His focus was on poetry, not politics. But as a poet, his only local outlet was now the Vilner emes (The Vilna Truth), the single Yiddish paper permitted to function in Soviet Vilnius under the watchful eye of the censors. Like all writers who wanted to continue to publish, Sutzkever joined the Lithuanian chapter of the Union of Soviet Writers and was conscripted to host a Yiddish program on local Soviet radio.7 On 22 June 1941, any hope for normal life as war ravaged the rest of Europe was smashed. Soviet Vilnius fell during Operation Barbarossa, the surprise German invasion of the Soviet Union. During the initial weeks of German occupation, the city’s Jews experienced unprecedented terror, torture, persecution, robbery, and murder. Some Jews fled eastward into the Soviet interior with the retreating Red Army, but only a few thousand survived that dangerous route. Sutzkever and his wife initially joined those attempting to outrun the Germans, but the assault on the city progressed so rapidly that their escape was cut off, and they were forced to return home. For more than two years, from late June 1941 through September 1943, Sutzkever and his wife Freydke shared the fate of Vilna Jewry. During the initial weeks of Nazi occupation, thousands of Jews were hunted in the streets, seized, and dispatched to the killing pits of Ponar, a forest on the outskirts of town; prior to the German occupation,

324

Afterword

families would picnic there on weekends, couples would go for walks, and young scouts would scour its woods for mushrooms and berries. Within weeks Ponar became synonymous with terror.8 Sutzkever hid in a chimney, under a tin roof, and even in an empty coffin to avoid capture.9 In September 1941 he was taken to the nearby hills, where he assumed he would be shot.10 The Germans soon established two ghettos (consolidated into one by late October 1941). He and Freydke first lived on the floor of a crowded apartment before moving to Daytshe Street 29 (today Vokiečių). Soon enough they moved again to a ghetto apartment at Strashun Street 1, directly across from the ghetto library and its ancillary cultural institutions. By the end of December 1941, of Vilna’s seventy thousand Jews prior to the German invasion, only twenty thousand were still alive; most had been shot at Ponar. The year 1942 marked the beginning of the so-called period of stability in the ghetto. Most of the city’s remaining Jews hoped that the mass shootings were behind them and that somehow they would survive the ghetto or several smaller urban camps until the end of the war. Only a minority fully recognized the German decision to complete the destruction of the Jewish people in stages. Sutzkever’s response to the Nazi terror was reflected through his faith in poetry and commitment to his craft. Years later he admitted: “I wrote more in the Vilna ghetto than I did the rest of my life. How? With what strength? It’s incomprehensible.”11 His wartime poetry ranged from lyrics mourning personal and communal losses to a mythopoetics that interpreted the Jewish struggle in death and life in broader national and historical terms. The Nazi occupation prompted him to play a role in the ghetto’s cultural establishment, and over time he emerged as an active organizer of and contributor to its extensive and diverse cultural life. Sutzkever joined in founding the ghetto theatre, a venture that early on faced determined opposition but earned him legitimacy later, even from those who had been its fiercest critics. He helped to organize the first musical performance of the ghetto theatre in January 1942, and wrote the passages linking the various literary segments of its first program, all of which he carefully selected himself. Sutzkever’s accomplishments involved not only cultural production but also cultural rescue. He was conscripted into the group of slave labourers whom the Germans appointed to sort and set aside treasures from various Jewish libraries as part of the Rosenberg Task Force

Afterword

325

(Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg).12 Most Jewish books and documents were designated for destruction and were sent to factories to be transformed into pulp. The most valuable materials were supposed to be set aside for shipment to Germany for a Nazi institute for the study of the Jewish Question. Sutzkever and his colleagues had other plans. While working under the careful eye of the Germans, they aimed to save and hide the most valuable treasures they came across. This was one of the central manifestations of Jewish cultural resistance in the ghetto. This band of intellectuals, journalists, and writers was permitted to leave the ghetto to conduct its “selection,” first at the university and then in the building that had once housed YIvo. Unlike other groups of Jews who were assigned to work in brigades outside the ghetto, they were not involved in physical labour, and had almost no contact with the non-Jewish residents of the city. Since they could not easily trade with non-Jews or receive food in exchange for other goods, they smuggled few practical materials and foodstuffs into the ghetto. Residents nicknamed them “the Paper Brigade,” since they snuck mere books and scraps of paper into the ghetto.13 They hid some items on the YIvo premises itself and smuggled many others into the ghetto or for safekeeping with sympathetic friends. These forty-some writers and intellectuals rescued not only one-of-a-kind manuscripts and books that attested to the intellectual and cultural richness of east European Jewry, but also weapons to help resist the occupiers. Among the crates of books they discovered in the YIvo building were instructional pamphlets on the use of armaments, which were later smuggled into the ghetto and used by its partisan fighters. A member of the group, Ruzka Korczak, later noted: “Who could have imagined that Sutzkever would write more than just lyric and epic poetry? Who could have predicted that he would not be satisfied with merely writing war poetry and calls to battle, and that his poem “Take Up Arms” (A nem ton dem ayzn) was not just an appeal to others but was actually realized when he wrapped his fingers around the cold steel of a pistol acquired from the underground from which he refused to loosen his grip? In his workroom at YIvo, under books by Yehoash, Leyvik, and Halpern, and under the dusty manuscripts, he concealed Belgian pistols, ammunition, and Russian machine guns.”14 Sutzkever’s forced-labour assignment at YIvo also served a valuable literary function: in the quiet of his office there he was able to write.

326

Afterword

Rokhl Pupko-Krinski, a fellow member of the Rosenberg detail and secret Paper Brigade, noted that “Sutzkever would often read his most beloved poets: Levyik, Leyeles, Yehoash, Glatshteyn and others … He also wrote himself. Almost all of Sutzkever’s ghetto poems were written in the tiny room of YIvo where we worked. I loved that room with its view of Vivulski Street, with the big unfinished church on the corner, and in the far-off distance, on the horizon, the contours of a forest.”15 In the ghetto Sutzkever also helped to organize a youth club. In the same way that he had been initiated as a young man into Yiddish high culture by local Yiddishists, Sutzkever did not hesitate to pass on the favour. He read Yiddish poetry with club members, and conducted a study group with them. Yitskhok Rudashevski, a teenager who penned a formidable diary in the ghetto, several times noted Sutzkever’s impact on club members, especially the way he introduced them to the work of Yehoash (the Yiddish poet who translated Longfellow’s Hiawatha and the Hebrew Bible into Yiddish) to communicate pride in the different registers of Yiddish and its literary inheritance: Today we had a very interesting meeting with the poet A. Sutzkever. He spoke with us about poetry, about art in general, and about various kinds of poetry. [2 November 1942] The club is currently abuzz with work. We are preparing an evening in honour of Yehoash … At night we prepare a magnificent exhibition with Comrade Sutzkever, who is supervising our work. Sutzkever salvaged from YIvo many priceless materials, manuscripts, books, photographs … [10 March 1943] Today marked the Yehoash celebration as well as the opening of the Yehoash exhibition in the Club. The exhibition is extraordinarily beautiful. The entire reading room is filled with materials, with priceless documents that are now treasures, handwritten letters from Peretz and Yehoash, rare newspaper clippings, old Yiddish translations of the Bible from the 17th century, and other valuables. The room is bright and clean. We are indebted to our loyal friend Sutzkever … [14 March 1943]16 Sutzkever clearly considered cultural productivity a means to defy German efforts to rob the Jews of their humanity. It, too, was resistance

Afterword

327

work, and it complemented his membership in the underground United Partisan Organization (Fareynikte partizaner organizatsye, or FPo), which drew its members from across the political spectrum of pre-war Jewish society. The organization linked the underground in the ghetto with partisan groups the Soviets had organized in the region, whose representatives, under dangerous circumstances, made contact with the ghetto. On 12 September 1943, only days before the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto, Sutzkever and his wife escaped to the forest on foot with a group of fellow FPo members, the initial step in a long and harrowing journey. The Sutzkevers walked more than 150 kilometres until they made it to the Narotsh Forest, where they spent the autumn and winter of 1943–44 with the Voroshilov Brigade of Soviet partisans commanded by Fyodor Markov. When the group first arrived in the forest, its members joined the Jewish partisan unit Revenge (Nekome), but Markov forced them to integrate into the general partisans. Because they were ordered to turn over their weapons, Sutzkever served in a partisan support unit and was asked to chronicle its activities. Although he never shot a bullet at the enemy, a handsome photograph of him with a rifle across his chest would later appear in his ghetto memoir, contributing to his reputation as a partisan poet. Even though Jewish partisans in the forest were no longer confined to the ghetto, they were prey to Nazi units and their collaborators, and had to contend with anti-semitism even within partisan ranks. Shike Gertman, one of these partisans, had received a handwritten copy of Sutzkever’s epic poem “Kol Nidre” in the ghetto from the poet himself in July 1943 and carried it through enemy territory so that it could make its way to Yiddish writers in Moscow associated with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JaFC). The JaFC had been established in April 1942 as the representative arm of Soviet Jews. In fact, the authorities considered the JaFC part of Soviet wartime propaganda, designed to bolster support for the anti-fascist struggle both within the Soviet Union and among Jews abroad. Headquartered in a building on Kropotkin Street in central Moscow, the JaFC was chaired by the Yiddish actor and theatre director Shloyme Mikhoels, while Shakhne Epshteyn, a loyal Communist journalist, served as its executive secretary and editor of its central publication, the newspaper Eynikayt. The JaFC included many leading figures of Soviet Yiddish culture, such as the poets Peretz Markish and Itsik Feffer, and the prose

328

Afterword

master Dovid Bergelson. Its prestige was enhanced by the visible role played by such popular Russian-language writers as Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman.17 Sutzkever had completed “Kol Nidre” in February 1943. The poem borrows its title from the service that initiates the Day of Atonement. It portrays a dramatic, completely unexpected meeting between a young Red Army soldier captured by the Germans and a group of Jews held prisoner in the ghetto. After a long discussion, one of the imprisoned Jews discovers that he is the father of the Red Army soldier who had left home years earlier. The unexpected meeting between father and son under such extreme circumstances was a metaphor for the secret dream of the poet (and of all the Jews in the ghetto): to build an imaginary bridge over the walls of the ghetto to the free world beyond it where they would be reunited with family and friends. At the same time writing the poem allowed Sutzkever to dramatize the terrible ethical questions residents of the ghetto confronted. The poem was inspired by the murderous roundups of Yom Kippur 1941, when more than four thousand Jews were taken from both ghettos to be shot at Ponar. As the noose now tightened around the Vilna ghetto, Sutzkever secretly dispatched it to Moscow to ensure its survival. When “Kol Nidre” arrived in Moscow, it was read aloud at an unprecedented gathering of Jewish writers, at first without attribution to Sutzkever, who at the time was still living behind enemy lines. His Moscow colleagues did not want to draw German attention to the fact that Sutzkever was still alive by revealing the poem’s author. The reading was a sensation.18 When the JaFC learned that Sutzkever had escaped the ghetto and was hiding in the forest, Mikhoels and Lithuanian president-in-exile Justas Paleckis appealed to have him smuggled from enemy territory. Paleckis, who was also a poet, had befriended Sutzkever in 1940 at a meeting of local writers and even knew some Yiddish from his time in prison. The Sutzkevers’ rescue from the forest on 12 March 1944 was dramatic. The couple spent days walking through enemy territory to the secret rendezvous, where a Soviet hydroplane was to retrieve them from behind enemy lines. Their commander, Markov, tried to ensure their safety by sending guards along with them, but German forces combed the area, which was heavily mined. Sutzkever would later attribute their making it through to his faith in poetry. He recalls measuring his steps

Afterword

329

poetically: “It was in March 1944 that I fully appreciated the strength of poetry and the power of its rhythms. I was living in the woods with the partisans, and I had to cross a field littered with live mines. We did not know precisely where they were located. I saw people shredded to pieces. A bird that did not know any better sat on a mine and was blown apart. I wondered how to proceed? What direction should I take? Where should I set down my foot? One false move would result in death, and lack of movement meant life. Suddenly a poetic melody came to me, and I walked across the minefield to the rhythm of that melody for a kilometre until I was safely on the other side.”19 According to Sutzkever, the first plane sent to retrieve them was shot down, killing a number of people hiding in a barn when it crashed. A second plane landed on a frozen lake a short time later. It collected Sutzkever and his wife, depositing them in Velikiye Luki, a town in western Russia that had been liberated from German occupation the previous year. From there the couple continued on to Moscow. In the Soviet capital fellow writers and artists associated with the JaFC enthusiastically welcomed Sutzkever as a symbol of the Jewish struggle against fascism. Jews in the Soviet Union had enlisted in the war effort in various ways, and they were certain that the day of German defeat was approaching. On 2 April 1944, within days of his arrival in Moscow, Sutzkever publicly appeared at a plenum of the JaFC. Some three thousand people packed the prestigious Trade Union Hall of Columns, including many of the leading Jewish figures of the Soviet Union. His remarks were carried on Moscow radio. Sutzkever spoke as a representative of the Jewish partisans: “In the name of the victims and in the name of the surviving remnant in the forests around Vilna and in underground caves in the city, I call you, Jews of the world, fight and avenge their deaths.”20 He was the only invited speaker who did not invoke Stalin’s name in his remarks, a breach of protocol that did not go unnoticed. Sutzkever also participated in a dramatic radio broadcast to the free world in which he sent greetings to his older brother in Palestine. Soon afterwards, on 29 April 1944, an article about Sutzkever by Ilya Ehrenburg was published in the leading Soviet newspaper, Pravda (Truth), entitled “Triumph of a Human Being.” In it, Ehrenburg reported on the destruction of the Vilna ghetto, the horrors of the Nazis, and armed combat by the partisans. Ehrenburg also described Sutzkever’s epic poem “Kol Nidre,” which he had heard read aloud even

330

Afterword

before Sutzkever arrived in Moscow, and other cultural treasures the partisan poet had brought with him from the forest.21 Within months of Sutzkever’s rescue his reputation had transcended Yiddish-speaking circles and reached the mainstream. Ehrenburg’s article presented Sutzkever as both a model Soviet and a proud Jew, as both a witness to catastrophe and a brave participant in the struggle to defeat Nazism, as a poet whose words inspired resistance and drew from the poet’s own personal sacrifices. It was an unprecedented moment in the Soviet press for a Jew to be presented this way. Although the public persona crafted by and around Sutzkever as a partisan-poet amplified his reputation and served Soviet interests, it masked a deeper emotional storm confronting the rescued couple. They felt the hope for the quick end to the war, but also profound grief. They mourned the murdered Jews of Vilna, among whom were their dearest friends and family, including Sutzkever’s mother, Freydke’s parents and sister, and the couple’s infant son, who had been poisoned at birth under German orders. A deep chasm separated their lives in Moscow from the preceding two and a half years in Nazi-occupied Vilna, and in the forest among partisan comrades. They recognized that their rescue was exceptional, and that they had left beloved friends behind to an uncertain future. Sutzkever’s talent and reputation as a poet had, literally, saved their lives. Meanwhile, as the Red Army liberated more and more areas from German control, the virtual extermination of eastern European Jewry came into sharper focus. Sutzkever’s public standing resulted in fellow survivors, refugees from German crimes, and Jewish Red Army soldiers entrusting him with their experiences. They wrote to him via the JaFC, the Soviet Writers Union, Ehrenburg, or even just with the address “A. Sutzkever, Moscow.” Those originally from Vilna assumed that only a fellow Jew from Vilna would be able to understand the particularity of their shared loss. Others looked up to him as a model and voice for the Jewish sacrifice in the fight against Nazism. They inquired about loved ones and shared their experiences in hiding or at the front. Later, after Eynikayt announced that Sutzkever was working on a book about the Vilna ghetto, more wrote to him, desperate for a copy.22 When word of the liberation of Vilnius on 13 July 1944 reached Sutzkever at a writers’ sanitorium outside of Moscow, he immediately sought a route back to Lithuania, which, according to his recounting,

Afterword

331

he did in the official car of Justas Paleckis. They arrived the evening of 18 July. Sutzkever spent two months in Vilnius, seeking out material remnants of the city’s storied Jewish past hidden during the war. There is no question that those two months were among the most intense of his life. Vilnius little resembled the city in which he had grown up and then come of age as one of the most exciting new voices in Yiddish poetry. It was now a ghost town. Sutzkever wandered empty streets that had once teemed with Jewish life. He stood face to face with a landscape of total devastation: vacant apartments and institutions, quiet alleys, unimaginable ruins, and a forest on the outskirts of town that held evidence of an extreme genocide, all reminders of the storied Jewish community extinguished in its prime. All that remained intact of the YIvo headquarters was its chimney.23 Only a tiny fraction of the city’s pre-1941 Jewish population ever returned. During summer 1944, when Sutzkever confronted the full scale of devastation, he joined several comrades from the FPo who tirelessly sought out materials hidden in the ghetto, including the Hebrew poet Abba Kovner, one of its commanders, and Shmerke Kaczerginski, his friend from Yung-Vilne. That which had been intended by the Germans for pulp or plunder now became the raw material for a museum they co-founded on 26 July, first housed in an apartment Sutzkever shared with Kaczerginski at Gedimino Street 15. It became the unofficial centre of Jewish life in the weeks immediately after the city’s liberation.24 Those few Jews returning from urban hideouts, the forest, or years as refugees in the Soviet interior exile sought out Sutzkever and Kaczerginski for information about their families or just for an encouraging Yiddish word. When the apartment could contain no more materials, the duo moved the museum on 11 August to Strashun Street 6, within the borders of the former ghetto. The courtyard’s crumbling buildings at that address had housed the ghetto library, culture club, and sports field. The materials recovered from various secret caches and the insights Sutzkever gleaned from the few survivors who trickled back to town prompted him to expand significantly a chronicle about the ghetto he had began drafting in late spring and early summer at the behest of Ilya Ehrenburg for his Black Book project, whereby the JaFC intended a detailed record of Nazi crimes in Soviet territories. This contribution would become the basis for his independent volume,

332

Afterword

From the Vilna Ghetto, whose writing was suddenly interrupted by Sutzkever’s return to Vilnius, where he remained until September 1944. As we see below, inquiries from his wife, Freydke, still in Moscow, about the status of the book during his time away, a request from his editors to add a final section on liberation, his visit to the mass killing pits of Ponar, and his discovery of cultural treasures and material evidence of Nazi crimes mean that his book could not possibly have been entirely “Written in Moscow, summer 1944” because he was not in Moscow for almost two summer months when he was still gleaning valuable information. Sizable portions were added to his original chronicle as a result of this time back in Vilnius. It was not unusual for Sutzkever to back-date his ghetto poems to align them with specific events, and it would appear that in the case of From the Vilna Ghetto he preferred to retain the date of his initial drafts rather than admit that the book was the culmination of significant additions and editing over the subsequent months. The dramatic impact of dating the text to the summer of 1944 marked it as a narrative of liberation. On 12 September 1944 an evening was held in Sutzkever’s honour in Vilnius prior to his return to Moscow, a testament to his reputation at that moment. Exactly a year earlier he and Freydke had escaped the Vilna ghetto. In the subsequent whirlwind of a year he had lived at a partisan encampment in the forest, found himself rescued, resettled, and celebrated in Moscow, and then suddenly found himself back at home in a city completely transformed. Forty colleagues gathered for the city’s first postwar Jewish literary evening. Lithuanian poet Liudas Gira expressed his love for the Jewish people, while someone else called for revenge. Sutzkever read from his poetry, but the elation of being among literary colleagues was short-lived. The next day a woman came to the Jewish Museum he had co-founded and fell at his feet with a cry, pleading for any information about the fate of her family. The woman, Sheyne Mitskuner, had survived by living in a pit for two years, and she was desperately searching for any trace of relatives. Sutzkever regretted that he had no knowledge of their fate. “I beg you,” she replied, “kill me now. I have nothing more to live for.”25

2. Sutzkever was conscripted soon after his arrival in Moscow to write about the Vilna ghetto for The Black Book project by Ilya Ehrenburg,

Afterword

333

who chaired the literary committee responsible for its publication under the auspices of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JaFC). It was intended to be a comprehensive account of the atrocities and murder perpetrated against the Jewish people by the Nazis in territories that had been under Soviet control prior to the German attack in June 1941. These included areas of Poland covered by the secret Nazi-Soviet Molotov-Ribbentrop protocol of August 1939 that the Soviets had occupied in 1939 and 1940. The Black Book was organized according to geography, with intended sections on Ukraine, Belarus, parts of Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. Later parts of the book concerned themselves with areas beyond Soviet control, such as Auschwitz and a short description of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising by historian Ber Mark. Although Vilna had been a Polish city for most of the interwar period, the Soviet Union, after it absorbed Lithuania in 1940, considered Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, a Soviet city. It was natural that The Black Book would commission accounts of the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry, especially about the fate of its three biggest ghettos: in Vilna (Vilnius), Kovno (Kaunas), and Shavl (Šiauliai). The JaFC sponsored the work of gathering material for the book and collecting witness accounts. It framed the acts of witnessing, testifying, accusing, and commemorating in the broadest terms. It was eager both to expose the magnitude and brutality of the extermination and to reveal the heroism of the Jews to the Soviet public, which had been fed anti-semitic propaganda accusing the Jews of not contributing sufficiently to the Soviet war effort. The book also was meant to build a bridge to Jews in the West (especially the United States), designed to ignite their support. The intention was to publish cloth-bound versions in English (in the United States), in Hebrew (in Mandate Palestine), and in other languages. There were close to thirty contributors, along with the book’s editors, most of them Russian writers (some of whom were not Jewish). Yiddish writers, among them Holocaust survivors, were also included: Hersh Smoliar, a Communist partisan leader who survived the Minsk ghetto and helped thousands escape to the forest, was tasked with describing its fate; Meir Yelin and D. Gelpern, members of the underground in the Kovno ghetto, took responsibility for that city; Abraham Sutzkever was asked to describe the experience of the Vilna ghetto. The book that Sutzkever eventually published in 1946 grew out of the chronicle initially solicited for The Black Book, some excerpts of which were published in Eynikayt, the Yiddish newspaper of JaFC.26

334

Afterword

Ilya Ehrenburg had been one of the first writers Sutzkever met after he arrived in Moscow in late March 1944. Ehrenburg himself was a celebrated war reporter, and among the most read journalists in the Soviet Union at the time. On 24 August 1941, Ehrenburg had given a speech for an appeal organized by Shloyme Mikhoels, the director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre, at which he noted: “I am a Russian writer. Like all Russians, I am now defending my homeland. But the Hitlerites have also reminded me of something else: my mother’s name was Hannah. I am a Jew. I say this with pride …”27 Ehrenburg was dismayed by the rise of anti-semitism in the Soviet Union at a time in which the fate of the Jews under Nazism demonstrated the dangers of fascism. Ehrenburg’s Soviet style of reportage undoubtedly influenced Sutzkever, who had read and admired the Russian writer when he was just starting out as a poet. Reportage was an especially popular genre in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, in which first-person lived experience informed reporting of events. Ehrenburg’s status and encouragement provided Sutzkever with a sense of urgency. He started work soon after his arrival in Moscow, organizing his memories and gathering testimonies that would inform his assignment. His straightforward prose adapted to the Soviet style, but also made room for the collective voice as well as his own. In the memoir he sometimes writes in the first-person singular, elsewhere in the first-person plural, and yet elsewhere he embeds the narrative testimonies of others in his text. The polyvocal nature of his volume suggests that Sutzkever understood that his own experiences provided the authority of a participant-witness, while the strategic incorporation of the voices of others vastly enhanced its scope. Given that his chronicle would be among the earliest to detail the tragic fate of his community, Sutzkever was forced to balance the expectations of the editors of The Black Book against his own priorities. To what degree could he reveal his personal feelings and experiences, or offer a tribute to fallen family and colleagues? If the project’s ultimate purpose was to indict the perpetrators and provide a record of the Jewish contribution to the anti-fascist fight, could he also celebrate Jewish culture in extremis? Finally, Sutzkever was aware that his writing would be reviewed carefully by the Soviet censors. Whatever he wrote would have to satisfy them, in addition to his own standards. Ultimately, as a son of Vilna, Sutzkever’s highest commitment remained to his community and its memorialization. Accordingly, his

Afterword

335

writing would attempt to demonstrate how Vilna Jewry adapted to ghettoization by building on pre-war models of mutual responsibility and cultural dynamism. A variety of sources informed Sutzkever’s reportage. First and foremost were his own personal experiences, observations, and memories. Second, during the two months he spent in Vilnius after its liberation, he had direct access to those materials from the Vilna ghetto that had been hidden, recovered, and now held in the Jewish Museum that he and his colleagues had established. As they gathered testimonies and dug up materials from secret caches, Sutzkever uncovered primary documents and eyewitness accounts, including Zelig Kalmanovitsh’s Hebrew ghetto diary and sections of the Yiddish diary of ghetto librarian Herman Kruk. Since no organized body of materials or chronologies of the ghetto yet existed, recovered documents provided him with a framework for reconstructing this period and checking his memory.28 Sutzkever also took in the testimonies of others, some in person, others in the form of letters to him. In some cases he quotes directly from them, whereas elsewhere they form the basis for his synthetic crafting of the ghetto experience. The resulting text is a hybrid genre that combines elements of war chronicle, memoir, reportage, and eyewitness accounts. Sutzkever began composing his contribution for The Black Book amid great personal and social upheaval. The war had not yet ended. He and his wife were settling into a foreign city after having lived for half a year in the forest, not knowing whether they would survive the winter. Vilna’s liberation then separated the couple when he rushed back home while his wife stayed behind in Moscow. He was suddenly called upon to rescue precious materials in great peril that had been hidden during the ghetto years. Despite these obstacles, it is remarkable how prodigiously detailed a portrait his eventual book provides. His personal experience or acquaintanceship with so many people creates an immediacy that transcends occasional errors in memory and later historical discoveries. He assumed that his primary audience would be fellow natives of Vilna, followed by other Yiddish readers invested in his narrative. In order not to draw attention to the various political affiliations of those he mentions, or to arouse the ire of censors by focusing on the richness of Vilna as a Jewish cultural space before the war, he includes no explanatory or biographical notes.

336

Afterword

Even though Ehrenburg intended for the first edition of The Black Book to be published in Russian, Sutzkever wrote in Yiddish, aiming for Moscow’s Emes Press (Yiddish for truth), the only Yiddish-language publisher in the Soviet Union at that time. What had started as a chapter for The Black Book in late spring 1944 had clearly evolved by that summer into plans for a Yiddish book. Letters from Freydke, who remained behind in Moscow, to Sutzkever in Vilnius already refer to his writing as a “book.” For example, on 24 July 1944, fewer than ten days after his return to a liberated Vilnius, she writes: “Strongin [the director of the press] asked me to remind you to write, that is to say to add an additional section to your book focused on Liberation. He wants you to include such a section, which is more important to them than any of its other parts. This is what they are discussing, and he asked that I relay it to you. So I’m passing along the message. My dear, don’t hesitate to write to me if you want me to make additional copies of the three sections of the book I already have. To date I have proceeded slowly on that matter. If you are not still revising them, write to me to let me know if I should do that.”29 To summarize: Sutzkever was commissioned to contribute a chapter on the Vilna ghetto to The Black Book soon after he arrived in Moscow in late March 1944. He drafted most of that chronicle in a terrific hurry between April and early July 1944. Once he was back in Vilnius in mid-July he was directed to add a section on liberation, while he simultaneously sought material evidence in the ruins of his hometown and testimonies of survivors.30 By the time he arrived in Vilnius the chronicle had already grown into a projected Yiddish book, which required significant expansion. As evidence of the project’s growth into a book, on 2 August 1944 Fredyke again complained: “The world awaits your book. Moscow awaits your book. What is more important to you than finishing the book? I’m tired of responding to everyone, in writing and in person, who asks: ‘How’s Abrashe? When is the book going to be finished?’”31 Sutzkever added some twenty “chapters” to what would become From the Vilna Ghetto,32 including its final section – a selection of survivor accounts and discussion of his return to Vilna. Although he would have us believe that the book was “written in Moscow, Summer 1944,” this chronology confirms that he expanded on his work in Vilnius and then again in Moscow after his return there. In fact, it was not sent

Afterword

337

to production in Moscow until 18 May 1945, and it was approved by the authorities for printing only on 10 January 1946. How to account for the substantial gap between Sutzkever’s dating of the memoir and its publication?33 Some of the delay was the direct result of Sutzkever’s several months in Vilna after the city’s liberation. He was overwhelmed by the experience, and his writing slowed to a crawl at the same moment that his editors in Moscow were asking him to add a final section on liberation. He hand-wrote a letter to Ehrenburg (in Yiddish): Greetings from Vilna. For two weeks I have trembled walking its narrow streets. I’ve managed to dig up cultural treasures, and I have been to Ponar. I found nothing there aside from ash. Vilna’s Jews were murdered, exhumed and incinerated. Human ash is sticky and grey. I filled a pouch of ash (it could be my child or my mother) and keep it by my side … … How do I spend my days? From early morning to night I organize the cultural treasures that we managed to bury … Fifty letters from Sholem Aleichem; manuscripts by Jewish writers like Mendele and Bialik, paintings and sculptures, rare books from the former Strashun library. And more … I also have gathered many important documents and diaries from the Vilna ghetto … … I am incredibly busy, even overwhelmed. I spend an entire day digging through a single cave seeking hidden materials. Your comrades, the Jewish partisans, are helping out.34 Sutzkever was so consumed by the task of rescuing hidden materials that he even ignored Freydke’s increasingly desperate questions about how he was doing and about whether he had learned anything more about the fate of her mother and sister. She warned him not to cooperate at all with any Lithuanian who had assisted the liquidation of Vilna Jewry. In late July, when she still had not heard from him since his departure from Moscow, she begged him “not to hold back … I walk around in a daze. I’m not eating. I’m not drinking. I cry and cry.” Then on 8 August she peppered him with a list of questions: “Why are you not responding? Where are you living? Where do you wash a shirt? What about the book? Do you believe there is anything more important than the book?”

338

Afterword

In a letter of 25 August, doubtful about the future of Jewish life in the Soviet Union, she urged him to consider a move to either Palestine (where his older brother lived) or the United States, which was home to many Yiddish poets they admired: “It’s a miracle we managed to crawl free of that German-Lith[anian] hell. Let us now make our way to a corner of the globe where there is freedom. Let’s stop living under the thumb of others!” By September, the pressure from Freydke was so great that Sutzkever could no longer continue his work in Vilna. She had written to him on 31 August asking whether there was enough room for her to join him in Vilna, and then followed up on 8 September: “It’s already September. I felt a punch in the gut when I heard: ‘Children are returning to school.’ The first of September. How I love my dear Vilna in autumn! I took detours on those special streets, walking them on those sun-drenched, beautiful red-green Polish autumns … Abrashinke, my heart is gone. My dreams are gone … Come back!”35 Freydke was alone and pregnant in Moscow. She had already gone through the trauma of giving birth to a child in the ghetto, only to have it murdered by Nazi doctors shortly afterwards. Sutzkever also was eager to devote time to editing his wartime poetry. He made the decision to return to Moscow. Although Kaczerginski and Kovner assumed he would come back to Vilnius soon to continue their important work at the Jewish Museum, Sutzkever waited until several months after the March 1945 birth of a daughter to return. Internal politics over publication of The Black Book also delayed the appearance of Sutzkever’s full memoir. Ilya Ehrenburg, now spearheading the project, had doubts about obtaining permission to publish, as he warned a meeting of the project’s literary commission in October 1944. Excerpts from The Black Book had been printed in Znamya (Banner), the prestigious Russian literary monthly, and in the Yiddish volume Merder fun felker (Murderer of Peoples) in order to generate public interest.36 Excerpts also appeared in Eynikayt, including several drawn from Sutzkever’s account of the Vilna ghetto. Then, in March 1945, Ehrenburg quit The Black Book project in fury. Unbeknownst to him, materials collected for it appeared in print in the United States before the full volume was first cleared for publication in Russian domestically, and he felt betrayed. During the war, the JaFC had been sending abroad the work of Yiddish writers in the Soviet

Afterword

339

Union, much of it unpublished, including articles, poems, plays, and books, in order to influence Jewish public opinion in support of the Soviet war effort. (This also is how a selection of Sutzkever’s ghetto poetry appeared in November 1945 in a U.S. volume entitled Di festung [The Fortress].) Ehrenburg, aside from feeling strongly that The Black Book ought to have appeared first in the Soviet Union, also feared that publication of excerpts abroad could lead to accusations that the project was serving primarily foreign interests. As well, he and Vasily Grossman disagreed about making The Black Book a synthetic text or preserving the individual voices of the submitted pieces. Ehrenburg valued the emotional power of the testimonies as works of art and felt responsible to their authors, whereas Grossman wanted the volume to speak for all those who no longer had a voice. Ehrenburg’s fear of censorship was confirmed when a special commission of the JaFC, overseen by the head of the Sovinformburo, Solomon Lozovskii, was organized to review the materials collected for The Black Book to ensure they were politically acceptable. On 24 February 1945, its report noted: “The committee believes that in the different exhibits, too much is related about the criminal activity of traitors among the Ukrainians, the Lithuanians, etc. This minimizes the strength of the main accusation against the Germans, which needs to be the central and decisive mission of the book.”37 Shortly afterwards, Lozovskii requested that Ehrenburg disband the literary committee for The Black Book and transfer such responsibilities to the JaFC. Ehrenburg could not conceive of the project continuing without him at the helm, even though Vasily Grossman took over as head of its editorial committee. Ehrenburg informed Sutzkever (and other contributors) that “the literary committee” had stopped work: “As to the materials you composed, you are welcome to use them as you see fit and publish them. I thank you warmly, Avram Gertsevitsh, for your contribution to the work of the commission. I am convinced that the work you completed will not be lost to history.”38 The original contributions had been designed to satisfy several needs simultaneously. Materials on the genocide of east European Jewry solicited in the Soviet Union were intended to justify the broader anti-fascist struggle. Ehrenburg and Grossman had sought to counter the calumny that not enough Jews had assisted the fight against Nazism.

340

Afterword

They had proposed to collect and compare thinking about recent events while wounds were still fresh – one of the earliest such anthologies. Rather than focusing on a single ghetto or town (like many postwar Yizker-bikher  – Yiddish and Hebrew memorial books), The Black Book strove to account for crimes across a vast territory. Although its publication faltered, Sutzkever’s Yiddish volume was part of a broader (if short-lived) Soviet commemorative project that was interested not only in generating literary texts and disseminating witness testimonies and documents, but also producing theatrical productions about heroism in the Holocaust and even creating memorials at sites of mass extermination. Most literary writing about the Holocaust in the Soviet Union was in Yiddish, although some was in Russian and other languages. The Holocaust claimed a central place in Soviet-Yiddish publications from 1942 until the authorities clamped down on Jewish cultural expression in 1948.39 • Once Sutzkever was freed from his commitments to Ehrenburg in March 1945, it took him little time to submit the Yiddish book manuscript for publication as an independent volume. 40 Meanwhile the precedent now set of sending domestically created materials for publication abroad prompted the JaFC to ship Sutzkever’s manuscript to Paris, where the Association of Vilna Natives in France released it as Vilna Ghetto 1941–1944. A foreword by N. Faynshteyn, the Association’s vice-chairman, bore the date 10 November 1945.41 This suggests that the typescript was ready for the printer in Paris possibly even before, or at least at the same time as, it went to press in Moscow.42 It was one of the first books to be published in Yiddish after the liberation of Paris. A year later a third edition was published in Buenos Aires by the pro-Soviet organization YkuF, and also appeared in newspaper instalments in New York. It was soon translated into French and Hebrew.43 Thus Sutzkever’s memoir appeared almost simultaneously in two different editions in Paris and Moscow in early 1946, and then in Buenos Aires in 1947.44 The slight difference in titles between the Moscow and French editions, whether determined by Sutzkever or by his editors, is none the less telling. The Soviet edition bore the title From the Vilna Ghetto – a nod to local librarian and bibliographer Khaykl Lunski’s title for his

Afterword

341

volume about Vilna after the German occupation of the Great War.45 By contrast, the Paris title – Vilna Ghetto 1941–1944 – strikes a more sober historical tone.46 The addition of dates to the title of the Paris edition temporally contains the ghetto experience, while their absence in the Moscow edition suggests an ongoing psycho-cultural catastrophe. The texts of both volumes invoke the word khurbn (destruction) vis-à-vis Vilna, putting it in a continuum of prior Jewish catastrophes.47 Among its various editions, in 1948 selected chapters from Vilna Ghetto were also distributed in booklet form to students at the Jewish schools in Argentina by the new Committee for Coordinating Secular Yiddish Schools in Argentina. The short-lived committee brought together the (Labour Zionist) Sholem-Aleichem schools, the Bundist schools, and Communist “progressive” schools. Though divergent politics and different responses to rising anti-semitism in the Soviet Union soon drove these groups apart, the booklet they jointly produced included the portions of Sutzkever’s chronicle about schooling in the ghetto, aiming to raise consciousness about the Holocaust for a new Jewish generation. All of this occurred a mere three years after the end of the war. Moscow (1946), Paris (1946), Buenos Aires (1947; excerpted for school children, 1948), Tel Aviv (Hebrew translation, 1947): the various editions of Sutzkever’s memoir demonstrate the hunger for detailed accounts of the Jewish catastrophe in Europe, especially among Yiddishspeakers. This transnational publication record deflates claims of silence from Holocaust survivors and unwillingness within the Jewish world to talk about recent events.48 In reality, the Holocaust resonated deeply wherever Yiddish was spoken; using the mother-tongue of so many of the murdered and of survivors, the Yiddish press and publishers (including those in the Soviet Union) provided an immediate voice to those struggling to narrate and navigate the scope of Jewish destruction. The various Yiddish editions of Sutzkever’s book prove that more than one Jewish community felt a pressing need to present evidence of the horrors of the Holocaust by disseminating first-person accounts and survivor testimonies as quickly as possible. When Sutzkever and others returned to the ruins of Jewish Vilna after liberation, they understood the importance of recording testimonies by survivors, several of which were included in Sutzkever’s book. The next stage was the publication of additional survivor testimonies.

342

Afterword

The same year (1946) that Sutzkever’s book came out in Yiddish in Moscow and Paris, Flames in the Ashes by Vilna ghetto partisan fighter Ruzka Korczak was published in Hebrew in Mandate Palestine. In 1947, Shmerke Kaczerginski’s Khurbn Vilne (The Destruction of Vilna) came out in New York. It featured testimonies collected in the weeks and months after the liberation of Vilna. Another survivor of the Vilna ghetto, Mark Dvorzhetski (Dworzecky), released his monumental Yerushalayim de-Lite in kamf un in umkum (The Jerusalem of Lithuania in Struggle and Annihilation) in Yiddish in Paris in 1948 and later in a Hebrew translation, combining historical description with witness testimonies of the atrocities. These volumes, by survivors of the Vilna ghetto, appeared close together temporally, one after another, grounding the historiographical record of the Holocaust in Vilna.49 They clearly refute the mistaken notion of a “silence,” at least in Yiddish, about the Holocaust – and they were all about a single city. Sutzkever’s work was part of a rapidly emerging library that simultaneously founded a local history of the Holocaust and laid the groundwork for a synthetic postwar Holocaust memory that transcended Vilna. What areas did he choose to illuminate? And what did his volume conceal?

3. Sutzkever rarely referred to his chronicle of the Vilna ghetto after its initial publication. As his fame grew over the subsequent decades he did not seek its republication or translation, and his anthology of Holocaust poetry, Lider fun yam hamoves (Poems from the Sea of Death, 1968), does not refer readers back to it. Even when reminiscing years later about Ilya Ehrenburg and his involvement with The Black Book, Sutzkever spoke in only the most general terms, as if to minimize its value: “I myself wrote a few hundred pages for The Black Book about the Vilna ghetto.”50 When The Black Book was finally published decades later, in Yiddish and in other languages, Sutzkever did not even bother to edit his own contributions to it or to correct errors or inaccuracies that had come to light.51 Why did Sutzkever seemingly ignore his memoir after its publication? First, he may have considered non-fiction prose a lesser form of art. He may have felt that everything he had to say about the war was best communicated in his poetry and symbolic fiction. Second, Sutzkever

Afterword

343

remained uncomfortable with the volume’s origins in the Soviet Union. Since he and Freydke owed their rescue to the Soviets, he could not easily refuse Ehrenburg’s invitation to contribute to his project. As with any Soviet publication, he understood that his editor would have the final say in shaping the text prior to printing. Manuscript notations in the Russian archives and textual differences between the 1946 Moscow and Paris editions reveal such interference. Once Sutzkever departed the Soviet Union, he wished to leave behind this particular, highly restricted chapter of his literary life. The Soviet influence on the text is obvious from its opening page, which reconstructs Sutzkever’s discussion with Noyekh Prilutski, the Yiddish linguist, who served as inaugural chair in Yiddish language and culture at Vilnius University, and had just recently been appointed to be director of YIvo: “Hitler began to dig his own grave with the first bomb dropped on Russian territory.” The reader is left with the sense that Vilna formed an integral part of the Soviet Union, which is generally and incorrectly referred to in the text as “Russia.” Prilutski’s confident declaration of victory is immediately consumed by reality. The rapid fall of Vilnius and German occupation erases all evidence of it as a Soviet city. Some Lithuanians justified collaboration with the Germans by accusing Jews of having cooperated against Lithuanian independence during the Soviet occupation of Vilnius. Jews, too, clearly differentiated between the Nazi terror that began in late June 1941 and the Soviet period that immediately preceded it. On the one hand, the Soviets clamped down on Polish anti-semitism, which had been a feature of daily life in Vilna in the mid-to-late 1930s, and provided local Jewry and refugees with protection from Hitler. On the other hand, some Jews under Soviet rule were arrested and disappeared, including Sutzkever’s fellow writer Zalmen Reyzen, editor of the daily newspaper Vilner tog, which had published Sutzkever and his Yung-Vilne colleagues regularly. Others had to go underground. Political, cultural, and religious expression was severely constrained during the brief period of Soviet rule prior to Operation Barbarossa.52 The Soviet context of the memoir’s composition also explains why there is hardly a single reference in it to Vilna’s storied Jewish past – its centuries as a rabbinical and maskilic centre, its interwar period under Poland as a major centre of secular Jewish culture, and its early war years, as successively Polish Wilno, Soviet-occupied Vilnius, Lithuanian

344

Afterword

Vilnius, and Soviet-Lithuanian Vilnius go unmentioned. Sutzkever shrewdly avoided the city’s complicated recent political history. He relied on his Yiddish readers’ historical literacy for understanding its place in the Jewish world. The censors would have disallowed any mention of it as a centre of Jewish national and cultural awakening. His assigned task was to comment on life and death under German rule, which is why the memoir begins starkly with the Nazi assault. Next, any writer describing the Jewish resistance to the Nazis might want to explain its various ideological components. The United Partisan Organization (FPo) in the Vilna ghetto included Communists, members of the Zionist Ha-Shomer ha-Tzair and Ha-noar ha-Tsioni, Zionist Revisionists (Beitar), and eventually the socialist Bund. It also began in late spring 1943 to cooperate with the Zionist Hehalutz ha-Tzair-Dror under Yehiel Scheinbaum. It is difficult to weigh the relative importance of each of these previously rival groups because of their remarkable degree of cooperation in the ghetto. The Communists, for example, had connections both to a secret Communist underground operating outside the ghetto (even as the latter’s operations were limited) and to Soviet-directed partisan groups in the forests. By contrast, the Zionist Ha-Shomer ha-Tzair had more active members overall in the FPo. In the ghetto the Communist Itsik Vitenberg commanded the FPo, with the Zionist Abba Kovner from Ha-Shomer ha-Tzair as his deputy. However, in the Soviet Union, Sutzkever could not write about the major contributions of Zionists or Bundists, which could undercut Soviet propaganda and endanger partisans still fighting in the forest. Part III of the Moscow edition on the Partisan Organization opens with three Communists meeting to establish the underground in the ghetto, whereas the Paris edition depicts the ghetto resistance’s founding quite differently. The Moscow edition does not name the individual who first called for resistance – the Zionist Abba Kovner53 – and only later in the narrative, in an organizing meeting of the FPo, are all the participants identified. Even then Sutzkever does not include the party affiliation of non-Communists such as Abba Kovner, Vitke Kempner, and Ruzka Korczak; the censors would have deleted mention of Zionist participants. Moreover, in various places the text goes out of its way to demonstrate how the fate of the Jews was intertwined with that of the Soviet Union. For instance, the first words attributed to a fellow poet he encounters in the ghetto are: “They won’t take Leningrad.” Elsewhere

Afterword

345

he includes a chapter on Jewish material assistance to Soviet prisoners of war. We see this also in Sutzkever’s article “Vos mir hobn geratevet in Vilne” (What We Rescued in Vilna), published in Russian translation on 7 October 1944 in the weekly Literatura i iskusstvo (Moscow’s major journal of literature and art) and then on 12 October 1944 in its original Yiddish in the weekly Eynikayt. Shmerke Kaczerginski, Abba Kovner, Vitke Kempner, and Zelde Treger appear in that article, although all but Kaczerginski were members of the Zionist Ha-Shomer ha-Tzair, which goes entirely unmentioned.54 Sutzkever learned about Soviet self-censorship through observation. He recalls how concerned Yiddish prose master Dovid Bergelson was when he read one of Sutzkever’s early accounts of the ghetto. Apparently, Bergelson had edited one of Sutzkever’s essays for Eynikayt, and panicked when he discovered that no deletions had been made to the Russian version. “I showed him a copy of the [Russian] journal. His face turned yellow, like desert sand. There was a thin foam on his lips. It was an expression I had previously not witnessed. ‘If so,’ he started to gasp heavily, ‘I must immediately dash to the printer to restore your article to its previous form. The Yiddish must not be different than the Russian …’”55 We see the censor’s influence also in a seemingly innocuous section of the memoir where Sutzkever describes the few surviving Jews he encountered in Vilna after liberation: “I hear someone call out to me: ‘Hello.’ It was Eisen, the teacher. He had just returned to Vilna. A priest hid him in a church. He asks me: ‘Comrade Sutzkever, what about a Jewish school? Have you given it any thought?’” This episode appears only in the Paris edition. The reason is clear: it touches on the abortive struggle to renew Jewish life in Vilna, which Soviet authorities did everything they could to impede. They were uninterested in any mention of a renewal of Jewish schooling. Constraints are especially noticeable vis-à-vis local non-Jews helping liquidate Vilna Jewry. Although the text mentions paramilitary forces rounding up and murdering Jews, they are often denationalized and generic – for instance, “local fascists” or “new and sinister types appeared all over town wearing white armbands and carrying small rifles over their shoulders.” The censors’ committee demanded that mention of non-German perpetrators be significantly toned down. By contrast, Korczak and Dvorzhetski’s memoirs about the destruction of

346

Afterword

Vilna published elsewhere show Lithuanians repeatedly as enthusiastic participants: not only collaborators and enforcers but extremely cruel freelance terrorists, especially in the first months of the German occupation. By late 1945 and early 1946 Soviet authorities wanted to establish their firm control over areas recaptured from the Germans. Moscow had no interest in highlighting local cooperation with Nazis as it tried to consolidate its rule. This policy shaped the texts for The Black Book, including Sutzkever’s. Contemporary primary sources underscore the shifting political landscape in Moscow while Sutzkever readied his account for publication, most notably the aforementioned report of 24 February 1945, which advised The Black Book’s editors to remove materials indicting Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and other collaborators with the Nazis. Since Sutzkever would have known that this was now official Soviet policy, his chronicle reflects this stipulation. Moreover, he knew better than to invoke the competing claims of Poles and Lithuanians over Vilna. The Lithuanians, who saw Vilnius as their rightful capital, denied to them in the fighting after the First World War, never accepted interwar Polish rule over it. During the Holocaust, some Lithuanians actively cooperated with the Germans to regain control over the city and permanently free it from Polish and then Soviet control.56 Sutzkever, writing in Moscow, could not write that the Lithuanian gain was a Polish loss, since both Lithuania and parts of Poland were now under Soviet control. Although his book identifies the eager complicity of the Lithuanian paramilitary squad Ypatingasis būrys in the roundup and murder of Jews, overall he tends to highlight the ennobling actions of non-Jews who risked their lives on behalf of their neighbours in order to establish a model of human decency and cooperation among national groups that was more in line with Soviet expectations, as when he notes (in an overstatement) that “Many Poles and Lithuanians hid Jews in their homes.” The reality, as the text reveals, is that the bravery of individual Poles and Lithuanians was the exception, not the rule. With the Jews isolated behind ghetto walls, most of the population was reduced by Nazi terror into knowing bystanders, with some Lithuanian nationalists eager to assist the German occupiers in their plans. Accordingly, his moving portraits of Janowa Bartoszewicz, the Polish woman who hid Sutzkever in her home, Anna Borkowska, at the time Mother Bertranda, who hid Jewish partisans in her convent, Ona Šimaitė, the Lithuanian

Afterword

347

librarian at the University of Vilnius, who hid Jewish materials from the Germans, and Julian Jankauskas, who helped smuggle arms into the ghetto stand out to the reader for their humanity. In the chapter “A Morbid Joke,” however, about the shooting of a group of Jews, we are told: “A young peasant girl stumbled upon us on the hill. The man in the helmet started up with her, pinched her cheek, and told her: ‘You like their clothes? Come, I’ll give them to you soon.’ ” Here, the text suggests that bystanders were not only aware of mass shootings of Jews but in some cases even benefited materially from their extermination. Additional episodes about local residents’ attitudes towards Jews demonstrate how Sutzkever’s poetry of this period differed from his descriptions in Vilna Ghetto. He wrote one such poem, “The Circus,” soon after a terrifying incident he describes in the book in the chapter “The German Idea of Entertainment.” In the early days of the city’s occupation, the Germans marched Sutzkever along with an aged rabbi who lived on his street and a young Jewish boy to a synagogue, where they were forced to strip naked and dance around a bonfire of burning Torah scrolls. It was one of the most difficult and terrifying experiences Sutzkever endured. Not only did the “dancers” not know whether they would be tossed into the pyre, but they were aware that prior generations of Jews had sacrificed themselves under similar circumstances in an act of kidush hashem (sanctification of the Name) rather than submit to such orders. There was a modicum of macabre “theatre” to have to perform naked before strangers who had been gathered to watch the spectacle. In the prose descriptions little attention is paid to the crowd. By contrast, in the poem written in the immediate aftermath of the event itself but rediscovered and only published decades later, the author shows the civilian onlookers as an eager audience, pleased to witness the degradation of the Jews. Peasant woman hops to see: What a circus: God is One! Says a neighbour: Pay them stones, For a circus costs a fee. One whore points out in the clatter To another: See them naked! Stones are falling. Fire devours. Climbs a sheygets on a ladder.57

348

Afterword

These differing versions (and also his testimony at the Nuremberg Trials) suggest the writer’s political constraints in Moscow. Early readers of Vilna Ghetto would not know for several more decades about the poem, which revealed the full emotional and psychic measure of an experience in which non-Jews were invited to watch his shame. This brings us to another critical point: the book is generally silent about Sutzkever’s poetic work in the ghetto, even when such a mention would have been to the author’s advantage. For instance, he does not explain that his poem “Kol Nidre” had been read publicly and approvingly in the Soviet capital while he was still behind enemy lines. Likewise, he devotes only a single line to his award for his dramatic poem “The Grave Child,” which years later he called the single greatest honour of his career: “The prize consisted of a certificate written on parchment, signed by all the Yiddish and Hebrew writers who were alive then, as well as a gold ten-ruble coin.”58 (He also failed to note that in early May 1942, before the prize, he read the poem to fifteen leading ghetto writers and artists, which Kruk’s diary termed the “first sublime evening of great creative excitement” in the ghetto.59) When describing cultural life in the ghetto, Sutzkever omits mention of his own “Under Your White Stars,” which received great acclaim within the ghetto walls, and remains one of the most popular songs to emerge from any Jewish ghetto. Moreover, he does not report that on 25 July 1942 the ghetto’s Union of Writers and Artists held an evening dedicated to Yung-Vilne, at which he and Kaczerginzki read from their work and honoured their colleagues who had been murdered in the late summer and the autumn of 1941. Ghetto librarian Herman Kruk chaired and introduced the event, at which he suggested that poetry must serve the living. For a poet who wrote consistently throughout his time in the ghetto, his chronicle’s mention of only three such poems severely underplays his literary accomplishments. The book notes “Penimer in zumpn” (Faces in Swamps), a series of poems he wrote during the first few weeks of the German occupation; “Ikh lig in an orn” (I Lie in a Coffin), based on his hiding in a coffin to avoid capture; and “A nem ton dem ayzn” (Take Up Arms), which advertises his allegiance to the partisan cause and was heard for the first time on 1 May 1943, disguised as “Springtime in Yiddish Literature.” The memoir is silent concerning his ghetto poems about individuals and episodes described in Vilna Ghetto composed well before he started work on the book. For instance, in the chapter

Afterword

349

about Mire Bernshteyn and her heroic efforts to educate ghetto children even as her pupils disappeared, he omits the fact that he wrote a poem memorializing her, which was published in the Soviet Union in 1944. He is silent too about his poem in memory of Yankev Gershteyn, the beloved music teacher of the Real-Gymnasium and ghetto high school, which was recited at his funeral in the ghetto,60 and about his poem to mark the anniversary of the ghetto theatre. Rather than writing in the memoir about his own poetry, Sutzkever quotes in full three poems by others, each varying in cultural function: Leyb Opeskin’s “The Maline Jew” exemplifies Sutzkever’s interest in declamation of poetry at ghetto literary evenings; Hirsh Glik’s partisan hymn appears as the ultimate public statement about the spirit of Jewish resistance;61 and an anonymous poem by a father mourning his daughter’s murder conveys the power of anonymous “found poetry.” (Sutzkever discovered it in a pit at Ponar after the city’s liberation.) The diversity of these works makes Sutzkever’s decision not to present even a single stanza from his own ghetto verse quite astounding. As readers, we now have access to Sutzkever’s significant contribution to Yiddish wartime poetry. His lyrics and epic poetry written in the ghettos and partisan forests and immediately after the war were real-time Yiddish responses to catastrophe and critical to any serious student of Holocaust literature. It is all the more crucial then to note the difference in register between the memoir’s description of particular events and personalities and their creative reimagination in the author’s poetry. For instance, the memoir speaks of the Romm printing house, renowned in the Jewish world for its publication of the Vilna edition of the Talmud, among other ground-breaking texts: “He [the Nazi Dr Pohl] sold the lead plates of the Romm press that had printed the Talmud for 20 years to a foundry for 39 marks a ton.” But those same tablets feature in one of Sutzkever’s most famous ghetto poems, “The Lead Plates of the Romm Press,” where, in an elaborate allegory, the ghetto fighters, modern-day Maccabees, melt the lead plates down into bullets to defend their modern-day Jerusalem.62 The poem was meant to be symbolic, part of Sutzkever’s broader mythopoetics of ghetto resistance, in which spiritual-cultural and armed resistance merge. The memoir says nothing about this poem. If Jews regarded the lead plates as symbolizing their city’s contribution to Jewish high culture and to their bravery, Germans destroyed them to make a profit. The resulting abyss illuminates how

350

Afterword

the memoir’s direct, descriptive reportage of particular events concealed the writer’s poetic imagination.63 How should we understand the book’s almost complete silence on the author’s true vocation as a poet? Sutzkever may have preferred to deflect attention away from his own poetry and towards the achievements of others. He also was reserving the most important things he had to say about his wartime experiences to poetry. His uncharacteristic modesty about his poetic oeuvre in Vilna Ghetto ensured that his own imagination did not overshadow the experiences of others, especially the dead. Sutzkever adhered to the editorial board’s stress on “truthful, fact-based ingredients.”64 If his poetry under Nazi occupation carved out a space for introspection, private mourning, collective grief, and a mythopoetics of Jewish cultural and physical resistance, his Soviet editor’s understanding of history focused on chronicling and indicting those Germans who were most responsible. By separating his commissioned work from his wartime artistry Sutzkever erected a barrier between the two that would allow him to edit his poetry privately beyond the reach of the censor. If his poetry served the angels of art, memoir served a more prosaic master. Overall, the emotional register of Vilna Ghetto is restrained. This makes its expressions of private rage or shock all the more powerful. For instance, Sutzkever acknowledges his private desire for revenge on several occasions, as when his mother is assaulted by a Nazi stormtrooper. The thirst for revenge was widely reported among survivors, but they rarely expressed it publicly after the war, and even fewer could realize it. About his personal tragedies, the text is remarkably composed, even terse: “I went to visit my mother. She bore happy news: my wife had given birth to a child in the ghetto hospital. Mother had forgotten Murer’s edict that condemned to death any child born in the ghetto. The next day the child was no longer among the living: Murer’s orders had been carried out. I had not yet recovered from the loss of my child when I suffered another tragedy. I went to Mother’s, and she was nowhere to be found. I discovered that it was the work of the German agent Oberhardt. At night he had come to Shpitol Street 7, where my mother was then living, and dragged all its inhabitants to prison, and from there to Ponar.” There is little emotional affect in this short, descriptive passage. Sutzkever does not mention that he had written the poems “Tsum kind” (To My Child) and “Mayn mame” (My Mother) upon their murders

Afterword

351

in the ghetto. Elsewhere in the memoir, the Germans gathered their victims’ shoes to repurpose them, and on one such wagon of shoes he recognized (or thought he saw) his mother’s Sabbath slippers. This experience in fact formed the basis for his poem “A vogn shikh” (A Cart of Shoes), and the loss of his mother was a major theme in his unfinished “Dray royzn” (“Three Roses”). To read the few lines about the murders of his child and mother in Vilna Ghetto is to read statements of fact that do not allow the reader into the anguish of a son and parent mourning his losses that does appear in his poetry. The difference in emotional register is striking between Sutzkever’s account of his child’s murder in the memoir and his testimony at Nuremberg in contrast to his poetry. At Nuremberg he expands on the mode of the chronicle while also revealing the anguish of his wife and of his own belated encounter with a child he never managed to greet alive: Towards the end of December in the ghetto my wife gave birth to a child, a boy. I was not in the ghetto at that time, having escaped from one of these so-called ‘actions.’ When I came to the ghetto later I found that my wife had had a baby in a ghetto hospital. But I saw the hospital surrounded by Germans and a black car standing before the door. Schweinberger was standing near the car, and the hunters of the Sonderkommando were dragging sick and old people out of the hospital and throwing them like logs into the truck … In the evening when the Germans had left, I went to the hospital and found my wife in tears. It seems that when she had had her baby, the Jewish doctors of the hospital had already received the order that Jewish women must not give birth; and they had hidden the baby, together with other newborn children, in one of the rooms. But when this commission with Murer came to the hospital, they heard the cry of the babies. They broke open the door and entered the room. When my wife heard that the door had been broken, she immediately got up and ran to see what was happening to the child. She saw one German holding the baby and smearing something under its nose. Afterwards he threw it on the bed and laughed. When my wife picked up the child, there was something black under his nose. When I arrived at the hospital, I saw that my baby was dead. He was still warm.65

352

Afterword

By contrast, in the extraordinary poem “To My Child,” Sutzkever’s personal loss becomes a vehicle for confronting the broader loss of Jewish children in the ghetto, all the while speaking in the intimate voice of a father to his first-born child: Whether from hunger, or my great love for you – only your mother can bear witness to it – I wanted to devour you, my child, when I felt your little body cooling down between my fingers, as if I’d clasped them round a glass of warm tea and felt its slow transition into coldness. … I wanted to devour you, my child, to experience the taste of my hoped-for future. It might be you would blossom in my blood as once you did. I am not worthy, though, to be your tomb, so I will part with you and give you to the calling snow, to the snow – my first delight – and you will sink like a splinter of the sunset into its still depths and greet for me the frozen blades of grass … Vilna ghetto, 18 January 194366 Next, Sutzkever’s volume avoids passing judgment against his fellow Jews. One might have expected it to include sharp words for the Judenrat or the ghetto’s Jewish police, yet such moments are rare. In his comments about Jacob Gens (the former chief of ghetto police, who was put in charge of the ghetto after the Gestapo disbanded the Judenrat) Sutzkever maintains his poise: “Gens believed he could save some of the ghetto’s inhabitants. He was playing for time.” Although he acknowledges Gens’s

Afterword

353

compliance with the Gestapo, he avoids harsh condemnation. Sutzkever benefitted from having experienced the entire historical arc of the ghetto; he was writing not as a historian or philosopher from a distance but as an active participant in ghetto life who recognized that behaviour and decisions that seem morally clear in peacetime were not necessarily so in the ghetto. Even about the Jewish police, the most he can say is: “The Jewish police, about whom it is impossible to say anything positive …” He reserves his greatest condemnation of a fellow Jew for police commander Salek Dessler, the most hated man in the ghetto, whom he refers to as a “traitor.” After liberation Sutzkever’s immediate focus was on rescuing Jewish cultural treasures, providing evidence for the prosecution of war criminals, and his own writing. He could not countenance passing judgment in ways that would force an internal Jewish reckoning that might cause further harm. Instead, the most shocking moments in the memoir occur when he allows others to indict fellow Jews. In one such moment a boy describes the terror of those in hiding. His mother begins to scream when she fears their hideout will be discovered, leading a fellow Jew to panic lest her screams betray them all. When she is unable to stop, the man attacks her with a brick, prompting the boy’s father to try to fend him off. In the commotion, the father stabs the attacker, and several Jews in the hideout grab him and beg him to quiet down. When he cannot, they shoot him. All attempts to silence the mother with a brick fail, and she too is shot by fellow Jews. The scene provides a brief glimpse into the breakdown in sanity that terror and long periods in hiding produced. Although Sutzkever was undoubtedly aware of the psychological effects of life in hiding, he resisted highlighting them, lest they reflect poorly on the victims. By allowing a young witness to describe the circumstances surrounding his parents’ death, he provides the relevant information but not in his own voice.67 As we suggest above, Sutzkever’s Vilna Ghetto and his poetry from those years point in two different directions. He reserved poetry for mourning personal and communal losses and for establishing a mythopoetics of ghetto resistance. Yiddish literary scholar Ruth Wisse suggests that Sutzkever had faith that poetry would keep alive that which history destroys: “Particularly during the Holocaust, when every known moral scruple was crushed beyond recognition, the reality of a good poem remained beyond anyone’s destructive perversity.”68 By contrast, the prose memoir details German crimes and names specific German

354

Afterword

perpetrators. If poetry was a sacred, almost-transcendental realm, prose memoir was appropriate for presenting the perverse rendered mundane. It was a temporary, but necessary concession to provide a record of what the writer remembered in the service of history. Elsewhere, the difference between Sutzkever’s poetic and prose registers is even more obvious. Consider, for instance, the ghetto theatre as it appears in the memoir and in his poem “Tsum yortog fun geto-teatr” (On the Anniversary of the Ghetto Theatre): … We walled ourselves in And live apart. From your freedom outside, do not smile at us, Do not pity – For us, even death can blossom into wonder. … Perform! From your mouth, let Yiddish sound Pure and clean as the ghost of a slaughtered child, Harsh and hoarse as the voice of our rifle and gunpowder, Performing tomorrow Over the rooftops … 69 Not only does the poem completely elide the controversy over the establishment of a ghetto theatre and posters put up by the Bund, warning “Don’t make theatre in a graveyard!,” 70 but it evades one of its most problematic components: Nazis sometimes attended its performances, creating friction between murderers and victims. Moreover, the best seats in front were regularly reserved for members of the ghetto administration and the Jewish police, and the next rows for other notables and members of the ghetto’s cultural organizations. The system allowed Jacob Gens, the head of the ghetto, to reward loyalty from those who helped him run its affairs. Sutzkever’s verse is silent about these facts. Moreover, Sutzkever strives in his lyrics to portray the ghetto as an autonomous Jewish space, where perpetrator and victim came together only at the most violent moments, and where music and theatre brought the community together in solidarity. Indeed, the poem above explores how theatre raised the spirits of audiences in impossible conditions, opening with a line – “We walled ourselves in” – that is the complete opposite of historical reality, as if the Jews had decided on their own to

Afterword

355

converge in the ghetto. From a broader literary-historical perspective, this one line echoes the cries of “back to the ghetto” that were common among Yiddish intellectuals a short while before the outbreak of the war, reflecting their frustration with Western civilization’s betrayal of the Jew.71 Since the poet defines the greatest danger in the ghetto as not dying but rather living indifferently amid degradation and death, Sutzkever’s poem about the ghetto theatre sounds the alarm. So too did his “Lid tsu di letste” (Song for the Last), concluding with the line: “You, the disgustingly patient, last of millions!”72 These were just two criticisms of ghetto residents sprinkled in Sutzkever’s poetry, but such rebukes are rare in the memoir, where he instead explores the moral challenges facing the underground groups, especially whether to remain in the ghetto to defend its inhabitants or to escape to the forest to join up with partisans, effectively leaving behind the remaining Jews of the ghetto to fend for themselves. In short, Sutzkever’s prose memoir explored aspects of life and death in ways that are more emotionally restrained than his poetry from the same wartime years. This certainly reflects the volume’s Soviet aesthetic. Literary scholars now accept that all memoir is a construction of the self at a particular moment. Sutzkever drafted his memoir of the Vilna ghetto within a particular context of devastation, in the months immediately preceding and following Vilna’s liberation, when he had to confront the full measure of its destruction and also navigate the complicated terrain of a Yiddish writer in Soviet Moscow. If readers intimately familiar with Sutzkever’s poetry are startled by how matterof-fact his memoir comes across, how restrained its emotional register is, and how sparing it is of commentary on his creative process in the ghetto, they should keep in mind that it was not crafted as a companion guide to his poetry. Rather, it stands independent of poetry and functions according to a different set of expectations and principles. It is incumbent upon today’s reader to develop an appreciation for the memoir’s aesthetic of absence, for what its author did not, could not, or would not reveal at the particular moment of its composition, out of respect for the dignity of the dead and his own attempts to come to a full understanding of the ghetto’s meaning. For instance, in a recent film interview, Ruth Wisse describes the only time Sutzkever ever lost his temper with her during their decades-long friendship:

356

Afterword

He told me about this man who was in the partisans and then he went back into Vilna. I couldn’t grasp what was happening in this story, so I said to him: “Why would someone who was already in the forests go back into the Ghetto?” … And suddenly he saw this girl, she understands nothing! … And he said to me: “Vos veystu, vos veystu fun di tsapldike rukzek?!” [What do you know, what do you know of the quivering knapsacks?!] Oh my God! And then I understood what he meant. What he meant was mothers who took their infants and abandoned them on street corners, and the babies were not yet dead. And indeed I did not know, and he was right … The only reason this is worth telling is because it tells you how much Sutzkever did not talk about. He would never have talked about this, he would never have talked about what went on in the ghetto.73 We can extrapolate from Wisse’s insight that elsewhere, too, Vilna Ghetto barely scratches the surface of what Sutzkever experienced and witnessed. None the less, as one of the earliest published texts in any language to describe the destruction of a major Jewish city, Vilna Ghetto is a key document for understanding what could and could not be expressed at a particular time, in a particular place, in a particular language with a specific readership in mind. Additionally, the volume alerts us to the political and social context of memory, which here is shaped not only by what happened in Vilna but also by what Sutzkever was able to remember or corroborate, what he was comfortable sharing, and what he was able to communicate in the shadow of his editor and the censor. We would do best also to recall the immediacy of its composition. In the final chapter Sutzkever reminds readers that one could still go to Ponar and pick up the sticky grey ashes of relatives and friends. Accordingly, when relating events that had happened directly to him, Sutzkever’s prose strives for maximal composure. He maintains aesthetic control over the memoir through a strategy of deflection, often allowing the other survivor-witnesses he encounters or “found documents” penned by the murdered to express his horror or his burning desire for revenge. Examples include the letter by victims on their way to slaughter that calls on Jews to avenge their murder, or his visit to the

Afterword

357

Gestapo jail cell in which FPo leader Itsik Vitenberg had been incarcerated, on whose walls prisoners had scrawled messages in their own blood: “In the light of sunset, which made the red markings on the wall even more striking, I read: ‘Avenge us!’”74 Sutzkever’s memoir also provided a preliminary visual narrative of the Holocaust through its inclusion of photographs.75 When the memoir was published in 1946 there was not yet an established visual canon to guide the work of historical memory. The choice of photographs served both evidentiary and narrative functions. Photographs of Nazi orders posted in the ghetto, of the mass murderers Murer, Hingst, and Weiss,76 of burned bodies at Ponar, of the dead piled up like stacks of wood, and of the ruins of the Vilna synagogue courtyard name the perpetrators and provide concrete evidence of their crimes. Yet another group of photographs asserts that cultural and armed resistance in the ghetto worked in synergy. When images of the childartist Samuel Bak and of sculptures that were hidden from the Nazis share the same space with FPo commanders Itsik Vitenberg, Abba Kovner, and a group of women partisans, the volume’s visual imagery bolsters the moral equivalence between cultural and physical resistance. The photographs also encouraged a reading of Jewish resistance that fulfilled Soviet expectations. An image of the Red Army soldier entering Vilna on the same page as a group of Jewish partisans suggests that the Soviet struggle and the Jewish struggle were synonymous. A photograph of Sutzkever with his Polish rescuer not only allows him to acknowledge the help that brave non-Jews offered to Jews, but it also deflects from the inconvenient truth that Poles and Lithuanians elsewhere eagerly collaborated in the extermination of the Jews. This image elects to showcase common bonds of humanity rather than emphasize the betrayal of the Jews. Finally, it is worth highlighting the choice of first and last photographs for the Paris edition of Vilna Ghetto (the Soviet edition included fewer photographs), respectively an image of Sutzkever holding a rifle and one of a sculpture of David by Antokolski, which had been hidden from the Nazis and recovered when Vilna was liberated. Together, the two images construct their own narrative: if David modelled the classical poet-fighter – slayer of Goliath, builder of Jerusalem, and psalmist – the opening image of Sutzkever fashions him as a modern-day David, both a poet and a defender of his Jerusalem of Lithuania.

358

Afterword

Sutzkever’s memoir is also significant for the attention it provides to the role of women in the ghetto, especially in the resistance. First, the text notes acts of spiritual and cultural steadfastness, as when his mother continues the blessing over the Sabbath candles even when a Nazi collaborator bursts into her home, or when Lyube Levitski trains for an opera at the ghetto theatre but is captured and tortured only hours before she is scheduled to take the stage, or when teacher Mire Bernshteyn protects her students during a night-time raid. Second, Sutzkever is in awe of women who give birth in the ghetto and nurse their infants in secret; perhaps because of the murder of his own newborn son he suggests that any child born and hidden in the ghetto is a miracle, a theme he developed in his dramatic poem “Dos keyver-kind” (The Grave Child, 1942), for which he was awarded a prize from his peers. Third, he points out gestures of selflessness that could have cost non-Jewish women their lives. His descriptions of his rescuer Janowa Bartoszewicz taking him into her home and smuggling bread to his wife and mother in the ghetto, of the mother superior who hid Abba Kovner and others in her convent and supplied them with weapons, and of the Lithuanian librarian Ona Šimaitė, who hid Jewish books and archival materials and came to the ghetto to celebrate May Day with the Jewish citizens of Vilna, offer models of solidarity. Finally, in the memoir’s third part, on the partisans, Sutzkever pauses to acknowledge the bravery of women fighters such as Vitke Kempner, who participated in the first partisan operation against the German occupation forces; the student Asya Big, who was a liaison officer in the FPo and was later captured and publicly hanged by the Gestapo; the Communist activist Sonye Madeysker, who helped found the FPo; the Zilber sisters and Khaye Grosman, who smuggled themselves into the Warsaw and Białystok ghettos with warnings from Vilna to organize armed resistance; Zelde Treger, who risked her life dozens of times as a courier between the partisan forest and the ghetto; and Lize Magun, who was captured and tortured while attempting to arrange resistance in the Oshmene ghetto. Both the Moscow and Paris editions feature a photograph of three Jewish women partisan fighters in order to emphasize their contributions. In these various ways, Sutzkever’s memoir provides a preliminary framework for study of gender and the Holocaust, and especially the different manifestations of women’s resistance.77

Afterword

359

4. Sutzkever’s account of the destruction of Vilna is leaner than those memoirs and chronicles on the same subject that appeared shortly thereafter by Ruzka Korczak, Shmerke Kaczerginski, and Mark Dvorzhetski. In some ways, however, his reaches for the broadest scope. This is achieved by the book’s organization into four distinct sections: “In German Claws,” “Behind the Gates,” “The United Partisan Organization of the Vilna Ghetto,” and “On Smoking Ashes.” The books by Korczak (first edition 1946) and Dvorzhetski (1948) end with the liquidation of the ghetto, the escape to the forest (in the case of Korczak) and the cruel fate of the last remaining Vilna Jews in the camps in Estonia (Dvorzhetski). Kaczerginski’s Khurbn Vilne (The Destruction of Vilna, 1947) privileges the voices of witnesses from Ponar.78 Only Sutzkever’s memoir conveys the full array of events in wartime Vilna, from the initial German bombardment of the city until his return after its liberation. Its focus on the ghetto itself resulted in the omission of the half-year he and his wife spent in the forest as partisans, an unfortunate lacuna, whose inclusion would have bolstered his volume’s argument about the Jews’ sacrifice in the partisan battle against Nazi forces and their collaborators.79 Part I of the book describes the first stage of the destruction of Jewish Vilna, from the Nazi occupation until the establishment of its two ghettos. These chapters bridge the personal fate of the author and the collective fate of the Jews of Vilna, but essentially the author’s experience is front and centre, beginning with his initial impulse to flee the German advance, his attempts to hide, and his shock when faced with the extent of German brutality. Its chapters demonstrate his community’s helplessness in the initial stages of its destruction, and its lack of any certainty regarding the future. The navigation between personal and communal experience and perspective is a tension throughout the memoir, but as Sutzkever organizes the narrative and adapts the genre of reportage, collective experience and voice take on increasing importance. Part II focuses on daily life in the ghetto, mainly during the year and a half after most mass killings and deportations were suspended and Jews began the work of self-organizing. It begins with a description of the cruel reality created by the Nazis, but Sutzkever then moves on to the various ways Jews responded to their new circumstances, starting

360

Afterword

with material concerns (“Access to Food”) and self-help organizations, and then shifting to the intense cultural life they created in the ghetto in the form of education, theatre, music, and art. A central claim of Sutzkever’s memoir is that he considers such efforts the work of cultural heroes, from a nine-year-old painter to an opera singer silently practising a new aria, from the new discoveries of a theoretical mathematician to the dedication of ghetto teachers. Sutzkever’s prose demonstrates a deep respect for those who deepened their creative expression and pedagogical commitments in such conditions, just as he conveys his admiration for the significant level of self-reliance and organization achieved by Vilna Jewry in the ghetto, from a hospital to a youth club and formal schooling. Written within a year of the ghetto’s destruction, Sutzkever’s text is among the earliest to suggest that Jewish self-organization, creativity, and solidarity in the ghetto are achievements about which readers could be proud. This might explain why he devotes comparatively little attention to those moments when such values were betrayed by ghetto Jews. Sutzkever’s text was as much about crafting a usable past for future generations as it was about honouring the dead. The sequence of chapters devoted to the various hideouts (malines) in the ghetto demonstrates the importance of such micro-spaces for a full understanding of ghetto life, from hastily constructed hidden rooms  and concealed sub-cellars to expertly engineered underground rooms connected to electricity, outside ventilation, and water. Sutzkever’s presentation of the network of hiding places in the ghetto and its underground city also served as the raw material for his ambitious mythopoetics of space and survival that appeared later in his epic postwar narrative poem Geheymshtot (Secret City), about a group of survivors hiding in the sewers of Vilna. Sutzkever began this work in Moscow while he was completing the memoir, and the overlap between the two clearly inspired him.80 In these chapters Sutzkever also notes the degree to which such malines served a valuable practical function: in addition to hiding people, members of the Paper Brigade also used them to conceal cultural treasures they rescued from underneath the noses of the Germans. Aside from hiding materials on site at YIvo and with several non-Jewish friends, large stashes of books and documents were distributed to several malines, including the one built at Shavelske Street 6 by Gershn

Afterword

361

Abramovitsh that Sutzkever describes in his chronicle. That bunker served not only as a hiding spot for Abramovitsh’s mother but also as an arms depot for the FPo and a storage facility for the Paper Brigade. Despite such efforts to preserve Jewish life and cultural treasures, part II does not end with the survival of those in hiding. Rather, its final chapter centres on the mass murderer Bruno Kittel, whom Sutzkever indicts for his sadism. Even in the months immediately after liberation, Sutzkever wanted to show that German brutality was perpetrated by a nation that saw itself as cultured, raising fundamental questions about European civilization itself. The chapter opens as follows: “Kittel is a performer. A singer. He graduated from a theatre school in Berlin, and from an academy of murder in Frankfurt. He managed to harmonize the teachings of both institutions. Every Sunday he appeared on the local radio. He played his silver saxophone and sang songs. Kittel was young, born in 1922. He was the youngest of his colleagues and, we should add, the most capable.” That the memoir’s long discussion of material self-help and cultural expression concludes with this chapter devoted not to what Jews created, but rather to what the Nazis (through agents like Kittel) destroyed, suggests Sutzkever’s sober approach to recent events. If he resisted naming perpetrators in his poetry so as not to contaminate his verse, in the memoir he directly indicted those Nazis responsible for the murder of his family, friends, and neighbours. Their mention is a temporary concession to the demands of justice. Afterwards, Sutzkever banished their names from his poetry to ensure its aesthetic and moral composure, literally realizing the Jewish curse, “May his name be blotted out.” The memoir’s organization compels the reader to assess the cultural, artistic, and educational efforts in the ghetto catalogued in part  II against the bitter reality that most of those who organized and participated in them did not survive. Opposition to such efforts, which was expressed ahead of the first concert in the ghetto in January 1942, dissipated quickly.81 Sutzkever and others devoted to culture saw their efforts in an utterly different light, and the book’s structure suggests that he considered the diverse material and cultural activities within the ghetto just as crucial as the underground military resistance that is the focus of part III. In this third part, Sutzkever takes on the mantle of chronicler and celebrator of armed Jewish resistance. Any mention of his personal

362

Afterword

involvement in the resistance is embedded within its larger collective mission. He writes about a gathering in May 1943 at which he read aloud his poem “Take Up Arms” in order to encourage his comrades. Of course, their work was not without grave risk. He describes a harrowing incident in which a weapon was delivered to him by a friend while he was at his slave-labour assignment at YIvo. Before it could be smuggled into the ghetto, Sutzkever had to hide it hastily behind artwork because of a visit by high-ranking German officials. He was terrified that its discovery would not only prove fatal to him but potentially also jeopardize many other lives. In his poetry, Sutzkever amalgamated cultural rescue and physical defence of the ghetto under the general rubric of resistance: We dreamers now have to be soldiers and fight And melt into bullets the soul of the lead.82 He continued to develop this theme after he and his wife escaped the ghetto to join the partisans in the forest: With Vilna in my heart Like a bullet that cannot be removed, With poems turned into powder And loaded into my gun … … I know this: I am a wolf and a poet in one, And I release from the gun Poem after poem.83 By contrast, in his memoir Sutzkever only hints at such a linkage through structuring chapters to parallel his work as a cultural organizer and poet in the ghetto and his work as a member of the Paper Brigade and the United Partisan Organization. More to the point, the structure of the memoir points in a clear direction: if its first part deals with the humiliation and murder of the Jews, its much larger second and third parts convey ways in which Jews attempted to retain their dignity and both evade and resist their killers through communal solidarity, organization, self-help, creativity, and ultimately an organized armed resistance. These two lengthy middle parts distinguish Sutzkever’s

Afterword

363

memoir from other Soviet volumes on the Vilna ghetto, and also underscore its uniqueness. Sutzkever’s memoir appeared alongside several other books published in the Soviet Union in early 1946, also edited by Mordecai Altshuler, one of which bore almost the same title: Hersh Smoliar’s From the Minsk Ghetto.84 If Sutzkever was an internationally recognized Yiddish poet, Smoliar was an avowed Communist from Poland who had been instrumental in the Minsk ghetto resistance. Smoliar too began writing with an invitation to contribute to The Black Book, and both men’s writing was shaped within the Soviet context, a fact noted by Smoliar in a later edition: “Back then I was motivated by a general unwillingness on the part of central figures of the Communist Party and the Soviet government in Belorussia to dedicate any attention to the fate of the Jews in the years of the German occupation, and by their unconcealed hate disseminated through anti-semitic conspiracies that the Jews did not fight in the war but rather fled and hid themselves far from the front in the Soviet interior.”85 Even though Sutzkever and Smoliar shared a burning desire to challenge this historical calumny, and even though Vilna and Minsk had been centres of Lithuanian Jewish culture (although Minsk, as part of Belorussia, was at the outer edge of the historical conceptualization of Lithuanian Jewry), significant political and cultural differences help distinguish the two memoirs. Until 1917, Minsk was considered a backwater, more provincial than Vilna, itself a borderland city. None the less, the Jewish communities in both were branches of the same family, with similar patterns of ultra-Orthodox, modern Orthodox, Zionist, and Bundist commitments. But the end of the Great War and the Russian Revolution separated the two communities. Vilna was incorporated into independent Poland, and Minsk became the capital of Soviet Belorussia. Minsk Jewry’s religious institutions, political parties, and its official Jewish community (kehile) were quickly outlawed. Yiddish was recognized as an official language and the state supported (and oversaw) Yiddish institutions that were in line with Soviet ideology. These included a Yiddish school system, a department at the Institute for Belorussian Culture dedicated to study of Yiddish literature and Jewish folklore, a State Yiddish theater, and the firstever chair in Yiddish in the world at its university. The regime would eventually shutter many of these institutions too before the start of the

364

Afterword

Second World War, leaving the Jews of Minsk bereft of any significant communal self-organization. Direct contact between Minsk and Vilnius resumed briefly in 1940–41 when Vilnius became a Soviet city, before the German invasion. During that brief period Minsk was already a completely Soviet city, while Vilna was a brand new one. Vilna’s deep Jewish communal institutions had only recently come under Soviet control, whereas Minsk Jews had navigated life in the Soviet Union for almost a quarter-century in the vanguard of the new Soviet Yiddish culture, lacking the traditional structures of Jewish institutional life.86 From the Soviet perspective in 1946, there was no difference between Vilna and Minsk when it came to writing about the Holocaust: both were considered Soviet cities. However, when comparing Sutzkever’s memoir against Smoliar’s, one quickly discovers a tremendous gulf in the response to Nazi occupation. Minsk had the largest ghetto in a former Soviet territory. It initially held some one hundred thousand Jews, more than a third of whom were not Minsk natives. By contrast, more than two-thirds of Vilna Jewry was liquidated in the initial six months of Nazi occupation. By the time of the Vilna ghetto’s period of so-called stabilization, between January 1942 and July 1943, it contained a little more than twenty thousand Jews, if one also includes those inhabitants in hiding underground. Life in the Vilna ghetto was an extension – politically, socially, and culturally – of the deep pre-war Jewish community. The situation in Minsk was utterly different. Over roughly two decades, the Communist authorities had shattered most of the city’s Jewish communal structures. Minsk’s Jews entered its ghetto without any sort of Jewish communal organization, except for the underground Communist cells that soon organized. As a result, Smoliar’s memoir primary focus is on the activities of the partisan underground. In the later, Israeli edition, Smoliar explains: In the Minsk ghetto there was no sign of cultural life. Initially it was because the Soviet authorities’ policy of liquidation ensured that the Jews had already been “fenced off ” from their connection to their own culture, and there was certainly no energy to initiate such cultural efforts in the ghetto, even if it had been possible to try. Second, in the existing environment of fear, anxiety about violent actions, attacks, and murders, there was no way even to consider or begin to plan any such thing. Religious Jews attempted

Afterword

365

during the first few months in the ghetto to organize a prayer quorum, especially during the High Holy days, but even here they gave up due to the threat of a surprise attack.87 The absence of a communal framework prevented Smoliar from including the rich perspective on daily ghetto life that Sutzkever was eager to describe. For example, what was the Minsk ghetto hospital like? How did ghetto inhabitants spend their time? Were there self-help organizations and schools like those in Vilna? Sutzkever deliberately made space for such vital information that would bring honour to Vilna’s reputation and reveal how his community mobilized to support Jewish life even under occupation. For Smoliar, in contrast, the only interesting aspect of the Minsk ghetto was its physical resistance. His focus was, of necessity, exclusively materialist, whereas Sutzkever could portray resistance in various forms. For Sutzkever, cultural creation and expression transcended the limits of physical rebellion.88 Equally illuminating is a comparison of Sutzkever’s memoir with M. Yelin and D. Gelpern’s Kaunas Ghetto Partisans, published by the same Emes Press in 1948.89 (The Soviet authorities shuttered the press that year.) The Jewish communities of Vilna and Kovno (Kaunas) also shared a strong identity as centres of Litvak culture, even though Kaunas was the interwar capital of independent Lithuania while Vilna (Wilno) was a Polish city. The hostility between the two countries prevented meaningful connections between the cities’ Jewish communities. Kovno was cut off from the other Jewish centres in Poland, which made it more provincial. Between the wars, both communities boasted a dynamic intellectual life and internal political competition among various streams of Zionism, Bundism, Territorialism, and Communism (which was outlawed), and in both Yiddish was the language of the Jewish street, despite increasing use of Lithuanian in Kovno and Polish in Vilna. Relations between the Jews of Vilna and Kovno revived only when Vilna was absorbed into Lithuania at the end of 1939, and continued and even tightened when Lithuania became a Soviet republic.90 Although approximately the same number of Jews were initially confined to the big ghetto in Vilna and the Kovno ghetto, cultural activity in the Kovno ghetto was less intense. Kovno was home to fewer Jewish intellectuals and writers and could not match Vilna’s Jewish libraries and prestigious institutions such as YIvo. Accordingly, the one late-1940s

366

Afterword

Soviet-published book in Yiddish about the Kovno ghetto said little about its social and cultural complexity. Its title, too – Kaunas Ghetto Partisans – underscores its emphasis on armed resistance. Given its Soviet composition and publication, it features Communist partisans and virtually ignores Zionist or Bundist fighters and their activities. In short, even though the Minsk and Kovno ghettos were very different, the two books about them shared the same emphasis and lacunae. Sutzkever’s is the outlier. It was the only one published in Yiddish in the Soviet Union that acknowledged the richness and complexity of Jewish social and cultural fabric in the ghetto of a former “Soviet” city.91 Sutzkever intended to convey Jewish communal organization and selfhelp as a moral statement of collective resilience. Part IV of Sutzkever’s memoir is the most graphic of all, with descriptions of mass killings at Ponar, witness statements by its few survivors, and highly detailed technical accounts by those who were part of a slave-labour detail that disinterred and burned victims’ bodies to conceal evidence of genocide. Fully realized witness descriptions of the atrocities transform the memoir from an act of individual to true collective witnessing.92 Perhaps the author, by concluding in this fashion, inadvertently undercuts his argument in parts II and III about Jewish resilience and resistance, for in the end none of these were able to save the Jews of Vilna. The piles of corpses in the mass graves and the smoke and ash at Ponar are the ultimate fate of his community. This is put into sharp focus near the end of the volume when Sutzkever describes efforts to dig out cultural treasures hidden during the war: “The discovery of ‘David’ by Antokolski came about as follows: a hand appeared after we managed to remove the first layer of earth. I took hold of it and jumped back in horror. It was not a plaster hand. It turns out that after the liquidation of the ghetto, Jews took refuge in this maline. One of them died, and he was buried next to Antokolski’s sculpture.” In the end, art and death cannot escape one another. Here is a dug-up sculpture by Mark Antokolski – the artist who symbolized the Jewish contribution to the cultural fabric of Russia. Alongside it are the remains of an anonymous Jewish victim. Is it possible to connect the two? Sutzkever provided various answers, one of them many years later, in a poem included in the collection Lider fun togbukh (Diary Poems, 1977), in which the material evidence of Jewish victimhood is a full partner in creative expression:

Afterword

367

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 line. … To me belongs the chopped-off hand that used to stroke Perhaps a woman’s hair, before its owner broke. I found it where he lost it. It was without a scratch – September nineteen forty-one, in a tomato patch.93 As the stanzas above make clear, Sutzkever made the dead his imagined co-authors whenever he wrote about what had happened in Vilna. Despite the concluding section’s focus on the technical aspects of mass murder at Ponar, the volume does not end with this extreme example of Jewish vulnerability and victimhood. Although the Nazis achieved much of their genocidal objective in Vilna, Sutzkever rises to the demands of Jewish collective dignity and Soviet political expectations by concluding with two important scenes. First, he cites a letter composed by a group of Jews on their way to slaughter. Its authors ask the person who discovers it to turn it over to a surviving Jew. We learn that it names a Lithuanian woman who betrayed their hideout to the authorities, and details the litany of horrors they have endured.94 The note ends with a call to fellow Jews to avenge their murder. Here, Sutzkever’s memoir gives voice to Jewish rage and the demand for historical justice, even if it is vigilante justice. The last request of these Jews on their way to death was not only acted upon after Vilna’s liberation (the woman responsible was executed on the street by Jewish partisans), but the urge for revenge consumed Sutzkever himself. As his later reminiscence of Ilya Ehrenburg reveals, he fantasized about assassinating a high-level Nazi official during his testimony at the Nuremberg Trials. The final paragraph of the memoir features a Jewish partisan gazing down at the body of a German soldier in the river. It leaves no doubt about the ultimate victory over fascism, and the Jewish sacrifice and bravery necessary to its achievement: “I walk through Vilna. I come to the Green Bridge. It was destroyed and is lying in the water. A temporary

368

Afterword

bridge made of wood boards has been erected next to it. As I cross this narrow footbridge, I see the body of a German Feldwebel trapped between the iron remains of the bridge lying in the water. It is one of Schweinberger’s men, with a gleaming swastika on his breast. The waves wash over him, passing over his head. And opposite him, on the bank of the Viliye, an armed Jewish partisan stands guard.”95 The same “Green Bridge” is mentioned on the first and last pages of the book. It connected the two sides of Vilna. Before the war, Sutzkever had lived on the north bank of the river, on a street that ran directly behind the bridge, so that he crossed it every day as he made his way to the city centre. The bridge later held strategic significance, and the soldiers who fought over Vilna made sure to blow it up in the fighting. Concluding with the image of the pre-war bridge in ruins and a temporary new bridge already erected was not random. It symbolized both the violent ruptures of recent history and the ways in which Jewish life hereafter would demand from its writers bridges between past and present, memory and continuity. Sutzkever suggests that the new wooden bridge is a fragile improvisation that cannot hide the fact that the former Green Bridge, and the entire world it represented, no longer exist. Time is already moving on, like the river that flows beneath it. Sutzkever’s concluding image of an armed Jewish partisan opposite the river bank gazing down at the remains of a German soldier may have satisfied both his Soviet sponsors and his Yiddish readers’ immediate need for an image of justice, but it does not reflect the near-total devastation that Sutzkever and his colleagues experienced upon their return to the city. Despite the historical truth that Jewish partisan soldiers assisted in the liberation of Vilna, by the time of the book’s publication in 1946 it was clear to Sutzkever that there was no future for Jews in Vilna: the entire landscape of pre-war Jewish institutions there was in ruins, and there was no chance the authorities would allow for their reconstitution. Efforts to build a Jewish museum were monitored closely by political commissars, and attempts to save recovered Jewish materials were stymied. The demise of The Black Book ominously foreshadowed a new era of Soviet anti-Jewish repression. As we have learned, in addition to Sutzkever’s chronicle of life and death in the ghetto, his attention during his two years in Moscow was divided between several other critical activities. First, the poetic imperative remained primary for him, including editing his wartime poetry.

Afterword

369

Second, he had responsibilities as a public figure, including assisting friends, acquaintances, and strangers who sought him out in person or in writing because he was their link to a vanished world. They, too, consumed his attention and emotional energy.96 Finally, in summer 1944, and later, he worked desperately to rescue buried materials that he and his colleagues in the Paper Brigade had risked their lives to save from Nazi hands and protect them in a post-war Jewish Museum he helped to establish in Vilnius. His experience in the Paper Brigade had taught him the importance of hiding the most valuable materials from the authorities. He personally locked away seventeen pages of Herman Kruk’s diary dealing with the July 1943 arrest of FPo commander Itsik Vitenberg. The authorities came to the Jewish Museum seeking information from the diary about who might have betrayed the Jewish Communist commander. The so-called Vitenberg Affair had been one of the most traumatic events for the Jewish partisans in the ghetto, and Sutzkever was not about to allow the regime to rehash the most intimate details of those fateful days. Even after he returned to Moscow in September 1944, on paper he remained one of the leaders of the Jewish Museum back in Vilnius. His letter of 16 November 1944 to Juozas Ziugzda, the Soviet-Lithuanian commissar of education, demonstrates the challenges facing the project: Over a month ago I was urgently called back to Moscow to finish my book [From the Vilna Ghetto]. I thought I would be able to bring the manuscript with me and complete it in Vilna. But I am in such a situation that I must absolutely remain here for a while longer. I apologize for not having made it a point to visit you in person before I left. Several of those who had already called on you said that you were overwhelmed with work. It was none the less a mistake. I very much hope that we can soon be in touch and come to an understanding. How could it be otherwise? Honoured Comrade! I have just learned from Vilna that “The Commission to Gather Documents of Jewish Culture” has been dissolved. Rare cultural treasures have been abandoned and are left to rot. I cannot imagine this happening. News that we rescued a part of YIvo made a huge stir in the United States. What will the public think now? It can’t be that cultural treasure rescued from the Germans will be liquidated in liberated Vilna. I very much hope

370

Afterword

that an error has been made. You, with your deep appreciation of this matter, will certainly help us. Now is the very moment for these materials to be collected and not laid to waste, and though I am currently in Moscow the practical work should continue by my fellow workers on the Commission.97 Letters from Abba Kovner to Sutzkever in Moscow reveal Kovner’s own frustration, not only with the authorities’ lack of support for the museum but especially with Sutzkever’s decision to leave them behind to sort materials and manage the institution while he socialized with leading figures of Soviet Yiddish culture and the JaFC back in Moscow. In several such notes from autumn 1944 he implores Sutzkever “to do something. Get the JaFC to intervene … in this anti-semitic act of the Lithuanian government.” On 4 November 1944 Kovner is blunt: “You must come … Collect money and bring it with you.”98 Sutzkever made several more return trips to Vilnius to organize materials and prepare secretly for smuggling the most valuable items out of the Soviet Union, but not until the following summer. In July 1945 he was there for a ceremony to mark the first anniversary of the city’s liberation. On 3 July he appeared at the Soviet Writers Club, and on 16 July the Jewish section of the Soviet Writers Union held an event featuring him and Kaczerginski reading from their work in the auditorium of the Lithuanian Dramatic Theatre.

5. Poet. Chronicler. Public figure. Sutzkever’s various roles after his rescue from the forest were complementary and interrelated.99 In February 1946, around the time From the Vilna Ghetto was finally published in Moscow, Soviet prosecutors selected Sutzkever as a witness for the Nuremberg Tribunal. Ehrenburg and theatre director Mikhoels had recommended him based on his reputation. As we learn from his diary notes of those days, Sutzkever felt the full burden of serving as a witness and representative voice for his people. He had hoped to testify before the accused – and the world – in Yiddish, although in the end he was compelled to speak Russian. For his efforts he was awarded a military medal featuring the profile of Stalin on 2 April 1946, attesting to his contribution to “victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic

Afterword

371

War, 1941–1945.”100 But by then the Sutzkevers had long grown disillusioned with the prospects of rebuilding Jewish life and culture under totalitarian rule. As the reminiscences included in this volume of his friendships with Ehrenburg, the Yiddish poet Markish, and Mikhoels attest, Sutzkever not only eschewed formulaic expectations of loyalty to Stalin, but even publicly undermined the unwritten rules of acceptable speech, as when he mentioned the Jewish people’s longing for Jerusalem in a speech in Moscow following his Nuremberg testimony. His frustrating experiences with the local authorities over the Jewish Museum in Vilnius, the editorial intrusions into his ghetto manuscript, and the self-censorship and fear he sensed among leading Yiddish cultural figures culminated in the couple’s decision to accept repatriation as Polish citizens and leave Moscow. Sutzkever made several final visits to Vilnius in January and April 1946. There, he searched for materials that remained undiscovered or had been hidden by his colleagues at the museum, and organized the smuggling of suitcases stuffed with rare manuscripts and books across the border into Poland, from where he arranged to have their contents secretly shipped to the YIvo offices in New York. Shmerke Kaczerginski, who left Vilnius for Łódź in November 1945, wrote to help him locate Herman Kruk’s ghetto diary, so that it could be brought to safety. Ona Šimaitė, the librarian who had helped rescue Jews and hide materials for the Paper Brigade, wrote to Sutzkever from Paris in February 1946 about where she had stashed materials in the attic of the Lithuanian studies seminar at the university.101 On 19 April 1946 he appeared at a public event in Vilna for the last time in his life, taking the stage of the Vilnius Dramatic Theatre on the city’s main street to deliver a Sabbath evening talk about his impressions of the Nuremberg Trials. In May 1946, soon after his final return to Moscow, he met with Ehrenburg for the last time, when he confessed that he was dreaming of resettling in Palestine. Ehrenburg, sensing the political dangers on the horizon in the Soviet Union, said that he wanted to send a gift with Sutzkever for the library of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem: materials he had collected for The Black Book.102 Ehrenburg’s intentions anticipated the end of The Black Book project. A full Russian typescript was already complete and approved by summer 1945, and in 1946 galley proofs were corrected and type plates were set. When its release was delayed Ehrenburg joined Vasily Grossman, Shloyme Mikhoels, and

372

Afterword

Peretz Markish in co-signing, on 26 November 1946, an appeal to Andrei Zhdanov, secretary of the Central Committee, seeking assurance that the regime would permit its publication. But Soviet foreign policy had already shifted completely with the end of the war. East Germany came under Soviet control, and Soviet authorities had no interest in blaming Nazi crimes on the German people as such. Despite the appearance of truncated versions of The Black Book in English in the United States in 1946 and in Romanian (neither with Sutzkever’s original contribution), the authorities officially halted publication on 7 October 1947, warning of “grave political errors.”103 A little more than a year later the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was accused of serving as a centre of anti-Soviet propaganda and ordered disbanded. Its newspaper, Eynikayt, and the Yiddish press Der Emes (which published Sutzkever’s volume in 1946) were dissolved. The galleys for The Black Book were confiscated, and its type-plates disappeared.104 Days after Sutzkever’s final meeting with Ehrenburg in May 1946, he, Freydke, and one-year old Reyna departed Moscow for Łódź, where many repatriates from the Soviet Union and Poland’s destroyed Jewish communities gathered, including Sutzkever’s Yung-Vilne colleagues Shmerke Kaczerginski and Chaim Grade, the Warsaw Yiddish theatre director Ida Kaminska, the comedy duo Dzigan and Shumacher, and Rokhl Oyerbakh, a prominent writer and member of the secret Warsaw ghetto archive Oyneg shabes. Sutzkever’s time among Yiddish refugee writers and artists in Łódź was tainted by lingering anti-semitism in Poland and concern about the limits of free Jewish expression and organization there.105 He joined the postwar Union of Jewish Writers and Journalists in Poland, but after a half-year the family moved to Paris. They thus narrowly escaped not only Hitler but also Stalin, for within a few years of his departure from Moscow most of his closest colleagues from his two years there, excepting Ehrenburg, fell victim to renewed purges that eliminated the top stratum of Soviet Yiddish writers.106 Thus, Sutzkever lived through not only the destruction of Vilna but also the final years of the founding generation of Soviet Yiddish culture. In Paris Sutzkever bided his time with fellow refugee writers, contributing to its postwar Yiddish press while awaiting the family’s opportunity to journey onward to the Land of Israel. Their chance came in September 1947, when they boarded the illegal immigrant ship Patria (illegal because the British still restricted most Jewish

Afterword

373

immigration into Palestine). Sutzkever was only thirty-four when he set foot in Palestine. In Tel Aviv, he established himself as the most prolific and accomplished Yiddish poet of the second half of the twentieth century. Soon after his arrival, he convinced the Zionist Histadrut labour union to sponsor a Yiddish journal, which he named Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain). The journal, which he personally edited for almost fifty years, provided a first-class outlet for new Yiddish publication and scholarship, and established Tel Aviv as a global centre of Yiddish high culture. It was during his early years in Tel Aviv that Sutzkever put the finishing touches on Geheymshtot (Secret City), the epic poem he had started in Moscow and continued to work on in Łódź and Paris about a community of Jews living in an underground hideout connected to Vilna’s city sewers, whose principal character escapes Europe for the Land of Israel. If his Vilna Ghetto concludes with the Jewish partisans’ return home to participate in the liberation of their hometown, the taste of victory was short-lived. In both his personal life and in his mythopoetic worlds Sutzkever’s decision to leave Vilna – and Europe – behind revealed the impermanence of such a homecoming. His true spiritual home was now in verse and among the ingathering of the Jewish people in Israel. Sutzkever had started writing farewell poems while still imprisoned in the ghetto, performing the promise never to forget home while anticipating his inability to tolerate remaining: You are my first love and my first love you will remain. I bear your name throughout the world As my distant grandfather bore Through the desert flame the Mishkan107 on his shoulders. (Oh, grandfather, you too hoped to see a shore!) And anywhere I wander – All the cities will Transform into your image.108 If the final scene of Sutzkever’s Soviet-commissioned prose memoir expressed the victory over Nazism and the homecoming of Jewish partisans, his Yiddish poetry of the same period wrestled with the inevitability of leave-taking. Without Jews, Soviet Vilnius was no longer home, no longer Vilna, no longer the Jerusalem of Lithuania.

Vilna Ghetto Chronology

1

1 September 1939 Nazi Germany invades Poland. The Second World War begins. 17 September 1939 The Soviet Union invades Poland. 19 September 1939 The Red Army takes control of Vilna. 28 October 1939 The Red Army turns over control of Vilna to Lithuania. Anti-Jewish violence accompanies the change from Polish to Lithuanian rule. November 1939–June 1940 While Jews in many other Polish cities and towns are under German or Soviet occupation, Lithuanian Vilna (now Vilnius) remains relatively calm, trapped between two totalitarian regimes. Jewish refugees able to escape the war zone flood into Vilna. The city’s Jewish population expands due to the influx of refugees. 15–17 June 1940 Moscow reimposes control as Lithuania becomes a Soviet republic. The city’s Jews adjust to their new status as Soviet citizens. All non-communist parties and publications are outlawed. Some local Jews are arrested, deported, and in some cases disappear. 22 June 1941 Operation Barbarossa: surprise attack by Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union. Sutzkever’s “First Day.”2 23–24 June 1941 Vilna comes under heavy German bombardment. A few thousand Jews flee eastward in an attempt to escape the German

376

Vilna Ghetto ChronoloGy

invasion. Sutzkever attempts an escape but is turned back due to the ferocious bombing and the quick German advance towards and into Vilna. 24 June 1941 Vilna falls to Nazi Germany. 4 July 1941 Vilna’s Jews are ordered to establish a Jewish Council, or Judenrat. It consists initially of ten members, and expands on 24 July to some two dozen. 8 July 1941 The first command ordering Jews to wear an insignia identifying themselves as Jews. 4–20 July 1941 Einzatskommando 9 forces, assisted by Lithuanian police auxiliaries, begin to snatch Jews off the street. Approximately five thousand men are detained in Lukishki Prison, and then shot at Ponar, a wooded area on the outskirts of town. 2 August 1941 The Germans forbid Jews from sidewalks, parks, and main roads. 7 August 1941 Several leaders of the Judenrat are murdered. 31 August–3 September 1941 The Great Assault (provokatsye), a mass roundup and murder operation. Almost four thousand Jews shot at Ponar. 6–7 September 1941 Two ghettos are established in and near Vilna’s traditional Jewish quarter: Ghetto No. 1 (The Big ghetto, twenty-nine thousand Jews) and Ghetto No. 2 (The Small ghetto, about eleven thousand Jews). Jews are ordered to establish a Judenrat in each ghetto. Many elderly, infirm, or orphaned Jews are moved to Ghetto No. 2. 15 September 1941 Approximately three thousand Jews are seized from Ghetto No. 1 and tricked into thinking they are being relocated to Ghetto No. 2. Instead, they are sent to their deaths at Ponar. Another thousand are killed a week later to coincide with the Jewish New Year.

Vilna Ghetto ChronoloGy

377

Late September 1941 Approximately four thousand Jews from towns in the Vilna region are executed. 1 October 1941 The Yom Kippur Aktion: approximately twenty-two hundred Jews from Ghetto No. 1 and seventeen hundred Jews from Ghetto No. 2 are removed from the ghettos and shot at Ponar. 3–4, 15–16 October 1941 Approximately three to four thousand Jews are removed from Ghetto No. 2 and shot at Ponar. 21 October 1941 Final liquidation of Ghetto No. 2. By the end of October Ghetto No. 2 is empty. 22 October 1941 Aktion targeting the aged. 24 October 1941 “Night of the Yellow Permits” Aktion: Approximately four to five thousand Jews from Ghetto No. 1 are shipped to their deaths. Yellow, and then pink, permits are issued for “specialist” workers and their families. The remaining ghetto inhabitants are issued a white permit, which leaves them vulnerable to deportation. 3–4 November 1941 The second part of the “Night of the Yellow Permits”; approximately twelve hundred Jews are murdered. December 1941 A series of smaller Aktions against the ghetto underworld and Jews working at the Gestapo offices results in the deaths of between four hundred and fifty and six hundred Jews. 20–22 December 1941 Pink Permits Aktion: the last roundup and murder of ghetto Jews of the year, concluding a period of six months of mass slaughter in which tens of thousands of local Jews are shot and killed at Ponar. 31 December 1941 The first warning against “going like sheep to the slaughter” and the call for armed resistance is issued at a meeting of Zionist youths.

378

Vilna Ghetto ChronoloGy

January 1942–spring 1943 A period of relative stability sets in over the ghetto, during which its approximately twenty thousand remaining Jews adjust to their new circumstances. A vast network of cultural, educational, health, and self-help organizations are established within the ghetto. 18 January 1942 First concert in the ghetto theatre. Sutzkever is responsible for curating literary selections for its performances. 21 January 1942 Establishment of the United Partisan Organization (FPo), the Jewish paramilitary underground of the ghetto. February 1942 Initiation of the Rosenberg Task Force in Vilna, charged with looting Jewish cultural treasures from the city’s libraries, museums, and archives. The Jewish intellectuals assigned to sort through the materials attempt to rescue as many valuable materials as possible and come to be known as “the Paper Brigade” due to their smuggling efforts. 17 February 1942 Establishment of the Association of Writers and Artists in the ghetto. 6 May 1942 Sutzkever recites his poem “Dos keyver-kind” (Grave Child), completed on 12 April for a gathering of fellow writers. July 1942 Jacob Gens is appointed ghetto representative. 2 July 1942 Sutzkever is awarded a prize for “Grave Child” by the Association of Writers and Artists in the ghetto. 17 July 1942 Aktion against the aged: roundup of approximately eighty-four old and invalid Jews who are murdered more than a week later. 25 July 1942 Sutzkever helps organize and presents at an evening dedicated to the pre-war literary and artistic group Yung-Vilne (Young Vilna).

Vilna Ghetto ChronoloGy

379

13 December 1942 Celebratory evening marking a hundred thousand books borrowed from the ghetto library. 6 January 1943 Official opening of the youth club, which had already been active for several months. 25 March–5 April 1943 Liquidation of the Oshmene, Sventsyan, Sol, and Mikhalishok ghettos. Some inhabitants are transferred to the Vilna ghetto, while most are killed at Ponar, despite having been promised they would be taken to the Kovno ghetto. 28 March 1943 Ghetto art exhibition opens. 9–17 July 1943 The Vitenberg Affair: FPo commander Vitenberg is arrested, but manages to escape. The Gestapo demands he turn himself in, threatening a full-scale attack on the ghetto if he does not. After intense debates within the ghetto and the FPo, Vitenberg surrenders. Some say he commits suicide in prison, while others believe he was tortured and executed. July 1943 Sutzkever provides a manuscript of his poem “Kol Nidre” to a partisan courier, asking that it be delivered to Soviet-Yiddish writer Peretz Markish in Moscow. 6 August–4 September 1943 After Himmler orders the liquidation of the remaining ghettos, mass deportations of individuals fit for labour to take place on 6 August, 19–24 August, and 1–4 September to camps in Estonia. 20–23 August 1943 Liquidation of six thousand Jews from smaller towns near Vilna. September 1943 Approximately twelve to fifteen thousand Jews remain in the Vilna ghetto. The ghetto is closed, and its workers are no longer permitted to leave. 1 September 1943 German and Estonian forces surround the ghetto and demand five thousand Jews for deportation. The FPo calls for a full

380

Vilna Ghetto ChronoloGy

mobilization. One of its units, led by Yehiel Sheynboym, confronts the Germans at Strashun Street 12. Sheynboym is killed. The FPo decides to change tactics, concluding that defence of the ghetto is impossible due to lack of broad support among the population. FPo members prepare to escape the ghetto and join partisan forces in the forest. Between 8 and 13 September several combat groups of some one hundred and fifty Jewish fighters escape for the Narotsh or Rudnitski Forests. 12 September 1943 Sutzkever, his wife, Freydke, and his friend Shmerke Kaczerginski redeploy to the Narotsh Forest, where they join up with Soviet partisans under the command of Colonel Fyodor Markov. The Sutzkevers will spend the next six months there. 14 September 1943 Jacob Gens, ghetto representative, is arrested and executed. 16–23 September 1943 The liquidation of the Vilna ghetto. The ten to eleven thousand Jews still remaining in the ghetto meet different fates. The aged and infirm are murdered at Ponar. Several thousand women and children are shipped off for execution at death camps. About seven thousand able-bodied men are deported to concentration or labour camps in Estonia and Latvia. Several thousand Jews and their families are relocated to one of four local forced-labour camps, most to hkP or Kailis. The last remaining FPo members escape in small groups through the sewers. One such group is caught and publicly hanged by Kittel in front of Jews who had been rounded up and held in the courtyard of the Gestapo headquarters. The final liquidation of the Vilna ghetto is announced by SS Oberscharführer Bruno Kittel on the balcony of the Judenrat headquarters at dawn on 23 September. 12 March 1944 Sutzkever and his wife, Freydke, leave their partisan base and journey to a secret location for their airlift to Moscow. 27 March 1944 The Children’s Aktion: roundup and murder of approximately two hundred Jewish children in the hkP and Kailis labour camps.

Vilna Ghetto ChronoloGy

381

2 April 1944 Sutzkever addresses a plenum of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in Moscow. 15 April 1944 A group of corpse-burners escapes from Ponar through an underground tunnel that they had secretly excavated by hand. 29 April 1944 Ilya Ehrenburg’s article “Triumph of a Human Being” about Sutzkever is published in Pravda. 2–3 July 1944 Liquidation of the labour camps hkP and Kailis in Vilna. Of the more than two thousand Jews incarcerated in them, fewer than two hundred escape to the forests or hide from the slaughter. 13 July 1944 Vilna is liberated by the Red Army; Jewish partisans participate in liberating the city. 18 July 1944 Sutzkever returns to Vilna from Moscow to assist his colleagues in digging up materials hidden during the Nazi occupation. Only a tiny fraction of Vilna’s pre-war Jewish population survives the war and returns. 26 July 1944 Sutzkever, Shmerke Kaczerginski, and Abba Kovner establish the Jewish Museum of Culture and Art in the apartment shared by Sutzkever and Kaczerginski at Gedimino Street 15. On 11 August, the museum moves to Strashun Street 6, where the former ghetto library and cultural centre had been located. It encounters significant obstruction from the local Soviet authorities. Mid-September 1944 Sutzkever returns to Moscow. 19 September 1944 Approximately two thousand Vilna Jews interned at the Klooga camp in Estonia are killed. 7, 12 October 1944 Sutzkever publishes “What We Rescued in Vilna,” describing the work of salvaging Jewish cultural treasures. The essay appears first in Russian, and then in Yiddish in Eynikayt.

382

Vilna Ghetto ChronoloGy

July 1945 Sutzkever returns for a working visit to Vilna, where he continues to catalogue recovered materials at the Jewish museum. January 1946 Sutzkever is again in Vilna, feverishly working to log materials and to arrange for rare items to be smuggled out of Lithuania, away from its Communist authorities. 27 February 1946 Sutzkever testifies at the Nuremberg Trials. 19 April 1946 Sutzkever delivers a public talk in Vilna about his testimony at Nuremberg. He will never return to the city again. September 1947 After a period in Łódź (Poland) and Paris, Sutzkever and his family arrive in Tel Aviv. Among the most important acts of his early years in the new state of Israel is his establishment of the Yiddish journal Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain), whose title (borrowed from a drama by Peretz) symbolized that the chain of Yiddish cultural transmission and creativity would continue.

List of Place Names in Vilna

This is a non-comprehensive list of locations in and near Vilna mentioned by Sutzkever in his memoir. It complements the maps at the start of the book and is designed to help the reader navigate the Yiddish geography of the original text by providing pre-war Polish and current Lithuanian equivalents to the Yiddish names.1

Yiddish name ( Y) (or English name [E] used in translation)

Polish name

Lithuanian name

All-Saints Monastery

Koścół Wszystkich Świetych

Visų Šventųjų bažnyčia

Antokol

Antokol

Antakalnis

Baksht Street

Bakszta

Bokšto

Ban Street (Train Street, E)

Kolejowa

Geležinkelio

Benzinuvke

Benzinowka

Savanoriu

Bernardine Gardens

ogród Bernardyński

Bernardinų sodas

Bezdan

Bezdany

Bezdonys

Breyte Street (Broad Street, E)

Wielka

Didzioji

Burbishok

Burbiszki

Burbiškės

Byalovake

Biała Waka

Baltoji Vokė

Castle Hill (Shlosbarg, Y )

Góraedymina

Gedimino kalnas

Chopin Street (Shopin, Y )

Shopen

Šopeno

Dainove (Forest)

Dainavos giria

Daytshe / Daytshishe (German) Street

Niemiecka

Vokiečių

Disner Street

Dzisnieńska

Dysnos

Dominikaner Street

Dominikańska

Dominikonų

Eyshishok

Ejszyszki

Eišiškės

Gaon Street (Goen, Y )

Gaona

Gaono

Gitke Toybe’s Alley

Św. Mikołaja

Šv. Mikalojaus

384

List of PLace Names iN ViLNa

Yiddish name ( Y) (or English name [E] used in translation)

Polish name

Lithuanian name

Glezer Street (Glazier, E)

Szklana

Stiklių

Glubok (Glubokoye, Belarussian)

Glębokie

Glubokas

Green Bridge (Grine brik, Y )

Zielony most

Žaliasis tiltas

Grodno

Grodna

Gardinas

Groys-Stefn Street

Wielka Stefańska

Šv. Stepono

Helene Street

Elenia

Elnių str

Hill of Three Crosses

Góra Trzech Krzyży

Trijų Kryžių kalnas

Ignaline

Ignalino

Ignalina

Ignatover Street

Św. Ignacego

Šv. Ignoto

Kalvaryer Street

Kalwaryjska

Kalvarijos

Karmelitn Street

Karmelicka

Karmelitų

Kene

Kiena

Kėna

Keydaner Street

Kiejdanski

Kėdainių

Kleyn-Stefn Street

Mała Stefanska or Kwaszelna

Raugyklos

Konske Street

Końska

Arklių

Kovno (Kovne, Y )

Kowno

Kaunas

Lavarishok

Ławaryszki

Lavoriškės

Lidske Street

Lidzki

Lidos

Lipuvke Street

Lipówka

Liepkalnis

Lukishki Prison (Lukishkes, Y )

Lukiszki

Lukiškės

Malkin (Y )

Małkinia

Markucie’s Manor

Markučiai

Mednik

Miedniki

Medininkai

Mickiewicz Street

Mickiewicza

Gedimino

Mikhalishok

Michaliszki

Mikhalishki (Russian)

Narotsh Forest

Narocz

Naročius (Narochansky, Belarussian)

Nay-Vileyke

Nowa Wilejka

Naujoji Vilnia

Novigorod Street

Nowogródzka

Naugarduko

Olkenik (Y )

Olkieniki

Valkininkai (Lt)

Oran

Orany

Varėna

Oshmene

Oszmiana

Ašmena (Ashmyany, Belarussian)

Piromont

Pioromont

Piramont

Plotsk

Płock

Plockas

Podbrozh

Podbrodzie

Pabradė

List of PLace Names iN ViLNa Yiddish name ( Y) (or English name [E] used in translation)

Polish name

Lithuanian name

Wielka Pohulanka Mala Pohulanka

Basanavičiaus Kalinausko

Polotsk (Polatskt, Belarussian)

Połock

Polockas

Ponar

Ponary

Paneriai

Poplaves

Popławska

Paupys

Portove

Portowa

J. Jasinskio

Porubanek

Porubanek

Kirtimai

Pospieshk

Pospieszki

Pospieška

Pskov (Yiddish, Russian)

Psków

Pskovas

Reshe

Rzesza

Riešė

Rose Street

Rossa

Rasų

Rudnitske Street

Rudnicka

Rūdininkų

Pohulyanke Streets Groys-Pohulyanke Street Kleyn-Pohulyanke Street

Rudnitski Forest (also Rudniki)

Rudninkai

Sadove Street

Sadowa

Sodų

Shavelske (Shavler) Street

Szawelska

Šiaulių

Shavl

Szawle

Šiauliai

Sheskin Hills (Sheshkine, Y )

Šeškinė

Shnipishok

Snipiszki

Šnipiškės

Shpitol or Hekdesh Street (Hospital)

Szpitalna

Ligoninės

Shumsk

Szumsk

Šumskas

Skapovker Courtyard

Skopówka

Skapo

Slobode

Sloboda

Sol

Soły

Soltanishok

Soltaniszki

Saltoniškės

Sorok-Tatar

Sorak Tataraŭ

Keturiasdešimt Totorių

Stefn Street (Kleyn-Stefn, Y )

Mała Stefańska

Raugyklos

Strashun Street

Straszuna

Strašuno or Žemaitijos

Subotsh Street

Subocz

Subačiaus

Sventsyan

Świeciany

Švenčionys

Svir

Świr

Svieriai

Tartaki

Tartaki

Lentpjūvių

Troker Street

Trocka

Trakų

University Street (Universitet, Y )

Uniwersytecka

Universiteto

Velitshan

Wieluciany

Vėliučionys

385

386

List of PLace Names iN ViLNa

Yiddish name ( Y) (or English name [E] used in translation)

Polish name

Lithuanian name

Venglove

Węgłowa

Šaltinių

Verek

Werki

Verkiai

Vilenke River

Wileńka

Vilnia

Viliye River

Wilja

Neris

Vilkomirer Street

Wiłkomierska

Šnipiškių str.

Vilna (Vilne, Y )

Wilno

Vilnius

Vilner Street

Wileńska

Vilniaus

Vivulski Street

Wiwulskiego

Vivulskio

Volozhin (now Valozhyn, Belarussian)

Wołożyn

Valažinas

Yatkever Street (Butchers Street, E)

Jatkowa

Mesinių and M. Antokolskio

Yidishe Street (Jewish Street, E)

Żydowska

Žydų

Zakret Forest (Zakreter, Y )

Zakręt

Vingio parkas

Zaretshe

Zarzecze

Užupis

Zavalne Street

Zawalna

Pylimo

Zigmunt Street

Zygmuntowska

Žygimantų

Zverinyets

Zwierzyniec

Žvėrynas

Notes

Translator’s Introduction 1 A. Sutzkever, Fun vilner geto (From the Vilna Ghetto) (Moscow: Der Emes State Publishing House, 1946); Vilner geto 1941–1944 (Vilna Ghetto 1941–1944) (Paris: Association of Vilna Natives in France, 1946). The Black Book was a project of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JaFC) designed to expose German crimes and highlight the Jewish contribution to the fight against fascism. See the afterword to this volume for more information. Manuscript pages submitted by Sutzkever to his Soviet editor are in fond P-8114, opis’ 1, delo 232, State Archives of the Russian Federation (GarF), Moscow. And see 448n2 below. 2 For more on this topic see Hannah Pollin-Galay, “‘A Rubric of Pain Words’: Mapping Atrocity with Holocaust Yiddish Glossaries,” Jewish Quarterly Review 110:1 (winter 2020), 161–93.

Part One 1 Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, a surprise attack on the Soviet Union, on 22 June 1941. By the next day Vilna came under heavy bombardment. The city fell to the Nazis on 24 June. 2 Noyekh Prilutski (also Pryłucki, 1882–1941): Jewish politician, journalist, and eminent scholar of Yiddish folklore and linguistics. Prilutski fled the Nazi occupation of Warsaw and found temporary refuge in Vilnius. He worked as a researcher at the city’s Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIvo). His volume Yiddish Phonetics was initially published in Vilna in 1940. The local Soviet authorities appointed him to the inaugural chair in Yiddish Language and Culture at the University of Vilnius and director of YIvo. After the Germans occupied the city, the Gestapo arrested Prilutski and demanded that he compose a list of incunabula at the Strashun Library, which included one of eastern Europe’s finest collections of Jewish rare books and manuscripts. Sutzkever’s relationship with Prilutski dates back to the young poet’s time in Warsaw in the 1930s. His experimental poem “Tsaytlid” (Timelyric), inspired by Old Yiddish, was

388

3

4

5

6

7

8

Notes to PaGes 7–11

dedicated to Prilutski and appeared in Sutzkever’s volume Valdiks (Vilna, 1940). See Avrom Sutzkever, Poetishe verk, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Jubilee Committee, 1963), 161. Prilutski was arrested by the Gestapo and murdered on 18 August 1941. Dovid Umru (1910–1941): Yiddish writer. Umru published stories in the 1930s about Jewish youth culture. When the Soviet Union annexed Lithuania in June 1940 he served as editor of Vilner emes (The Vilna Truth), the only Yiddish daily newspaper permitted by the authorities, and was appointed director of the Vilna State Yiddish Theatre. Although the paper’s contents were tightly censored, Sutzkever published a number of poems in its pages. Umru was murdered in July 1941, shortly after the city fell to the Germans. “Siberia” (Sibir in Yiddish) is Sutzkever’s major poetic cycle of the 1930s. It presents his early childhood as a refugee in Siberia as a metaphor for his birth as a poet in a frozen wonderland. Several individual poems from the series were published in leading modernist journals abroad, and the entire cycle appeared under the title “Shtern in shney” (Stars in Snow) in Sutzkever’s debut volume Lider (Poems, 1936). Sutzkever continued to revise the cycle between 1937 and 1941, and a manuscript version of the cycle from the Vilna ghetto titled Siberia is in the Sutzkever Archive, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. A revised version of “Siberia” was published in 1953, with drawings by Marc Chagall. See Sutzkever, Poetishe verk, vol. 1, 7–20. English translations are available in A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. and intro. by Benjamin Harshav, trans. Barbara Harshav (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 73–91; Still My Word Sings: Poems, trans. Heather Valencia (Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf University Press, 2017), 56–75; and The Full Pomegranate: Poems of Avrom Sutzkever, trans. Richard Fein (Albany: suNY Press, 2019), 2–49. Freydke Sutzkever: Freydke (née Levitan) met Sutzkever in the Yiddish scouting movement. She was a bibliographer at the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIvo). The couple married in 1939. Cheap Houses: a reference to the “bilike hayzer,” two buildings erected on Subotsh Street by the Jewish Colonization Organization, with funding by Baron Maurice de Hirsch in 1898, to provide affordable housing. In 1933 the Vilna Jewish community assumed responsibility for the edifices. The site later became a Jewish forced-labour camp. The White Armbands were nationalist Lithuanian paramilitary units organized by the Provisional Government of Lithuania during Operation Barbarossa. The units, which under the occupying Germans were reorganized as Lithuanian Auxiliary Police Battalions, participated in mass roundups and executions of Jews in the summer and autumn of 1941. Adolf Zehnpfennig: Oberstleutnant and Militärkommandant (military governor) of Vilna after the city fell to the Nazis. Sutzkever here may be confusing the dates of two different orders. The first, issued on 3 July and published on 4 July, followed the orders of Oberstleutnant

Notes to PaGes 11–14

9 10

11

12

13

14

15

389

Eberhard von Ostmann, who was the German military commander of Vilna just prior to Zehnpfennig’s appointment. Zehnpfennig’s order, issued a few days later, replaced the command to wear a yellow patch with the order to wear a white armband with a yellow circle and “J” in the centre. Orders changed frequently so as to sow maximum confusion. Hans Hingst (1895–1955): Gebietskommissar (governor) of the Vilna district and head of the occupation administration. Horst Schweinberger (b. 1916): SS Oberscharführer. Officer responsible for overseeing killings at Ponar and the Ypatingasis būrys, the pro-Nazi Lithuanian special killing squad, from July 1941 to January 1942. Sutzkever mistakenly refers to Horst Schweinberger as Schweinenberg. I have corrected the mistake in this translation. Martin Weiss (1903–1984): SS Hauptscharführer and deputy to Horst Schweinberger. Weiss oversaw the Vilna ghetto and Lukishki Prison, and later managed the Ypatingasis būrys. Beginning in June 1942 he commanded a special unit responsible for executions at Ponar. In 1943 he was assigned to the Jewish section of the Gestapo. He was brought before a German judge in 1950 and convicted of war crimes, but he was released from jail well before having served his life sentence. For a first-hand account of Weiss’s crimes see the written testimony of Beba Epshteyn-Levental, “Tsu di bashuldikung fun Martin Weiss” (Towards an Indictment of Martin Weiss, undated), rG 223.1 folder 764, YIvo Institute for Jewish Research, New York. In her testimony, Epshteyn-Levental notes that she was a slave labourer at the Gestapo headquarters alongside Sutzkever’s sister-in-law Sore Levitan, who did not survive the killings. Ypatingasis būrys (Special Squad): a pro-Nazi Lithuanian paramilitary, made up of volunteers, which was a sub-unit of Einsatzgruppe A. Its members actively hunted Jews in Vilna and carried out mass shootings at Ponar (Paneriai), the forested parkland on the outskirts of town. It was commanded by Lithuanian Lieutenant Juozas Šidlauskas, and then by Lieutenant Balys Norvaiša. At its peak the squad included a hundred and fifty men. Judenrat (German rat = council): a “self-governing” Jewish body that the German authorities ordered established in most ghettos. Sometimes referred to as a Council of Elders, it served as the liaison between the German authorities and the Jews, responsible for carrying out German orders. The Judenrat also helped organize ghetto life. Khayim-Oyzer Grodzenski (1863–1940): prominent rabbi, scholar, communal figure, and leader of Orthodox Jewry in Lithuania. A yeshiva was established in his name in the ghetto. Gershn Gershuni (1860–1941): highly respected local physician. During the interwar period he was among the leaders of the Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish Population (toz) and the Help through Work Society and chaired the Vilna Old Age Home. He was also an editor of, and regular

390

16

17

18 19

20

21

22

Notes to PaGes 14–17

contributor to, the biweekly newspaper Folks-gezunt (Public Health). He was arrested by the Gestapo along with other members of the first Jewish Council in August 1941, and then released. He committed suicide at the ghetto hospital a short time later. Yankev Vigodski (also Jacob Wygodski, 1855–1941): physician, Zionist activist and leader of the Vilna Jewish community. As a member of the Minorities Bloc and the Jewish faction in the Polish Sejm (parliament), he fought for Jewish communal rights. Before the war he published several memoirs about Jewish life during the First World War. Pinkhes Kon: lawyer and researcher who published significant articles with YIvo about the history of the Jews of Vilna, Lithuania, and Poland, and Polish-Jewish relations. He was murdered along with many other members of the first Jewish Council shortly after its establishment in 1941. The first Judenrat eventually grew to some two dozen members. Mefitsey-Haskole Library: important local Jewish library and reading room, established by the Society for the Diffusion of Enlightenment in 1910. Its collection grew to about forty-five thousand books, and it moved to Strashun Street 6 prior to the Second World War. During the period of the ghetto its collection formed the core component of the ghetto library. Franz Murer (1917–1995): known as “the butcher of Vilna,” he served as deputy to Hans Hingst for Jewish Affairs from July 1941 to July 1943. After the war he was extradited to the Soviet Union, where he was sentenced to twenty-five years of hard labour, but was released and returned to Austria. There is no direct English equivalent in this context for provokatsye (provocation, or staged outrage), which is best understood as a major assault operation against the Jewish population. For the full cycle of “Faces in Swamps,” including images of the manuscript, see Avrom Sutzkever, “Penimer in zumpn,” in Der yoyresh fun regn (Heir of the Rain) (Tel Aviv: Di goldene keyt, 1992), 75–92. For an English translation of a selection of the poems see A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, 120–5. In a note dated 16 May 1942 that accompanied the poetic cycle, Sutzkever explains: “The nine poems ‘Faces in Swamps’ were composed in the first ten days of the war, when the Plague marched into Vilna, from around 25 June to 5 July [1941]. I wrote them lying down, hidden in a broken chimney in my former home at Vilkomirer Street 14. This is how I managed to avoid the snatchers, who abducted every Jewish man they came across. My wife carried the poems with her through all the horrors and calamities. They accompanied her during the first provokatsye and were smeared in blood in prison due to Schweinberger’s whip. Miraculously, my wife managed to escape with them back to the ghetto, but I was no longer there – I fled in the middle of the night during the Roundup [‘Night’] of the Yellow Permits [24 October 1941]. When I returned I found my wife in the hospital, where she had given birth. She was clutching the poems

Notes to PaGes 19–21

391

in her hand during her birth pangs.” Years later, Sutzkever added: “I learned about the discovery of my Holocaust-era poetic-cycle ‘Faces in Swamps’ through an announcement in the newspaper Yerushalayim de-Lite 3:5 (March 1990). Mrs Esther Mayerovitsh-Shvarts of the State Archive in Vilnius then sent me a photocopy of the nine poems. She now resides in Yeruham, Israel. In my wartime note which followed the last poem, I commented that ‘I wrote them lying down, hidden in a broken chimney in my former home at Vilkomirer 14, around 25 June to 5 July [1941].’ I personally hid the poems, or handed them over to be hidden, in the Vilna ghetto in 1942. In my book Vilna Ghetto, Paris 1946, I mention that ‘Faces in Swamps’ came to life in a maline under a metal roof in the same building. I also note in that volume that I hid myself in a broken chimney, ‘facing the moon’ for three nights. No doubt, both are the proper address for where ‘Faces in Swamps’ was composed.” Der yoresh fun regn, 85–6. After the city was liberated by the Red Army in July 1944 Sutzkever paid a brief visit to this hideout where he had spent these fateful weeks. See his poem “Nodlshayn” (Needleshine, 1978) in A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, 341, and Laughter beneath the Forest: Poems from Old and New Manuscripts, trans. Barnett Zumoff (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1996), 154–5. 23 Sutzkever’s text is somewhat unclear here. He notes that he and two fellow Jews were marched to the Alter-kloyz (The Old Prayer House). However, this institution, founded in 1440, was next to the Great Synagogue, across the river from where his memoir states he was stopped, and not on Vilkomirer Street, which was in the neighbourhood of Shnipishok, where Sutzkever’s mother lived and he had grown up. Perhaps he is referring to the Great Synagogue of Shnipishok (also known as the Great Beys-Medresh), at Vilkomirer Street 20, which was “desecrated by Nazi soldiers in August 1941 and its Torah scrolls were burnt.” See Synagogues of Lithuania, vol. 2 (Vilnius: Vilnius Academy of Arts, 2012), 331–2. As well, in Sutzkever’s testimony at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, the stenographer apparently mistranscribed the street he mentions for these events as Dokumenskaia, whereas the Alter-kloyz located in the traditional heart of the Jewish community was on Dominikanska. In Yiddish, initially a kloyz was a house of study established by a private benefactor or family, or presided over by a prominent rabbi. Later, the term expanded to mean a smaller house of prayer that was more intimate than a synagogue. In Vilna, there were many such kloyzn, some also associated with particular guilds. 24 Sutzkever also describes this event in his testimony at the Nuremberg Trials. The experience was the inspiration for his poem “Der tsirk” (The Circus, dated early July 1941). See Sutzkever, “Der tsirk,” in Di ershter nakht in geto (Tel Aviv: Di goldene keyt, 1979), 6–9; “The Circus” in A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, 126–9. 25 The Paris edition has a different section title: “Fifty Decapitated Heads.”

392

Notes to PaGes 21–3

26 Leyb Shriftzetser (1866–1941): Yiddish actor, known as “the king of comedy.” He was murdered in October 1941. 27 Sholem Aleichem (Sholem Rabinovitsh, 1859–1916): among the most popular Yiddish writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, widely considered one of the founders of modern Yiddish literature. Among his most beloved works are an exchange of letters between the dreamer MenakhemMendl and his practical wife Sheyne-Sheyndl. Sholem Aleichem’s works were frequently adapted for the Yiddish stage, so Sutzkever here demonstrates dark humour in commenting on how this beloved literary character might be revived under the new circumstances of Nazi terror. 28 Dovid Kaplan-Kaplanski: prior to the war worked in the Vilna Jewish community and contributed to the Yiddish daily newspaper Vilner tog (Vilna Daily). In the ghetto, the unit for which he served as brigadier initiated a series of workers’ lectures every Sunday. The first lecture was held on 15 May 1942 at the tea house on Rudnitske 7. Later, the Council of Brigadiers that he chaired took over organization of these popular talks. In a diary entry dated 4 July 1943 ghetto librarian Herman Kruk noted that Kaplan-Kaplanski deserves special recognition as founder and organizer of this lecture series. During the liquidation of the ghetto in September 1943 Kaplan-Kaplanski was deported to Estonia, and he was later sent to a camp in Germany, where he died. 29 Although Pinkhes Kon was a member of the first Judenrat, he did not serve as its chair. That position was held by Saul Trotski. 30 Yoysef Teper (d. 1941): writer, German translator, teacher, and Jewish high school administrator. 31 Shmerke Kaczerginski (1908–1954): member and key organizer of the pre-war Yiddish literary group Yung-Vilne (Young Vilna). A member of the outlawed Communist Party in Poland, he was known for his short stories, radical lyrics, and reportage. After the German occupation of Vilna, he escaped and roamed the countryside for more than half a year posing as a Polish deaf-mute. He slipped into the ghetto in April 1942 and became an active participant in its cultural life, a member of the underground, and an organizer of the youth club. He and Sutzkever were members of the Paper Brigade, slave labourers for the Rosenberg Task Force at YIvo who secretly rescued Jewish cultural treasures from the Nazis. Several of his poems became popular songs in the ghetto, including “Yugnt-Hymn” (Youth Hymn), “Shtiler, shtiler” (Quiet, quiet), “Dos elente kind” (The Lonely Child), “Itsik Vitenberg” (in memory of the head of the ghetto underground), and “Friling” (Spring). When the ghetto was liquidated in September 1943 he joined Sutzkever and other members of the United Partisan Organization (FPo) to fight in the forests. He co-founded, with Sutzkever, the first postwar Jewish Museum in Vilnius. His memoirs of the Vilna ghetto and the partisans – Khurbn Vilne (The Destruction of Vilna) and Ikh bin geven a partizan (I Was a Partisan) – and his collection of songs from the ghettos and

Notes to PaGes 23–4

32

33

34

35

36

37

393

camps – Lider fun di getos un lagern (Songs from the Ghettos and Camps) – are critical sources for Holocaust history and memory. Disillusioned with Soviet rule over Lithuania, he moved to Łódź and then to Paris, before ultimately settling in 1950 in Buenos Aires, where he became a significant Yiddish cultural activist. He died in a plane crash in 1954. See Sutzkever’s late poem “Mit Shmerken, ven es brenen velder” (With Shmerke, When Forests Are Burning) in Laughter beneath the Forest, 148–9. Yung-Vilne (Young Vilna): group of young Yiddish writers and artists in Vilna that was officially established in 1929. The group held public events to showcase its members’ accomplishments, published its own journal 1934–36, and achieved a significant reputation abroad. The local establishment regarded Yung-Vilne as evidence of the city’s status as a global centre of avant-garde Yiddish culture. Sutzkever and many of his closest friends were members. Moyshe Levin (1907–1941): a member of Yung-Vilne who excelled in realist and naturalist prose about the working class and urban poor. He published a number of volumes prior to the war with stories that focused on Vilna, including A denkmol baym taykhl (A Memorial by the Rivulet, 1937) and Friling in kelershtub: noveln un humoreskes (Springtime in the Cellar, 1937). Shimshn Kahan (1905–1941): a member of Yung-Vilne, whose poetry celebrated local landscapes and peoplescapes, and an editor at the daily newspaper Vilner tog. Bentsye Mikhtom (1908–1941): the leading visual artist of Yung-Vilne. He designed the group’s emblem, and his sketches of its members and local urban and pastoral landscapes were featured in group publications. Yisroel Rabon (1900–1941): Yiddish novelist and short story writer from Łódź. His novel Di gas (The Street, 1928) is a Yiddish modernist classic. With the beginning of the war, Rabon fled Łódź, eventually finding refuge in Vilna, where he became an active member of the Yiddish cultural scene. Nosn Kozhen (1895–1941): an artist trained in Warsaw, Kozhen fled to Vilna in 1939 to escape the German occupation. He specialized in portraits and landscapes, including one of Sutzkever that was lost during the war. Moyshe Shalit (1885–1941): noted local journalist, writer, and community leader. Shalit helped administer the Sh. An-ski Museum of the Jewish HistoricalEthnographic Society, the Yiddish PeN Club in Poland, and the Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists in Vilna. His work ranged from literary essays to essays on the history and culture of Polish Jewry. “Ikh lig in an orn” (“I Lie in a Coffin,” dated 30 August 1941) in Lider fun yam hamoves (Poems from the Sea of Death) (Tel Aviv and New York: Bergen-Belsen Press, 1968), 17; in Still My Word Sings, 92–3; and The Full Pomegranate, 62–3. Yankev Beregolski (1910?–1943): actor who arrived in Vilna in April 1941 to perform. He remained active in the ghetto theatre, including a leading role in a Hebrew production of Dovid Pinski’s drama “The Eternal Jew.” He managed to

394

38

39

40 41

42 43

44

45 46

47

48

Notes to PaGes 24–31

survive the liquidation of the ghetto because of his internment in the local hkP labour camp, but was killed just prior to the city’s liberation. Shapse Blyakher (1904–1944): Yiddish actor and a central figure in the ghetto theatre. His chronicle of Yiddish actors in the ghetto is a valuable historical source, published posthumously by Leyzer Ran. When the ghetto was liquidated he was deported to the Klooga concentration camp in Estonia, where he was killed just before the camp was liberated. Khayim Semyatitski (1908–1944): rabbi and poet whose art focused on religious themes. Originally from the Białystok region, he moved to Warsaw, where he published several volumes of poetry and essays. Arrived as a refugee in Vilna in early 1941. He was interned in the ghetto, and then in the hkP labour camp, where he was murdered. Paula Prilutski (1876–1941): poet who published under the name “Paula R” and wife of scholar Noyekh Prilutski. Murdered at Ponar in October 1941. Rudolf Neugebauer (1912–1945): Obersturmführer, chief of the Gestapo and commander of the Einsatzkommando in Vilna from February 1942 to October 1943. After he ordered the liquidation of the ghetto he was transferred to Kovno and then to Budapest. Sutzkever refers to the location as “Shtibl-vald,” a wooded retreat. A handwritten testimony about Motl Gdud’s experiences can be found in arC 4:1703 166: 1–4, Collection of Vilna Ghetto Documents, Sutzkever Archive, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855): leading Polish Romantic poet, who is also admired in Lithuania and Belarus, the region where he was born and lived for a time. His famous epic Pan Tadeusz (1834) was set in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In 1940, the Soviets dug large pits at Ponar to use to store emergency fuel. August Hering: adjutant to Horst Schweinberger; one of the main figures responsible for organizing the provokatsyes targeting Vilna Jewry. He was put on trial alongside Martin Weiss in Würzburg, Germany, in 1950. Lukishki Prison (also Łukiszki or Lukiškės): prison prominently located in the centre of Vilna dating back to late-tsarist rule (it was inaugurated in 1905). Lukishki became synonymous with state terror, especially when under the control of the Soviet NkvD (future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was an inmate there in 1940), Nazi Germany, and postwar Soviet Lithuania. Thousands of Vilna Jews were rounded up and held at Lukishki Prison (some were tortured or murdered in its holding cells) prior to their transfer and execution at Ponar. The prison closed in 2019. Sutzkever’s text uses the Yiddish word tsigayner in a descriptive, not a derogatory sense, although today its cognates in eastern Europe are frowned upon, much like the English term “Gypsy.”

Notes to PaGes 31–41

395

49 See Sutzkever’s poem “Di tsigaynerin Mariye Kvyek,” as “The Gypsy Maria Kviek,” Laughter beneath the Forest, 146–7. 50 Nuremberg Laws: racial laws enacted by Nazi Germany at Nuremberg in 1935. They included the Reich Citizenship Law, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship, and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour, which outlawed marriage and sexual relations between Jews and other Germans. Jews were defined not through religion or culture but through blood, that is as a race. 51 In the Moscow edition, Herder is referred to as the sukhotnik (the consumptive), and in the Paris edition as subotnik, referring to sects of sabbatarians who split from Russian Orthodoxy. 52 The Moscow edition combines both the previous and the current chapters under the title “On the Way to the Ghetto.” The Paris edition inserts this new chapter title. 53 Sutzkever’s text refers to the first ghetto and to the second ghetto. Other sources refer to them variously as ghetto #1 and ghetto #2, or the Big ghetto and the Little ghetto.

Part Two 1 Leah Rudnitski (1916–1943): Yiddish poet who first made her reputation in Kovno. She joined the staff of the Yiddish daily Vilner emes when the Soviets occupied Lithuania. She continued writing in the ghetto, where she was a central figure in its literary and cultural scene. She also joined the underground Partisan Organization, and was a beloved songwriter. She was deported to a camp when the ghetto was liquidated, but it is unclear whether she died in Estonia or was murdered in a death camp in German-occupied Poland. 2 Located on Gitke-Toybe’s Alley (today Šv. Mikalojaus). 3 Motke Khabad (c. 1820–c. 1885): beloved nineteenth-century local jester, whose witticisms were directed against the powerful and wealthy. 4 Zelig Kalmanovitsh (1881–1944): Yiddish scholar, translator, and co-director of YIvo. He served as editor of the institute’s flagship journal YIVO-bleter. He became religiously observant prior to the war, providing him with the authority of a modern-day prophet. When the ghetto was liquidated, he was deported to a camp in Estonia, where he died. Sutzkever dedicated his poem “Der novi” (The Prophet, dated Vilna Ghetto-Moscow 1943–1944) to his memory. See Poetishe verk (Tel Aviv: Jubilee Committee, 1963), vol. 1, 370–3. 5 YIvo: acronym for Vilna’s Yidisher visnshaftlekher institut (The Yiddish Scientific Institute), the leading scholarly centre and archive for research into the history, folklore, and culture of Yiddish-speaking European Jewry. Though founded in Berlin in 1925, it soon moved its headquarters to Vilna, which added to the city’s status as the intellectual capital of the Yiddish world. A modern

396

6

7

8

9

10 11

Notes to PaGes 41–3

building for YIvo was inaugurated in 1933 at 18 Vivulski (Wiwulskiego) Street. During the war, seized and repurposed by the Germans, it became the sorting centre for the Nazis’ Rosenberg Task Force, charged with looting the most valuable treasures of Jewish culture and sending the rest to the paper mill. Sutzkever was among those conscripted into the task force, and he spent much time at his workplace in YIvo’s former home, where he also composed many of his finest ghetto poems. YIvo relocated its headquarters to New York City in 1940, but references to “YIvo” in the text and notes indicate the Vilna building unless otherwise stated. Real-Gymnasium: Vilna’s Yiddish-language high school, which was the pride of secular Yiddish culture and a symbol of its future. During the war its former building served as the ghetto high school. Frida Vitalin(a) (1881–1941): beloved member of the Vilna Troupe, an interwar Yiddish theatrical group that travelled Europe and North America. She worked in the health division of the Judenrat, until she was murdered during the liquidation of the second ghetto. Chaim Grade (1910–1982): pre-war Yiddish poet and colleague of Sutzkever through their membership in the literary group Yung-Vilne. In the initial days of the war Grade escaped Vilna to the Soviet interior, while his wife, Libe, and mother, Vella, stayed behind and were eventually murdered. Grade emerged as one of the great postwar Yiddish novelists, whose prose explored the intellectual culture and traditional practices of Lithuania Jewry. His postwar literary memoir Der mame’s Shabosim (My Mother’s Sabbath Days, 1955) is an intimate and moving tribute to Vilna. Leyb Turbovitsh: until 1940, director of the Real-Gymnasium, Vilna’s Yiddishlanguage high school. Turbovitsh held a graduate degree in history from the city’s Stefan Batory University. He attempted to maintain the high academic standards of the Real-Gymnasium in the ghetto. A manuscript he wrote in the ghetto about Vilna was awarded a prize. He died at a camp in Estonia in 1943. Yogikhes kloyz, established by the wealthy merchant Yaakov Yogikhes (1778– 1848), was located at Shavelske Street 1. Jacob Gens (1903–1943): chief of the Jewish police in the ghetto starting in 1941. Although he had a non-Jewish wife, daughter, and many friends outside the ghetto who offered to help him hide, he insisted that it was his duty to help his fellow Jews in the ghetto. He believed that the best way to preserve the lives of Jews was to make them useful workers, hoping that under his leadership the ghetto could hold out until the Nazis were defeated. In his role as chief of ghetto police Gens facilitated the deportation of many Jews to their deaths. When the second Judenrat was dissolved in July 1942 Gens was appointed head of the ghetto administration, or “ghetto representative.” He had an ambivalent relationship with the underground in the ghetto, about which he was aware,

Notes to PaGes 43–53

12 13

14

15 16

17 18

19

20 21

397

but came to fear that its actions could endanger the entire ghetto. Gens was summoned by the Gestapo and executed on 14 September 1943, ten days before the liquidation of the ghetto. Sutzkever’s chronology here is confused. Gens was not appointed head of the second Judenrat in autumn 1941. His power derived from his role as chief of the ghetto police and, from July 1942, as chief administrator of the ghetto. Anatol Frid, the former director of a community bank, was deputy chairman of the first Judenrat. The Paris edition of the memoir includes a different list of names, suggesting that Sutzkever made editorial changes as documents or additional testimony refreshed his memory: “Frid the banker, Zaydshnur the merchant, Trapida the journalist, Sroylovitsh the attorney, Milkonovitski the attorney, and others.” Eliohu Sedlis (1888–1957): local doctor who administered the Jewish hospital in town prior to the war, and then directed the ghetto hospital. He served on the short-lived first Judenrat. Aktion: During the Holocaust a German word designating an operation involving the mass roundup, deportation, and murder of civilians. The Shulhoyf (Synagogue Courtyard) was the traditional heart of Jewish Vilna, home to a number of institutions including the Great Synagogue and the Strashun Library. The study house of the Gaon of Vilna (Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman, one of the greatest rabbinical scholars of the 18th century) was located across from the Strashun Library, and the complex of buildings also included the Old Prayer House (built in 1440) and a large number of smaller prayer houses. During its long history it also housed offices of the Vilna Jewish Community and communal institutions such as a well and public bathhouses. Yankev Gershteyn (1882–1942): beloved music teacher and director of the city’s best-known Yiddish choir. One of the most popular poems by Y.L. Peretz (1852–1915), the fin-de-siècle Warsaw writer who was one of the founders of modern Yiddish literature. Peretz’s poems and short stories were a key part of the curriculum in Yiddish secular schools. A major exhibit to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Peretz’s death was held at YIvo in 1941. The anniversary of his death was celebrated with lectures in the ghetto in both 1942 and 1943. Sutzkever here cites an excerpt from “Dos naye lid” (The New Song, 1899), a favourite of Yiddish radical circles, based on a poem by the Yiddish writer Avrom Reyzen (1876–1953). Reyzen’s writings were popular in the Yiddish secular school system. Sutzkever errs with the date here. The second ghetto was liquidated between 21 and 30 October 1941. This incident forms the basis of Sutzkever’s poem “In kloyster af Rudnitsker-gas” (In the Church on Rudnitske Street), in Di festung: lider un poemes, geshribn in

398

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

Notes to PaGes 53–64

vilner geto un in vald 1941–1944 (The Fortress: Poems Written in the Vilna Ghetto and the Forest, 1941–1944) (New York: Ikuf, 1945), 21–2. Sutzkever did not include the poem in his collected works, perhaps because of its Christian motifs. Two footbridges crossed the Viliye and were closed to motorized traffic, one that connected Antokol to northern neighbourhoods in the eastern part of town and one, referenced here by Sutzkever, that connected the Zakret Forest to Karolinke (Karoliniškės) in the west. Sutzkever dedicated several poems to his rescuer. See “Mayn reterin” (My Rescuer, dated 5 March 1943), in Lider fun yam hamoves (Poems from the Sea of Death) (Tel Aviv and New York: Bergen-Belsen Press, 1968), 53–4. See also the later poems “Tsum toyt fun mayn reterin” (On the Death of My Rescuer), in Lider fun yam hamoves, 425, and “Un vel ikh tsu mayn heymshtot oyle-regl zayn in vinter” (And I will make a winter pilgrimage to my hometown), in Tsvilingbruder (Tel Aviv, 1986), 83. Arn Yitskhok Grodzenski (1891–1941): well-known pre-war journalist, editor of the daily Yiddish newspaper Ovnt-kurier (Evening Courier) and secretary of the Union of Jewish Writers and Journalists. Malke Khayimson (1888–1941): teacher, writer and editor of Yiddish school books and children’s literature, and a member of the editorial staff of the interwar Yiddish children’s journal Grinike beymelekh (Green Trees). For a moving poem about the murder of his infant son, see “Tsum kind” (To My Child, dated 18 January 1943), in Lider fun yam hamoves, 44–5, and Still My Word Sings: Poems, trans. and ed. Heather Valencia (Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf University Press, 2017), 94–9. See also his testimony at the Nuremberg Trials, below, pp. 253–61. Walter Oberhardt (d. 1943): a Jew from Vienna who served as an agent for the Gestapo in the ghetto, and for a time as deputy chief of the ghetto police. After the liquidation of the ghetto in September 1943 he managed to hide in the Kailis labour camp before he was arrested and deported for execution to Ponar. Sutzkever wrote several poems about his mother in the ghetto. See “Mayn mame” (My Mother, dated October 1942), “Fun a farloyrener poeme” (From a Lost Poem), “A vogn shikh” (A Wagon of Shoes, dated 1 January 1943), all in Lider fun yam hamoves, 31–5, 41–2, 46. See translations of these poems and “My every breath is a curse,” dated 30 July 1943, in A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, 145–53. Petras Kubiliūnas (1894–1946): Lithuanian general who served as chief of the Lithuanian General Staff 1929–34 until his support for a coup against the Lithuanian president earned him a death sentence, later reduced to life in prison. During the war the Germans appointed him first general counsellor, essentially the highest-ranking Lithuanian official in the German occupation administration. He retreated to Germany near the end of the war, but was kidnapped by Soviet agents. He was tried and executed in Moscow in 1946.

Notes to PaGes 65–7

399

30 Petras Cvirka (1909–1946): Lithuanian novelist and children’s book writer who went to Moscow in 1940 (along with Salomėja Nėris) to ask that Lithuania be integrated into the Soviet Union. Liudas Gira (1884–1946): Lithuanian poet and literary critic. Antanas Venclova (1906–1971): Lithuanian poet and journalist who edited several pro-Soviet journals. Kostas Korsakas (1909–1986): Lithuanian poet, literary critic, and journalist who directed the State Publishing House after Lithuania became a Soviet republic in 1940. Salomėja Nėris (1904–1945): Lithuanian poet. 31 Emil Jannings (1884–1950): German actor and recipient of the first Academy Award for best actor in 1929. After the Nazis seized power he starred in a number of pro-Nazi films, earning him the title “Artist of the State” from propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. 32 Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946): Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Rosenberg was a leading Nazi ideologue and racial theorist. He established the Rosenberg Task Force (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, or err), which was responsible for looting Jewish art collections, museums, libraries, and other assets. Sutzkever testified against Rosenberg at the Nuremberg Trials, where Rosenberg was convicted and sentenced to death. He was executed at Nuremberg 16 October 1946. 33 Povilas Plechavičius (1880–1973): Lithuanian general who, during the Nazi occupation, led a voluntary Lithuanian detachment that sought to maintain its independence from the German command structure. At first it cooperated with German officials, but, as the war came to a close, it resisted German demands even as it maintained its strong anti-Soviet resistance. 34 Julian Jankauskas: a Lithuanian friend of Shmerke Kaczerginski who hid Kaczerginski’s wife, Barbara, during the early autumn of 1941. Jankauskas took great personal risk in providing small arms and even a machine-gun to the ghetto underground. 35 Ona Šimaitė (1894–1970): Lithuanian librarian and journalist who worked at the university in Kaunas and then at Vilnius University. She helped smuggle rare Jewish books and cultural documents out of the ghetto. She also smuggled money, food, medicines, and letters into the ghetto, rescued children from the ghetto by placing them with foster families, and offered her home as a safehouse for Jews. She received support for her work from the rector of the university and an intimate group of friends. She was denounced by a neighbour, arrested, and tortured by the Gestapo in 1944. She settled in France after her liberation from several camps. According to David Fishman (The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis [Lebanon, Nh: ForeEdge, 2017]), 201–3), she wrote to Sutzkever in Moscow in 1946 with details of where she had hidden the Jewish materials she had rescued, including

400

36

37

38 39 40

41

42

Notes to PaGes 67–71

in the university’s Lithuania Studies Seminary. In 1966 she was recognized by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Among the Nations, and in 2015 a street was named in her honour in Vilnius. For more on Šimaitė see Julija Sukys, Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Simaite (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012). Maria Fedecka: a member of the Polish underground who helped rescue and hide a number of Jews, including children, at her home near Vilna. Sutzkever wrote a poem about her that was included in his postwar epic Geheymshtot (Secret City) (Tel Aviv: Friends of the author, 1948). See “Maria Fedecka,” in Poetishe verk, vol. 1, 522–4. She was recognized by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Among the Nations. Shmuel Bak (known professionally today as Sam Bak, 1933– ): Sutzkever refers to Bak throughout the memoir as Zalmen, perhaps because he was known then as Samek or Zamek, a diminutive of Shmuel (Samuel). Bak’s talents as an artist were evident at a young age, and Sutzkever was taken by the boy’s commitment to his craft. After the war Bak studied art in Germany and then at the Bezalel Academy for Art and Design in Jerusalem, before settling in the United States. He is known today for his surrealist paintings, many of them about Vilna and its destruction. A Samuel Bak Museum was opened in 2017 in Vilnius as part of the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum. This incident is referred to again in part II, below. This was the address of YIvo, where Sutzkever was employed as a slave labourer, an experience he describes later in the memoir. Albert Sporket: a trader in livestock who also ran a leather factory in Berlin. Sutzkever later writes about him as one of the central Nazi officials overseeing the Rosenberg Task Force, responsible for looting Jewish cultural treasures. Sporket knew Polish and Russian, but relied on Jewish intellectuals like Sutzkever, who worked as slave labourers, to sift through the materials, most of which were in Hebrew and Yiddish. Sporket replaced Hans Müller in May 1942, when Muller was sent to Kiev to set up a Rosenberg Task Force unit there. Kailis: An urban forced-labour camp in Vilna that, beginning in October 1941, produced fur and leather goods for the German war effort. Jews able to find work there were considered privileged by residents of the ghetto, since its director attempted to protect his workers to maintain the camp’s productivity. Up to twelve hundred Jews and their families lived in two large building blocks at the camp, located in the former premises of the Elektrit radio factory on Mindaugienės st. 7 / 8 and Mindaugienės st. 15 (formerly ulica Generała Szeptyckiego; currently Ševčenkos), although their numbers swelled after the liquidation of the ghetto in September 1943. Most of its internees were murdered at Ponar in early July 1944, less than two weeks before the Red Army liberated the city from Nazi rule. toz: acronym for Towarzystwo Ochrony Zdrowia Ludności Żydowskiej (Society for the Protection of Health of the Jewish Population), founded in Warsaw in 1921. During the interwar period toz, funded mainly by

Notes to PaGes 72–84

43

44

45

46

47

48

49 50 51

401

memberships and philanthropy, expanded to include hundreds of clinics in many cities and towns throughout Poland. It concerned itself with promoting the health and hygiene of the Jewish population by employing doctors, providing vaccinations, treating infectious diseases, supporting women during pregnancy, promoting healthy living habits and good nutrition, and publishing a magazine. It also established several retreats for urban children, including the one mentioned here by Sutzkever that served as a summer camp. Horst Wulff (1907–1945): Gebietskommissar (governor) of the Vilna district starting in August 1941, then Generalkommissar of Kaunas starting in February 1943. In March 1943 he personally oversaw the murder of three thousand Jews from the Vilna ghetto. He died near the end of the war in the battle for Berlin. Sutzkever was creatively haunted by this incident. See “A vogn shikh” (A Wagon of Shoes, dated 1 January 1943), in Poetishe verk, vol. 1, 275–6; A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, 151–2. See also “My every breath is a curse,” dated 30 July 1943, in A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, 152–3. The Paris edition differs slightly: “When Schweinberger’s time in Vilna came to an end, he was dispatched elsewhere for ‘work.’ ” The Paris edition also refers to Martin Weiss as the shef of the Ypatinga, whereas the Moscow edition uses the Slavic term natshalnik, suggesting the role that editors played in making the text understandable to different Yiddish audiences. Bruno Kittel (b. 1922): SS Oberscharführer in charge of Jewish affairs in Vilna beginning June 1943. He oversaw massacres of Jews in towns around Vilna that summer, and was the official responsible for demanding the surrender of Itsik Vitenberg, the commander of the ghetto underground. He supervised the liquidation of the ghetto in September 1943. He also was involved in the liquidation of the Kovno and Riga ghettos. He disappeared in 1945. Teme Kats: beloved teacher who in the years immediately preceding the war worked in a school for developmentally delayed children. Sutzkever is mistaken in his dating here. Kats escaped from the killing pits at Ponar in October 1941 and was among the first eyewitnesses to mass slaughter there. She was deported to Estonia during the final liquidation of the ghetto in September 1943. Kapores (Heb. Kaparot): ritual atonement ceremony performed in advance of Yom Kippur in which observant Jews swing a live chicken around their head, and then slaughter it and donate it to the hungry. With food, especially meat, so scarce in the ghetto, Sutzkever provides insight into the struggle to maintain traditional practices, often at great risk and exorbitant expense. A measure of weight native to Imperial Russia, used especially for grains and cereals. A pood was equivalent to just over 36 lb. or 16 kg. These two short lines appear elsewhere in the Paris edition. Vayskop ran one of the main workshops in the ghetto. He was known for his generosity, and carried the nickname “the king of the ghetto.” He was murdered by the Nazis in June 1943.

402

Notes to PaGes 84–90

52 Yitskhok Giterman (1889–1943): director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (referred to as the Joint) and a member of the underground in the Warsaw ghetto. He was a leader of both the Jewish Self-Help Society and the Jewish Mutual Aid Society, contributed to Emanuel Ringelblum’s secret Oyneg Shabes archive in the Warsaw ghetto, and helped set up there the Jewish Combat Organization (zob). He was killed in January 1943 during a major Nazi operation in the Warsaw ghetto. 53 In Yiddish the letter mem is equivalent to the English letter “M.” Makom literally means place in Hebrew (it also is one of the names for God), and would have been a Hebraic component of Yiddish not understandable in German. 54 Mire Bernshteyn (d. 1943): much-loved teacher and, briefly, director of the Yiddish-language Real-Gymnasium during the Soviet occupation of Vilna. She continued to teach in the ghetto, and was also active in the Social Welfare Committee and ghetto cultural life, especially the theatre. She was deported and murdered at Majdanek. 55 Strashun Library: library established by Matisyahu Strashun (1817–1885), a local scholar, philanthropist, and supporter of the haskole (the Jewish Enlightenment). He bequeathed his personal library of more than six thousand books, manuscripts, and incunabula to the Jewish community of Vilna. The library opened to the public in 1892 in the Shulhoyf, the traditional heart of Jewish Vilna. During the interwar period its reading room was often filled with readers demonstrating the diversity of the Jewish community: yeshiva students, intellectuals, young writers, and political activists. Its collection grew to some thirty-five to forty thousand items, representing the full range of Jewish culture: rabbinical literature, modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature, and Judaica. During the war some of its collection was transferred to the university library, while most of it was sent to YIvo for sorting by the Rosenberg Task Force. 56 See Sutzkever’s poetic elegy to the heroism of Mire Birnshteyn in his lyric “Di lererin Mire” (Teacher Mire, dated 10 May 1943), in Lider fun yam hamoves, 68–70, and A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, 160–2. Sutzkever was very moved by the dedication of teachers such as Mire Bernshteyn and sought to present them as cultural heroes of the ghetto. The poem first appeared in the Soviet-Yiddish newspaper Eynikayt (Unity), Moscow, 25 May 1944, 3, suggesting how much both he and his Soviet editors regarded teachers as a strong symbol of communal endurance and resistance to German efforts to dehumanize the Jewish population. 57 Moyshe Olitski (d. 1944): local Zionist and Hebrew teacher, principal of the Tarbut school, and chair of the Hebrew Teachers Union in Vilna. He was a leading educational figure in the ghetto, and worked hard to secure the Hebrew component of its curriculum. He also taught at the Kailis forced-labour camp. 58 Rokhl Broydo (d. 1943): teacher in the Yiddish secular school system prior to the war, and a central figure in the ghetto’s educational system. A Communist, she

Notes to PaGes 90–3

59

60

61

62

63 64

65

66

67 68 69

70

403

was connected to the FPo but was unable to escape with the partisans due to her health. When the ghetto was liquidated she was deported and killed at Majdanek. Borekh Lubotski (d. 1945): teacher in the Yiddish secular school system, member of the Vilna city council, and director of the Cheap Houses tenements. Died at the Stutthof concentration camp. Yankl Kaplan (1907–1943): directed the school in the Kailis forced-labour camp. Kaplan was an active member of the Communist Party in the ghetto and of the underground FPo. He was captured during an attempted escape along with Asya Big and Avrom Khvoynik, and the three were hanged together on 24 September 1943. See Sutzkever’s description of this event below in “Three Heroes.” Avrom Sliep (1884–1943): music and choral teacher, and director of the highly admired Vilna Education Committee (Vilbig) choir prior to the war. In the ghetto Sliep also organized a choir whose repertoire included both classical music and selections of Yiddish and Hebrew songs, and co-directed a music school. When the ghetto was liquidated he was deported to a camp in Estonia. Matisyahu Shrayber (1891–1944): director of the Vilner yidisher tekhnikum (the ort Jewish Vocational School) and chair of the Union of Jewish Engineers. Shrayber wrote Yiddish-language technical and mechanical guides. When the ghetto was liquidated, he was deported to a concentration camp in Estonia. See Sutzkever’s poem “Es flit arayn a flaterl” (A Butterfly Flutters In, dated 5 May 1943), in Lider fun yam hamoves, 64–5. Aleksandr Volkoviski: child composer, one of whose melodies was awarded a ghetto prize. His father, Noyekh, a well-respected local physician, wrote lyrics to the melody in Polish. Shmerke Kaczerginski took the first stanza as inspiration for his lyrics “Shtiler, shtiler” (Quiet, quiet), which became one of the most famous Yiddish songs of the Vilna ghetto. Shmerke Kaczerginski was inspired by the activities of the youth club and dedicated his ghetto song “Youth Hymn” to it. It remains one of the most popular Yiddish songs to emerge from the Holocaust, regularly sung at gatherings to affirm the spirit of Jewish youths. Lize Gordon (d. 1943): history teacher at the city’s Real-Gymnasium and active in educational circles in the ghetto. She was dragged from her hideout by the Germans and shot. Nine Gershteyn (1906–1944): dance teacher who worked in the ghetto theatre and wrote music to several poems performed in the ghetto. Yeshiva (yeshive in Yiddish): an academy of advanced religious learning. Reb Shaulke’s kloyz was established on Shavelske Street in memory of Rabbi Shaul Katsenelenbogen, a student of the 18th-century Gaon of Vilna, and was home to the ghetto’s most prominent yeshiva from 1941 to 1943. For a homage to the ghetto theatre, see Sutzkever’s poem “Tsum yortog fun getoteater” (On the Anniversary of the Ghetto Theatre, dated 31 December 1942) in Lider fun yam hamoves, 39–40, and A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, 154–5.

404

Notes to PaGes 93–4

71 Max Viskind (1907 or 1908–1942): born in Vilna, studied theatre in Warsaw. Director of the Jewish State Theatre in Białystok before fleeing to Vilna. In 1942, he managed to escape from Vilna to the Warsaw ghetto, where he continued work in the theatre. He was deported and murdered at Treblinka. 72 The establishment of a ghetto theatre was controversial. In his diary entry for 17 January 1942, Herman Kruk, the director of the ghetto library, writes that he was “personally offended” by the “disgrace” of holding performances “in the shadow of Ponar.” He notes that the Bund decided to boycott early performances and posted placards in the ghetto warning “Don’t make theatre in a graveyard.” Despite Kruk’s strong initial reservations, the ghetto population responded enthusiastically to the theatre, which staged more than a hundred shows in 1942 alone, attracting more than thirty-eight thousand spectators. In a subsequent diary entry of 8 March 1942, Kruk acknowledged that “the boycotted concerts prevail. The halls are full. The literary evenings burst their seams, and the local hall cannot hold the large number that comes here.” See Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944, ed. and intro. by Benjamin Harshav, trans. Barbara Harshav (New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press, 2002), 173–4, 226–7. 73 Chaim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934): a pioneer of modern Hebrew poetry. Bialik composed several of the most influential poems of the modern Hebrew revival, including “City of Slaughter,” about the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev, a foundational modern text for writing about Jewish catastrophe. By the time he moved to Tel Aviv in 1924 he was widely acknowledged as the Hebrew national poet. 74 Lyube Levitski (1909–1943): vocalist; graduate of the local conservatory who continued her studies in Vienna. Prior to the war, she appeared as part of the Warsaw Jewish Art Theatre and on the radio. In the ghetto she participated in the opening performance of the theatre. Sutzkever dedicates an entire chapter to Levitski (“The Singer”), which was published first in Moscow in Eynikayt (8 June 1944). 75 Yankev (Jacob) Gordon (1853–1909): among the most popular Yiddish playwrights. His 1898 drama Mirele Efros, about a powerful matriarch (also referred to as “the Jewish Queen Lear”), was a staple of the Yiddish theatre repertoire. 76 Stefan Zweig (1881–1942): prolific Austrian-Jewish novelist, playwright, and journalist who committed suicide in exile in 1942. 77 The Golden Chain (Di goldene keyt): visionary Yiddish drama by I.L. Peretz about a Hasidic rebbe who refuses to recite the prayer at the end of the Sabbath to mark the division between sacred time and the work week. The play’s concern with charismatic leadership and the transmission of values across generations in times of crisis inspired audiences. Lines from the drama are inscribed on Peretz’s tomb in Warsaw, and Sutzkever’s poem “To Poland” (1946) also referred

Notes to PaGes 94–6

78 79

80

81

82

83

84

85

86

87

88

89

405

to the drama. The Yiddish journal that Sutzkever established in Tel Aviv in 1949 borrowed its title from Peretz’s drama. Mazl tov (1889): one-act Yiddish play by Sholem Aleichem. Shloyme Molkho (1926): verse drama by American Yiddish modernist Arn GlantsLeyeles (1899–1966). The play stages a conflict between the historical figures of David Reuveni (1490–1535 / 41?), who advocated Jewish militarism as a way to liberate the Jews, and his student Shloymo (Solomon) Molkho (c. 1500–1532), a Jewish mystic born Diogo Pires, who wanted the Jews to redeem the world through their suffering and was eventually killed by the Inquisition. The Golem (1921): dramatic poem by Yiddish modernist writer H. Leyvik (1888–1962), inspired by the famous legend about a rabbi who forms a mystical being from earth to protect the Jews, only to lose control over his creation. Green Fields (Grine felder): Yiddish pastoral romance by Peretz Hirshbeyn (1880–1948). The play was a favourite of Yiddish audiences, and was made into a Yiddish film in 1937. It opened in the Vilna ghetto on 20 July 1942 and was performed more than two dozen times. The Flood (Der mabl): translation of Swedish playwright Henning Berger’s Syndafloden, about the terror of a group trapped in a saloon during a flood. The play opened in the ghetto theatre in summer 1943, just before the liquidation of the ghetto. The Treasure (Der Oytser): dark comedy by Dovid Pinski (1872–1959), in which townspeople frantically seek out a treasure believed to be buried in the cemetery. The play opened in the ghetto theatre in March 1943. Max Shadovski (1905–1944): Yiddish actor, who performed with the famed Vilna Troupe. When the ghetto was liquidated he managed to hide in the Kailis labour camp, from which he was sent to Ponar for execution. Ester Lipovski (1889–1943): ghetto actress. The last performance of Dovid Pinski’s drama The Treasure put on by the ghetto theatre in spring 1943 was dedicated to marking her fortieth year in the Yiddish theatre. Yekusiel Rutenberg (1907–1944): itinerant actor who performed with the Yiddish comedy duo Dzigan and Shumacher before the war. When the ghetto was liquidated he was deported to a camp in Estonia. Khayele Rozental (1925–1979): one of the most popular singers in the ghetto. When the ghetto was liquidated, she was deported to Kaiserwald, and at war’s end she spent time in a displaced-persons camp in Germany. She later settled in South Africa. Volf Durmarshkin (1908 or 1914–1944): graduate of the local conservatory. Served as musical director of shows in the ghetto, most famously of a Hebrew version of Dovid Pinski’s The Eternal Jew. During the liquidation of the ghetto, he was deported to a camp in Estonia. Hirsh Gutgeshtalt (1899–1944): poet from Warsaw who fled to Vilna when

406

90

91

92

93 94

95

Notes to PaGes 96–7

the war started. When the ghetto was liquidated, he was deported to the Klooga concentration camp in Estonia, where he was killed moments before its liberation. Herman Kruk (1897–1944): a leading journalist, writer, Bundist activist, and director of the largest Jewish library in pre-war Warsaw. He fled to Vilna in September 1939. He served as director of the ghetto library, one of the most active cultural spaces in the ghetto. He was also conscripted for work in the Rosenberg Task Force with other writers and intellectuals sorting Jewish cultural treasures. When the ghetto was liquidated he was deported to the Klooga concentration camp, where he died. Kruk’s Yiddish diary, which he kept meticulously throughout the ghetto period, is a priceless historical source for daily life and death in the ghetto. He hid his diary prior to his deportation, and portions of it were discovered in secret caches after the war. Yankev Sher (1901–1944): artist and teacher who was a cultural activist in the ghetto. When the ghetto was liquidated, he was deported to the Vaivara concentration camp in Estonia. Yoysef Glazman (1913–1943): member of the Revisionist Zionist party Betar and one of the leaders of the underground in the ghetto. When the Soviets occupied Vilna and outlawed all political parties, Glazman was arrested and sent to a forcedlabour camp. With the German invasion of the Soviet Union, he made it back to Vilna and the ghetto, where he organized an underground of Betar members to carry out resistance. In January 1942 he helped found the United Partisan Organization (FPo), serving as a deputy commander and chief of intelligence. He resigned from the Jewish ghetto police in June 1942. Jacob Gens, head of the ghetto administration, was eager to remove him from the ghetto because he feared him. Glazman escaped from the ghetto in summer 1943 with a group of fellow partisans to set up a base in the forest. On 7 October his group was attacked by a German unit sniffing out Jewish partisans, and he was killed. The Union’s soirees were held weekly or bi-weekly, most often in the communal kitchen at Shavelske Street 17. Sutzkever does not mention the evening dedicated to the literary group YungVilne (Young Vilna), under whose auspices he and many of his close colleagues had first gained local and international creative recognition. On 25 July 1942 more than two hundred people attended a Yung-Vilne evening at Shavler Street 1 that presented an art exhibit, samples of pre-war group publications, and readings by group members confined to the ghetto, including works by those who had been killed or escaped to the Soviet interior. Herman Kruk introduced the event, noting that Yung-Vilne represented “the Vilna of renewal.” See a typescript of Kruk’s remarks in rG 223: 493, Sutzkever-Kaczerginski Archive, YIvo Institute for Jewish Research, New York. The poem, dated 12 April 1942 and inspired by the birth and murder of Sutzkever’s own infant child in the ghetto hospital, is about a woman who

Notes to PaGes 97–8

96

97

98

99

407

gives birth to a Jewish child while she is hiding from the Germans in a local cemetery – both illegal actions. The poem’s climactic words – “The child must live!” – speaks to a yearning for Jewish survival and regeneration that directly challenged German efforts to liquidate the Jews. See Dos keyver-kind (The Grave Child), in Lider fun yam hamoves, 151–8, and in Joseph Leftwich, Abraham Sutzkever: Partisan Poet (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1971), 73–80. In his ghetto diary entry of 6 May 1942, Herman Kruk remarks: “In the company of fifteen of the most distinguished writers and artists, Mr. Sutz[ever] read his new poem, ‘The Grave-Child,’ as he calls it – a dramatic chronicle. The work was greeted with great applause by the audience and, most important, with a great and long exchange of opinions. The dramatic chronicle has a lot of visionary lyricism, as someone called it. 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. Only after the first speaker, friend Dr [Tsemakh] Feldstein, did a broad discussion get under way, which lasted for three hours. This is, I think, the first sublime evening of great creative excitement.” In a later entry of 2 July 1942, Kruk adds: “At the meeting of the board of the literary association on Monday, July 2, the question of granting two persons an award for literary achievement in the ghetto was discussed. At Kalman[owicz]’s suggestion the awards were granted to the poet A. Sutzkever for poetry and H. Kr[uk] for underground literary and journalistic achievement in the ghetto.” Cited in Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, 280, 316. Sutzkever composed and recited the poem “Afn toyt fun Yankev Gershteyn” (Upon the Death of Yankev Gershteyn, dated 28 September 1942) at Gershteyn’s funeral in the ghetto. See Lider fun yam hamoves, 30. Rokhl Sutzkever (1905–1943): artist and active member of the interwar literary and artistic group Yung-Vilne. She studied art at the university, and her work appeared in local exhibitions in the mid-to-late 1930s. She also designed covers for several books published by Yung-Vilne member Elkhonen Vogler. In the ghetto she designed sets for the theatre and contributed to an art exhibition in March 1943. When the ghetto was liquidated she was deported to Majdanek. Sutzkever’s poem “Legende” (“Legend,” 1979) is about her. See A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, 340; Laughter beneath the Forest: Poems from Old and New Manuscripts, trans. Barnett Zumoff (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1996), 144–5. Lize Daykhes: member of the pre-war Yiddish puppet theatre Maydim in Vilna. Upon the liquidation of the ghetto, she was deported to camps in Estonia and Germany. Yehoash (literary pen name of Shloyme [Solomon] Blumgarten, 1872–1927): Yiddish poet and writer whose translation of the Hebrew Bible into Yiddish is a masterpiece of modern Yiddish literature. See Sutzkever’s poem “Yehoash” (dated 6 April 1943) in Lider fun yam hamoves, 59–60.

408

Notes to PaGes 98–102

100 The references here are to Yohanan Buxtorf ’s Hebrew grammar (first published in 1609, and which contained some discussion of Yiddish), Yiddish Bible translations by Yekusiel Ben Yitskhok Blitz (1678) and Yoysef Witzenhausen (1679), and Mendl Lefin’s Yiddish translations of Proverbs (1814) and Ecclesiastes (1873). 101 Khaykl Lunski (1881–1942 or 1943): long-time chief librarian of the Strashun Library, secretary of the Sh. An-ski Museum of the Jewish HistoricalEthnographic Society, and historian of the Jews of Vilna and Lithuania. His works include From the Vilna Ghetto (Yiddish 1920, Hebrew 1921), a study of Jewish life in Vilna in the shadow of the Great War, when Vilna had been occupied by Imperial Germany. Sutzkever’s ghetto memoir of the Second World War was published in Moscow with the same title. 102 Herbert Gotthard (d. 1983): taught Oriental and biblical studies at the University of Berlin; served as the Judaica expert on the local team of the Rosenberg Task Force, charged with looting Jewish cultural treasures for shipment to the Institute for Study of the Jewish Question (Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage). He helped direct the plundering of YIvo. He was nicknamed “the little swine” by Shmerke Kaczerginski. He later moved between Vilna and Riga, where he served as a religion expert from the Rosenberg Headquarters for the Eastern Territories. Gotthard was arrested by the British in November 1946 after a resident of a displaced-persons camp in Lübeck, Germany, came across his name while reading Sutzkever’s account of the Vilna ghetto and matched it to a man in the camp pretending to be a Jew. The savvy camp resident wrote to Sutzkever, who corroborated the physical description. Sutzkever informed on Gotthard to the authorities, and also sought the intervention of YIvo’s new headquarters in New York, leading to his arrest. Sutzkever and others who had served as slave labourers for the Rosenberg Task Force fantasized about confronting him in court, but Gotthard was released in January 1948 because Poland chose not to prosecute him. He went on to fabricate his wartime biography, and taught Oriental studies at the University of Kiel for several decades. See Fishman, The Book Smugglers, 68–9, 215–16, 239–40. 103 Eliohu Yankev Goldshmidt (1882–1941 or 1942): history teacher in the Yiddish secular schools of Vilna, poet, contributor to articles about local Jewish history, and curator of the Sh. An-ski Museum of the Jewish HistoricalEthnographic Society. 104 Johannes Pohl (1904–1960): an ordained priest whose training included a period pursuing biblical studies in Jerusalem. In 1934, he left the priesthood and became a Hebraica librarian at the Prussian State Library. He published anti-semitic articles in leading Nazi publications. Pohl later worked for Alfred Rosenberg as the head librarian of the Institute for Study of the Jewish Question and was active as a Judaica expert in the Rosenberg Task Force’s confiscation of Jewish art and books. After the war he worked for several German publishing houses.

Notes to PaGes 102–5

409

105 Der Stürmer: rabidly anti-semitic German tabloid published by Julius Streicher. 106 Pohl and Gotthard were first in Vilna soon after the Nazis conquered the city in July 1941. They returned in 1942 to oversee the sorting work for the Rosenberg Task Force. 107 The Paris edition puts the number at seventy-four. 108 Mark Antokolski (1843–1902): born in the Vilna region, a leading Jewish sculptor of 19th-century Russia and one of the first to explore Jewish themes. 109 The Sh. An-ski Museum of the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society was named in honour of the Russian and Yiddish writer, playwright, and ethnographer Sh. An-ski (Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport, 1863–1920). An-ski is best known for his play The Dybbuk and for his ethnographic expeditions in 1912–14 that raised the status of Jewish folklore. Khurbn Galitsye (The Destruction of Galicia), his memoir of pogroms against Jewish communities at the end of the First World War, is a foundational text of Holocaust literature. The Vilna branch of the Sh. An-ski Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society had a tense relationship with YIvo’s Ethnographic Committee, as the two competed for influence and scarce resources, although the Second World War saw the incorporation of the society’s ethnographic materials and museum collection into YIvo. 110 Romm Press (also, The Press of the Widow and Brothers Romm): a Vilna institution founded 1799. It was one of the few Jewish presses permitted to function in the Russian Empire after most were ordered closed in 1836. It gained fame throughout the Jewish world for its publication of a modern edition of the Talmud (1880–86), referred to colloquially as the Vilna Shas. It was also known for its sacred books, Jewish Enlightenment tracts, and foundational works of modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature. By the time Soviet authorities shut it down in 1940 it had published more than fourteen hundred titles. For more on how Sutzkever’s poetry transformed events for mythopoetic effect, see his famous resistance poem “Di blayene platn fun Roms drukeray” (The Lead Plates of the Romm Printing House, dated 12 September 1943) in Lider fun yam hamoves, 94; A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, 168–70; and Still My Word Sings: Poems, trans. and ed. Heather Valencia (Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf University Press, 2017), 106–7. The poem imagines Jewish resistance fighters breaking into the Romm Press to melt down its lead type to make bullets, linking the defence of the Jerusalem of Lithuania with the Maccabean revolt and defence of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem. In reality, as Sutzkever reveals above, Johannes Pohl sold some sixty tons of lead plates that had printed the famed Vilna Talmud for smelting. Sutzkever’s ability to imagine a different fate for the lead type galvanized the collective imagination and spirit. 111 The group of writers and intellectuals who set out to rescue as much as they could from German hands came to be known as “the Paper Brigade” for their smuggling and hiding of precious books, manuscripts, and archival materials.

410

112 113

114 115

116

117

118 119

120

Notes to PaGes 105–6

Sutzkever’s faith in the work of this fellowship inspired his poem “Kerndlekh vayts” (Grains of Wheat, dated March 1943). See Lider fun yam hamoves, 55–6; A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, 156–8; and Still My Word Sings, 100–3. For a history of their efforts, see Fishman, The Book Smugglers. Ilya Repin (1844–1930): Russian realist painter who was among the best-known Russian artists of the late nineteenth century. Theodor Herzl (1860–1904): journalist, playwright, novelist, and activist who is considered a founder of political Zionism, the movement of Jewish national selfdetermination that resulted in the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Sutzkever provided the document to Wiktoria Gzmilewska, the wife of a Polish military officer, who was associated with the Polish underground. Rokhl (Rachela) Krinski (née Pupko, 1910–2002): polyglot teacher of history at Vilna’s Yiddish high school, the Real-Gymnasium. Her husband was killed soon after the German occupation of Vilna, and she was left with their two-year-old daughter, Sore, who was taken in by her non-Jewish nanny. Krinski joined the staff of the Rosenberg Task Force working at YIvo, and was active in its Jewish slave labourers’ secret effort to rescue Jewish cultural treasures. Poet Shmerke Kaczerginski, with whom she grew close, wrote “Dos elente kind” (The Lonely Child) about her daughter, Sore; it became one of the most famous songs to emerge from the ghetto. After the ghetto’s liquidation Krinski was deported to the Kaiserwald concentration camp in Estonia, and then to Stutthoff in Germany. She was reunited with her daughter in 1945. Rokhl Krinski’s short Yiddish memoir, “Mayn arbet in YIvo unter di daytshn” (My Work in YIvo under the Germans), appeared in YIVO-bleter 30 (1947), 214–22. Ume Olkenitski (1899–1943): graphic artist and art teacher who provided the cover art for Sutzkever’s poetic volume Valdiks (1940). She served as the curator of the Ester Rokhl Kaminska theatre museum at YIvo, and designed its emblem. She was deported to an extermination camp when the ghetto was liquidated. Noime Markeles (1925–2009): worked in the same manuscript room as Sutzkever while on the Rosenberg Task Force. A Bundist, then Communist member of the underground FPo, she was able to escape the ghetto to fight in the forest. Daniel Faynshteyn: anthropologist and social scientist who worked as a slave labourer in the Judaica section of the Rosenberg Task Force. Kazys Boruta (1905–1965): Lithuanian poet, writer, and political activist. Boruta concealed Jewish materials in the Lithuanian Institute of the Lithuanian Academy of Science. The Paris edition alters this sentence to read: “The Germans tortured her for helping Jews.” Sutzkever here mistakenly assumes Šimaitė was killed, but she survived Dachau and was transferred to a camp in France, in which country she remained after the war.

Notes to PaGes 107–19

411

121 Bialik’s “A freylekhs” (A Lively Dance) is the Yiddish title of a poem that was later developed into the Hebrew classic “Dance of Despair” (lit. To the Master of Dance, 1915), which is included thematically among Bialik’s “poems of wrath.” 122 Avrom Reyzen’s “Di vant” (The Wall, 1900) appeared in an underground Bundist publication. Its refrain is appropriate in the context of the ghetto: “We break down the walls.” 123 Rokhl Sarabski: a graduate of the city’s Yiddish Real-Gymnasium, Sarbaski taught in the ghetto schools and composed poems, several of which were set to music and turned into songs. She was shot just before the end of the war during an attempted escape from a concentration camp. 124 Tsemakh Feldshteyn (1885–1945): Yiddish and Hebrew writer and pedagogue. He directed the Hebrew high school in Kovno prior to the war, and taught in Vilna’s Real-Gymnasium starting in 1940. In the ghetto he edited the weekly Geto-yedies (Ghetto News), and also taught and lectured. He was deported to a camp in Estonia, and when the camp was liquidated was deported to Germany where he died. 125 hkP: the initials of Heereskraftfahrpark 562 (Military Motor Vehicle Repair Park), a forced-labour camp in Vilna that housed more than a thousand Jews and their families in the former Cheap Houses housing project on Subotsh Street. It continued to function even after the liquidation of the ghetto. 126 Juozas Stakauskas (1899–1972): scholar of theology and philosophy; motivated by his religious beliefs, he protected Jewish workers from the ghetto who were assigned to his office. Together with a nun (Maria Mikulska) and carpenter (Vladas Žemaitis) he prepared a hiding place for Jews on the premises of the municipal archives, then housed in a former Benedictine monastery at Ignatover Street 5. In 1974 the three were recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations. 127 The Moscow edition states fourteen survivors, and the Paris edition fifteen. 128 The Moscow edition reports this number to be around a hundred. 129 An excerpt from the Rebbe’s monologue is engraved on Peretz’s tomb in Warsaw: “So we go / singing and dancing … / We great, big Jews, / Sabbath-Festival Jews / Our souls ablaze! / Clouds split before us! / The heavens burst open their gates / We float into the Cloud of Divine Glory / All the way to the Heavenly Throne.” 130 Sutzkever demonstrates how language developed to accommodate the circumstances. Susine is derived from the Hebrew word for horse. Jews dubbed the horse rations they turned to for basic nutrition with this slightly more elevated, ironic terminology, akin to the English “equine.” 131 Ramayles yeshiva was established in the 1820s and was among the city’s most respected institutes of advanced Torah study. 132 On differences between published versions of this chapter and the original essay, see Hannah Pollin-Galay, “The Epic Demands of Postwar Yiddish: Avrom

412

133

134 135

136

137 138

Notes to PaGes 120–33

Sutzkever’s Geheymshtot,” East European Jewish Affairs 48:3 (2018), 342–6. On Sutzkever’s contribution to identifying new forms of Yiddish that developed in this period, see Hannah Pollin-Galay, “‘A Rubric of Pain Words’: Mapping Atrocity with Holocaust Yiddish Glossaries,” Jewish Quarterly Review 110:1 (winter 2020), 161–93. Leyb Opeskin (1908–1944): graduate of the city’s Yiddish Teachers Seminary. He was active in Communist circles before the war. During Soviet rule over the city he published Yiddish translations of Soviet poetry and his own poetry. In the ghetto he was a teacher and member of the underground FPo. He died during an attempted group escape from the hkP forced-labour camp. The Moscow edition says sixty-three inhabitants, and the Paris edition sixty-five. Karl Plagge (1897–1957): Nazi officer and commander of the hkP camp in Vilna. His discomfort with the genocidal treatment of Jews prompted him to provide work permits for ghetto Jews to transfer to hkP. When the ghetto was liquidated he managed to cram in almost twelve hundred Jewish workers and their families. During one of his furloughs, the SS conducted an operation against children in hkP. As the Red Army approached Vilna, Plagge tipped off the Jews in hkP about plans to exterminate them, prompting many to hide. Some two hundred and fifty hkP Jews managed to survive the SS raids on the camp. Although he was put on trial in 1947, testimonies by Jews interned at hkP led to the determination that he was not a war criminal. In 2005 Yad Vashem posthumously recognized him as a Righteous Among the Nations. The underground city that Sutzkever describes here inspired his epic, booklength poem Geheymshtot (Secret City, dated 1945–47) (Tel Aviv: Friends of the author, 1948), which details the lives of ten Jews, a symbolic quorum (minyan) for group prayer. An excerpt appears in A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, 185–97. Perhaps the pianist Rivele Bernshteyn, also a partisan fighter. The Moscow edition says two, and the Paris three. hkP and Kailis were the two major forced-labour camps remaining in Vilna after the liquidation of the ghetto. The French edition perhaps added in those several dozen Jews forced into labour at a military hospital in nearby Antokol or an even smaller number confined to work at the Gestapo headquarters.

Part Three 1 The Paris edition titles this third part: “The United Partisan Organization in the Vilna Ghetto (FPo).” The Moscow edition begins the first chapter with Communist activists forming the underground, and the Paris, with the first call to resistance. The differences between the two make Sutzkever seem to repeat himself.

Notes to PaGes 133–7

413

2 Itsik Vitenberg (1907–1943): member of the pre-war Communist underground in Poland and a political activist. During the brief Soviet rule over Vilnius he assumed trade-union responsibilities. Since he was a known Communist, he was wanted by the Germans and was forced underground. Vitenberg served as the commander of the FPo (the United Partisan Organization) in the ghetto beginning in January 1942. 3 Berl Shereshnyevski (1909–1971): member of the Communist underground in pre-war Poland, secretary of the Communist Party in the ghetto, member of the FPo, and partisan fighter in the forests. 4 Khyene Borovski (1914–1999): originally affiliated with the Zionist party HaShomer ha-Tzair, then with the Communist underground. She joined the FPo in the ghetto and later fought with the partisans in the forest. 5 Sonye Madeysker (1917–1944): a member of the Communist underground in pre-war Poland, who served time in jail for her political activities. A founder of the FPo and one of its main Communist representatives, she was a critical link between the ghetto and the Communist underground in town. She was arrested, questioned, tortured, and killed by the Gestapo just before the city’s liberation by the Red Army. 6 Yankl Kaplan (1907–1943): a member of the Communist committee in the ghetto and the FPo. He was caught attempting to escape the ghetto along with Asya Big and Avrom Khvoynik. The three of them were publicly hanged; see below: “Three Heroes.” 7 Abba Kovner’s famous appeal, read to a New Year’s Eve late-night gathering of Zionist youths on 31 December 1941. 8 Abba Kovner (1918–1987): partisan leader and Hebrew poet. He arrived in Vilna as a child and studied at the local Hebrew-language Tarbut school. He was a leader of the socialist-Zionist youth party Ha-Shomer ha-Tzair (The Young Guard). After hiding in a convent early in the German occupation he entered the ghetto to help organize the resistance. He served as deputy to Itsik Vitenberg, commander of the FPo, until the latter’s death in July 1943, and then replaced him. When the liquidation of the ghetto was imminent, Kovner dispatched many of his ghetto fighters to the forest, briefly fought the Germans in the ghetto, and then joined his comrades in the forest, where he commanded the Jewish partisan unit Nekome (Revenge). His unit committed acts of sabotage, rescued Jews, and killed Germans. He was among the first Jewish fighters to enter Vilna during its liberation on 7 July 1944. He partnered with Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski to establish a Jewish museum, secure valuable hidden cultural materials, and help Jews emigrate to Palestine. He married fellow partisan Vitke Kempner after the war. Kovner arrived in 1946 in Palestine, where he remained a notable poet and national figure. He served as a witness at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, and conceptualized the first core exhibition

414

9 10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18 19

Notes to PaGes 137–43

of Beit Hatfutsot (Museum of the Diaspora) in Tel Aviv. He was awarded the Israel Prize for Literature in 1970. Because he was a Zionist, the Soviet edition of the memoir does not acknowledge Kovner as author of this famous call. Nisan Reznik (1918–2016): a leader of the General Zionist youth movement in Pinsk prior to the war who became an FPo leader in the Vilna ghetto and then a partisan in the Narotsh Forest. His Hebrew wartime memoir, Sparks from the Ash, was released by Yad Vashem (2003). Lyube Ziskovitsh (d. 1943): an activist in the Zionist revisionist movement Betar from Oshmene. He organized a group of partisans in the Oshmene ghetto, before arriving in the Vilna ghetto, where he joined the FPo. He later fought as a partisan in the Narotsh Forest, where he was killed in battle in October 1943. Edek Boraks (1918–1943): a leader of Ha-Shomer ha-Tzair and member of the Polish army at the beginning of the war. He left Warsaw for Vilna, where he became a leader in the FPo and an organizer of the underground in the Białystok ghetto. Itsik Matskevitsh (1920–1943): a member of the Communist underground in pre-war Vilna. Sutzkever describes him later as joining FPo fighters Vitke Kempner and Moyshe Brauze in one of the first sabotage operations. He was killed with other partisans while attempting to escape to the forest. Borekh Goldshteyn (1913–1990): member of Ha-Shomer ha-Tzair prior to the war who went on to join the FPo. He escaped from an Estonian concentration camp to fight in the forest. After the war he emigrated to Palestine. Shmuel Kaplinski (1914–1999): member of the Bund (the Jewish socialist party) who commanded one of its divisions and gave weapons instruction. After the liquidation of the ghetto he fought as a partisan in the Rudnitski Forest. Lize Magun (1920–1943): a member of the Zionist Ha-Shomer ha-Tzair before the war, and then of the FPo in the ghetto. She was dispatched to the Oshmene ghetto in order to warn Jews of its imminent liquidation. She was arrested and killed by the Gestapo. The Moscow edition includes a final paragraph in this section about a secret radio and transmission station in a ghetto hideout. It appears, slightly expanded, as its own short section in the Paris edition below. Vilna-Colony (Wileńska Kolonia Kolejowa): pastoral village east of Vilna, today a parkland within the Vilnius city limits (Pavilnys). Mother Bertranda (Anna Borkowska, 1900–1988), who, along with her fellow Dominican nuns, hid seventeen Jews (including Abba Kovner) in their convent. Borkowska and her sisters also provided the first hand grenades and ammunition to the ghetto underground. She was arrested in 1943 by the Gestapo and sent to a labour camp. After the war she asked for a dispensation from her vows. She was recognized by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Among the

Notes to PaGes 144–50

20

21 22 23

24

25 26

27 28

415

Nations. See Sutzkever’s postwar story about the sisters of the Dominican order, part of his series of symbolic tales Green Aquarium (1953–54): Lider fun yam hamoves (Poems from the Sea of Death) (Tel Aviv and New York: Bergen-Belsen Press, 1968), 340–5; as “A Funeral in the Rain,” trans. Zackary Sholem Berger, In geveb (August 2015). Vitke Kempner (1920–2012): a member of Ha-Shomer ha-Tzair in Warsaw. After the German invasion of Poland she fled to Vilna, where she joined the FPo and was active in its earliest sabotage operations. With the liquidation of the ghetto she helped establish the Jewish partisan unit Nekome (Revenge) in the forest. She married the group’s commander, Abba Kovner, after her emigration to Palestine in 1946. Kovner was a Socialist-Zionist. In the Moscow edition this short section appears at the end of the chapter “The First Appeal.” Irena Adamowicz (1910–1973): a devout Polish Catholic social worker and a leader of the Polish Scouts. Even before the war she developed personal ties with the leadership of Zionist scouts in Ha-Shomer ha-Tzair. She joined the Polish Home Army during the war and was a courier between a number of ghettos. Her dangerous work earned her recognition as a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem. Jadwiga Dudziec (1912–1944): young Pole who was encouraged to join the Polish scouts by Irena Adamowicz. During the 1930s she was a member of the Catholic Youth Academic Society and of the local 13th Scout Troop. In 1937 she led a group of Jewish scouts on a camping trip. During the war she worked with the Polish Home Army and managed a workshop that employed Jews from the ghetto. She provided weapons to the partisans in various cities and towns, and helped to hide Jewish youths and children in various Catholic institutions. She was hit by shrapnel during the final battle for the liberation of Vilna and died a short time afterwards. She was recognized as a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem. Margis: code name for Vitold Senkiewicz, a Pole who was part of the command of the partisans in the Lithuanian forest. Makar Korablikov (1915–1943): a Communist active in the underground. He entered the ghetto frequently to make contact with the partisans there, and helped smuggle several Jews to safety. He was arrested, tortured, and executed by the Germans in late 1943. Posthumous Hero of the Soviet Union and recognized by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Among the Nations. Itsik Kovalski (1920–?): a member of the Revisionist Zionist organization Betar, and then of the FPo. See previous note (part I, n6) on the Cheap Houses (bilike hayzer). Only the Moscow edition includes this new chapter heading.

416

Notes to PaGes 153–64

29 The Moscow edition does not include this chapter. 30 Perhaps Anton Schmid (1900–1942), a sergeant-major in the Wehrmacht, who was arrested and shot for assisting Jews. He transported Jews from the Vilna ghetto to Białystok and Warsaw. He was honoured by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Among the Nations. 31 Khaye Grosman (1919–1996): a native of Białystok who was a member of HaShomer ha-Tzair. She arrived in Vilna after the outbreak of war. She served as an underground courier between the Vilna and Białystok ghettos, and as a leader of the uprising in the Białystok ghetto. 32 The PPr (Polish Workers’ Party) was a communist party established secretly in Nazi-occupied Warsaw in January 1942. 33 A hectograph device made multiple copies of a document using a gelatin plate. 34 Only the Paris edition includes specific numbers. The Moscow edition notes “millions of armed Soviet soldiers.” 35 The first secret print shop, in Przewalski’s home outside the ghetto, went into operation on 1 May 1943. 36 Salek Desler (d. 1943): Jewish chief of ghetto police, and one of the most despised men in the ghetto. He briefly took over as the last head of the ghetto after Jacob Gens was killed by the Gestapo on 14 September 1943. He later attempted to flee but was also executed. 37 Lines 1–10 trans. Leo Schwarz in The Root and the Bough: The Epic of an Enduring People (New York and Toronto: Rinehart & Co., 1949), 68; lines 11–16 trans. Elliot Palevsky in Mir trogn a gezang: The New Book of Yiddish Song, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Education Department of the Workmen’s Circle, 1977), 191; quoted in David Roskies, The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 485–6. 38 Hirsh Glik (1922–1944): young poet and member of Ha-Shomer ha-Tzair. Before the war he belonged to the Yiddish literary group Yungvald (Young Forest), which was mentored by members of Yung-Vilne, including Sutzkever. His lyrics for the “Partisan Hymn” are among the most famous words penned in the ghetto and underscore the intimate bond between cultural and military resistance. When the ghetto was liquidated, he was deported to a camp in Estonia where he died. A posthumous volume of his collected poems, Lider un poemes, appeared in 1953. 39 The Warsaw ghetto uprising actually started on 19 April 1943. That the Jews in the Vilna ghetto took inspiration from it while it was still unfolding demonstrates the intense clandestine contact between Jewish communities. 40 The literal translation of the title is “Take Hold of the Iron.” Given the ghetto’s scarcity of weapons and ammunition, the poem suggests that any kind of improvised device – homemade combustibles, knives, axes, whatever – could be used for self-defence.

Notes to PaGes 164–8

417

41 For more on Sutzkver and his comrades’ work as forced labourers in the Rosenberg Task Force see David Fishman, The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis (Lebanon, Nh: ForeEdge, 2017). Sutzkever was among a group of Jewish intellectuals charged with sorting materials looted from Jewish libraries and archives for the Germans. Instead, they secretly ferreted the most valuable cultural treasures into secret caches, many of them in the ghetto, earning them the nickname the “Paper Brigade,” since their smuggling involved books and manuscripts, in addition to weapons. 42 Mussolini was deposed on 25 July 1943. 43 Alfred Landau (1850–1935): Yiddish linguist and philologist who spent his professional career in Vienna. After his death his personal papers were sent to YIvo, from which researchers hoped to realize Landau’s aspiration to publish a Yiddish etymological dictionary. 44 Reyzl (Ruzka, Rozka) Korczak (1921–1988): a central figure in the ghetto underground. Korczak was a pre-war member of Ha-Shomer ha-Tzair from Plotsk. She arrived in Vilna, via Warsaw, after the outbreak of war. She was at the first planning meeting that led to the FPo. When the ghetto was liquidated she joined the partisan unit Nekome (Revenge) in the Rudnitski Forest under the command of Kovner. She was among the first Jewish partisans to enter Vilna in the battle for its liberation. She emigrated to Palestine in 1944, and became one of the earliest resistance fighters to report on the extermination of the Jews to Zionist leaders there. Her Yiddish memoirs (never printed) were published in Hebrew as Lehavot ba’efer (Flames in the Ash, 1946). They describe life in the partisan resistance in the Narotsh and Rudnitski Forests. After her death Sutzkever wrote a poem in her memory: “Ruzhke,” Der yoyresh fun regn (Tel-Aviv: Di goldene keyt, 1992), 19. 45 Esther-Rokhl Kaminska (1870–1925): leading actress and central figure in the emergence of Yiddish theatre in late tsarist Russia and early interwar Poland. She was best known for her title role (“the Jewish Queen Lear”) in Jacob Gordon’s play Mirele Efros. By the end of her career she was widely acknowledged as “the mother of Yiddish theatre.” After her death, YIvo’s theatre collection was named in her memory. 46 Maurycy Minkowski (1881 or 1882–1930): Polish-Jewish painter noted for depicting Jewish life, especially Jewish refugees from Odessa and Białystok. 47 Sutzkever misremembers the chronology. The so-called Vitenberg Affair (see below) took place 9–17 July 1943. However, above Sutzkever states that the German commission visited YIvo on the day Mussolini was deposed, 25 July 1943. 48 Sutzkever is not precise about individuals’ identities here or on the previous page. It is likely Rokhl Krinski, whose young daughter, Sore, had been placed in the care of her non-Jewish nanny. The nanny used to stroll past the YIvo building with the child so that her mother could catch a glimpse of her.

418

Notes to PaGes 170–7

49 The Moscow edition does not mention their names. 50 It is possible that Vitenberg was initially identified as a member of the Communist underground rather than as commander of the Jewish FPo within the ghetto. His arrest came shortly after two non-Jewish Communists were arrested and tortured by the Gestapo. 51 Sutzkever’s poem “Itsik Vitenberg” (dated 16 July 1944), written upon the poet’s return to a liberated Vilna, marked the first anniversary of Vitenberg’s death. See Sutzkever, Poetishe verk (Tel Aviv: Jubilee Committee, 1963), vol. 1, 376–81. The Gestapo’s demand that Vitenberg be turned over after he escaped arrest was the single most devastating crisis for the underground and the ghetto. Some argued that a refusal to turn him over could endanger the entire ghetto, while others could not conceive of voluntarily giving up the commander of the partisans to the Gestapo. The controversy pitted the underground against the fears of the civilian population. On 16 July 1943, seeing that the resistance might lose the support of the ghetto population were he to hold out, Vitenberg volunteered to turn himself in. Historians cannot agree about exactly how he died. Did he take cyanide with him to take his own life before he could be tortured and possibly give up valuable information under questioning? Was he poisoned by Jacob Gens (ghetto representative), Salek Desler (chief of the ghetto police), or another interested party who feared what he might reveal? Or was he tortured to death by the Gestapo, refusing to submit to their questions? Here, Sutzkever chooses to portray Vitenberg as a victim of brutal Nazi torture who died protecting his comrades in the FPo. This strategy furthered Sutzkever’s construction of a postwar collective memory that modelled self-sacrifice. 52 Shike Gertman (1921–1943): part of the underground in the Sventsyan ghetto who escaped to the Vilna ghetto. He guided partisan units seeking to escape the ghetto to the Narotsh Forest. He took his own life during a battle in November 1943 to avoid falling into enemy hands. 53 Vaivara: the largest of almost two dozen concentration and labour camps established in Estonia. During its brief period of operation (August 1943– February 1944) many Jews from the Vilna and Kovno ghettos were deported there. 54 Ilye Sheynboym (code name Yehiel, 1914–1943): beginning spring 1942 commanded the underground Yehiel’s Battle Group, consisting of members of the Zionist Hehalutz Hatsa’ir Dror. It sought contact with the partisans so as to join them in the forest, and it became an autonomous FPo unit in spring 1943. Sheynboym was killed in battle at the partisan barricade at Strashun Street 12 on 1 September 1943. 55 A wooded area located east of the ghetto. 56 Zelde Treger (1919–1987): a member of Ha-Shomer ha-Tzair and graduate of the city’s Hebrew Tarbut school. In the early days of German occupation she passed as a farmer and was registered as a non-Jew. She spent seven months living outside

Notes to PaGes 179–89

57 58 59 60 61

62 63

419

the ghetto before sneaking in to join its underground. She served as a courier first between various partisan positions in the ghetto and later, after joining the Nekome Jewish partisan brigade in the forest, between the partisans and the remaining ghetto fighters who were seeking an escape route. During the final liquidation of the ghetto (September 1943), she helped guide many FPo members to the forest, making eighteen round trips, often alone, on rescue missions, for weapons, or to acquire medicines. After the war, she helped organize and smuggle survivors to Palestine, where she settled in 1946. The Paris edition does not include this new chapter heading and continues the narrative without it. Asya Big (1922–1943): a member of the Bund and of the FPo. She was hanged along with her colleagues on 24 September 1943. See Sutzkever’s memorial poem to the three fighters, “Subotsh-gas tsvantsik” (20 Subotsh Street, dated December 1944), in Lider fun yam hamoves, 143–5. The Moscow edition states 100 kilometres, and the Paris version 130. Yitskhok Rudnitski (now Yitzhak Arad, 1926– ): pre-war Zionist youth who joined partisans under Russian Colonel Markov in February 1943. He smuggled himself into the Vilna ghetto in April 1943 to establish contact with Abba Kovner, and continued to fight with the partisans until war’s end. Afterwards he emigrated to Palestine, rose up the ranks of the Israel Defense Forces to brigadier-general, served 1972–93 as director of Yad Vashem, and lectured at Tel Aviv University. His historical works include Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the Holocaust. A reference, borrowing from the language of Soviet propaganda, to groups of anti-Communist Polish nationalists. See Sutzkever’s poem about the Narotsh Forest, where he served as a partisan after escaping the ghetto: “Narotsher vald” (Narotsh Forest, dated 9 October 1943), in Laughter beneath the Forest: Poems from Old and New Manuscripts, trans. Barnett Zumoff (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1996), 40–1.

Part Four 1 Klooga: a forced-labour sub-camp of the Vaivara concentration camp in Estonia. A number of Vilna Jews were deported to Klooga after the liquidation of the ghetto. When the Red Army advanced on the camp in September 1944, its remaining inmates were shot and burned on wooden pyres. 2 The Paris edition locates the sorting on Subotsh Street. 3 The Moscow and Paris editions list different names, so I synthesize the two. The chapter that follows on Zelig Kalmanovitsh was not in the Paris edition. 4 Moyshe Lerer (1895–1944): a specialist in folklore who worked as YIvo’s representative in Warsaw, and later at its headquarters in Vilna. He published

420

5

6 7

8 9 10 11

12 13 14

15

Notes to PaGes 191–216

widely in the Polish-Yiddish press about folklore and philology. When Vilna came under Lithuanian rule in late 1939, Lerer replaced Kalmanovitsh as director of YIvo, and he later served as its commissar during the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, which pitted him against other long-time YIvo staffers, including Kalmanovitsh. He spent time at a labour camp digging peat, and was then returned to the ghetto, where he contributed broadly to its cultural life. According to witnesses, Lerer and Kalmanovitsh spent their last days together at the Kiviõli concentration camp, and finally the Narva subcamp, both in Estonia. Lerer was the husband of Ume Olkenitski, the graphic artist. A handwritten testimony of Frume Burshteyn’s experiences, dated 8 September 1944, can be found in arC 4:1703 149: 1–4, Sutzkever Archive, Collection of Vilna Ghetto Documents, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. Richter: SS Oberscharführer who assumed command of the Kailis labour camp in November 1943. The narrative here shows how the Germans consciously deployed language to dehumanize people, even after their victims were dead. The word “Figuren” can refer variously to units, items, or pieces. Sutzkever calls the fellow “Mikhelman” in the Paris edition. In fact the second ghetto was liquidated at the end of October 1941, but some of its victims may not have arrived at Ponar until early November. The Paris edition mentions Dogim but not Gol here. The Paris version states the distance as 72–80 metres. Recent archaeological excavation of the site with ground-scanning technology confirms the Moscow edition’s figure of 30-some metres. Sutzkever received this estimate from survivors, who had no means to measure their progress accurately, especially since the tunnel was not totally level and in places turned vertically. The Paris version says 30 metres. Sutzkever dates the escape to 19 May in the Paris edition, but it actually took place on 15 April. A photograph of this document appears in Leyzer Ran, ed., Yerushalayim de-Lite ilustrirt un dokumentirt (The Jerusalem of Lithuania Illustrated and Documented) (New York: Vilna Album Committee, 1974), 450. The letter can be found in the Sutzkever-Kaczerginski Collection, rG 223, File 743, YIvo Institute for Jewish Research, New York. For a longer, published excerpt, see Shmerke Kaczerginski, Khurbn Vilne (The Destruction of Vilna) (New York: CYCo, 1947), 55–7. Kaczerginski too edits out certain details: “These lines cannot be reprinted because they describe sado-sexual habits that the German murderers performed on children.” However, unlike Kaczerginski, Sutzkever excises the letter’s ending, where the writers request that it be turned over not to just any surviving Jews (as Sutzkever’s edition has it), but to “the Jewish militia [partisans] to exact revenge on that merciless woman, who is responsible

Notes to PaGes 217–38

421

for so much blood. Our thirty children were murdered. Now she, along with her two sons and her daughter, must die … We don’t know her family name. Her first name is Marisia, a widow with three children, two boys and a girl, residing at Groys-Pohulyanke Street 34, next to the Heart of Jesus Church, on the left side of the courtyard. The watchman’s name at the courtyard is Rincewicz. Everyone knows her, that extortionist.” Jewish partisans fulfilled the letter-writers’ request by executing her in the street. See Abba Kovner, “A Plea to Our Jewish Brothers and Sisters,” D.1.4.94, Moreshet Archive, Givat Haviva, Israel. 16 Dovid Bergelson (1884–1952): widely acclaimed modernist Yiddish novelist who contributed significantly to Yiddish culture in revolutionary Kiev, then in Berlin, before he settled in the ussr . During the Second World War, he, like other prominent Jewish writers, joined the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. He was executed on 12 August 1952 along with several other leading Soviet Yiddish writers. “Der toyber” was his first Yiddish story, written in 1906 and published in 1910. 17 Ilya Ginsburg (1859–1939): Russian Jewish sculptor who was influenced by Antokolski and spent most of his career in St Petersburg. He specialized in portrait busts of great writers, artists, musicians, and others. In 1891 he visited Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, where he made a bust of him and a statuette. Ginsburg was a founder of the Jewish Society for the Promotion of the Arts in 1915, and after the Revolution a professor at the Leningrad Academy of Arts and dean of its sculpture division. Five of his statues were rescued by members of the Paper Brigade to which Sutzkever belonged. 18 See Sutzkever’s poem “Di mirmlne statue” (The Marble Statue), in Lider fun yam hamoves (Poems from the Sea of Death) (Tel Aviv and New York: BergenBelsen Press, 1968), 389–91.

Diary Notes 1 First published as A. Sutzkever, “Mayn eydes-zogn farn nirnberger tribunal,” Di goldene keyt 54 (1966), 5–16; translated here from Avrom Sutzkever, Baym leyenen penimer (Face Reading) (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1993), 150–66. 2 For a poetic interpretation of these experiences, see his series “Sodom” (BerlinNuremberg, Fürth, Landsberg, February-April 1946), in Lider fun yam hamoves (Poems from the Sea of Death) (Tel Aviv and New York: Bergen-Belsen Press, 1968), 557–66. 3 Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967): among the most renowned Soviet journalists and writers. He arranged for Sutzkever and Freydke’s March 1944 rescue from the forest near Vilna (where they had been with a partisan unit since escaping the ghetto liquidation in September 1943) and flight to Moscow. His essay about Sutzkever in Pravda in April 1944 brought the writer’s name and the experience

422

4

5 6 7 8

9

10 11

12

13 14

Notes to PaGes 238–43

of Vilna Jewry to a broad readership. Ehrenburg was a leading figure of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JaFC) and served as editor (along with Vasily Grossman) of The Black Book until his resignation from the project. Emilia Teumin (1905–1952): member of the JaFC and of the international department of the Sovinformburo. She was arrested after the war and executed during Stalin’s purges of leading JaFC members. Sovinformburo: the chief propaganda office of the wartime Soviet Union. Likely reference to I.F. Khomich, Soviet officer and Pow, who later published a memoir about his experiences during the Second World War. Lev Smirnov (1911–1986): Soviet assistant chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials and later chairman of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union. Iossif (Joseph) Orbeli (1887–1961): Soviet-Armenian scholar, archaeologist, and historian, who became director of the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad in 1934. Babi (Babyn) Yar: ravine on the outskirts of Kiev and site of one of the largest massacres of the Holocaust, where, on 29–30 September 1941, almost thirty-four thousand Jews were shot to death. The site continued to be used to kill Jews, prisoners of war, and political prisoners until the Red Army liberated Kiev in November 1943. Estimates are that more than a hundred thousand victims were shot at Babi Yar. A reference to Grosslazarett 301, a German prisoner-of-war camp in Ukraine where tens of thousands of Red Army prisoners died. Andrei Smirnov, a German specialist at the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, organized and prepared a diverse group of witnesses. Orbeli, Dmitriev, and Lomakin had contributed to the Extraordinary State Commission for Ascertaining and Investigating German-Fascist Crimes in the ussr , which was collecting evidence. Kivelisha and Tarkovski were included to provide evidence about German treatment of Soviet prisoners of war, and Grigoriev to testify about German brutality against Soviet civilians. Budnik was initially the only Jew in the group. Authorities added Sutzkever and replaced two previous selections with testimony by Seweryna Szmaglewska, a Polish woman interned at Auschwitz, and Samuel Rajzman, who was deported to Treblinka from the Warsaw ghetto. See Francine Hirsch, Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). Sutzkever draws attention to a pun: in German the words for “sun” and “zone” sound similar. He is referring here to the division of Germany into four Alliedoccupation zones. A reference to the Boeing b-17 heavy bombers used by the United States and Allied air forces in the Second World War. Roman Rudenko (1907–1981): chief Soviet prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials.

Notes to PaGes 243–68

15 16 17

18

19 20 21

22

23

423

He was procurator-general of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic beginning in 1944, and later held the same post for the Soviet Union. American chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson. Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528): foremost painter, printmaker, and theoretician of the German Renaissance. Syrets: German concentration camp opened in 1942 on the northwestern edge of Kiev, near Babi Yar. Jews from the camp were ordered to remove all traces of the mass murder of Kiev’s Jewish population in the Babi Yar ravine. Paul Radomski (1902–1945): commander of the Syrets concentration camp in Kiev who was considered brutal even by his fellow SS officers. He terrorized prisoners and was moved to command a concentration camp near Athens after he threatened to kill his own deputy in Syrets. Geoffrey Lawrence (1880–1971): chief British judge and president of the judicial group at the Nuremberg Trials. Julius Streicher (1885–1946): major Nazi ideologue and publisher of the antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer. He was convicted at Nuremberg and executed. Hans Frank (1900–1946): governor-general of occupied Poland, responsible for civil administration. Tried and convicted as a war criminal at Nuremberg and executed on 16 October 1946. Ernst Kaltenbrunner (1903–1946): chief of the Reich Main Security Office starting January 1943, overseeing the Gestapo. Tried and convicted as a war criminal at Nuremberg and executed on 16 October 1946. A reference to the flag of the Zionist movement that was raised over the former property of Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher.

Testimony at the Nuremberg Trials 1 Trial of Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, vol. 8 (Nuremberg: International Military Tribunal, 1947), 302–8. 2 The court transcriber mishears Sutzkever’s testimony, confusing Galonsky Alley with Gaona and Shabelsky with Shavelske.

Ilya Ehrenburg 1 First published as “Ilya Ehrenburg: A kapitl zikhroynes fun di yorn 1944–1946,” Di goldene keyt 61 (1967): 21–37; translated here from “Ilya Ehrenburg,” in Avrom Sutzkever, Baym leyenen penimer (Face Reading) (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1993), 129–49. 2 Ilya Ehrenburg, “Torzhestvo cheloveka,” Pravda (29 April 1944), 4. For a translation of the article see Joshua Rubenstein, “Il’ia Ehrenburg and the Holocaust in the Soviet Press,” in Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh, eds.,

424

3

4

5 6

7

8

9

Notes to PaGe 270

Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering (Brighton, ma: Academic Studies Press, 2014), 41–5 Joseph Roth (1884–1939): born into a Jewish family, Roth was a Germanlanguage journalist and novelist, whose most famous works deal with the decline of the Habsburg Empire (Radetzky March, 1932). His reportage Wandering Jews (1927) and novel of Jewish life Job (1930) were noted portraits of interwar Jewish life. Yoysef Tshernikhov (1882–1941): prominent Vilna attorney, intellectual, communal leader, and co-founder of the Frayland-lige (Freeland League), the umbrella organization of the Territorialist movement, dedicated to securing territory for the mass emigration of eastern European Jews to lands where they could maintain an autonomous, secular Jewish culture. Sutzkever was a friend of Tshernikhov’s son, and the two spent time at the family’s dacha enjoying the countryside and reading world literature together. Tshernikhov was arrested when the Soviets occupied Vilna in 1939. When the Germans attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, Tshernikhov was shot by his Soviet guard. See “Bashafung” (dated 1935), in Poetishe verk (Tel Aviv: Jubilee Committee, 1963), vol. 1, 25–6. Sutzkever’s account of Roth’s life is not entirely correct. Roth died in May 1939 from acute alcoholism. He did not marry his long-time partner, Andrea Manga Bell, but lived with her until 1937, after his marriage to Friedl Richter fell apart due to her severe mental illness. Manga Bell was an exotic figure, daughter of a black Cuban musician and a German woman of Huguenot descent. Julian Tuwim (1894–1953): among the most popular interwar Polish-language poets. He belonged to the modernist literary group Skamander and the circle of the influential literary journal Wiadomości Literackie. Though fully assimilated into Polish culture and ambivalent about his Jewishness and the Yiddish language, his interwar writing frequently touched on Jewish themes. My, Żydzi Polscy (We, Polish Jews), written in exile in 1944, affirmed his solidarity with Polish Jewry and later became part of the canon of Holocaust literature. Yekhiel Yeshaye Trunk (1887–1961): prolific Yiddish memoirist, essayist, literary critic, and short-story writer based in interwar Warsaw. Trunk was an influential figure in both the local Yiddish PeN club and in the Yiddish literary union. He and his wife escaped the city in 1939 and lived briefly in Vilna before making it to New York via Siberia and Japan. He is best remembered for his sevenvolume Poyln (Poland), one of the most comprehensive Yiddish memoirs of Polish Jewry. Moyshe Broderzon (1890–1956): Yiddish poet and dramaturge. Although his first book appeared on the eve of the First World War, he made his mark as an innovative poet as part of the Moscow Circle of Jewish Writers and Artists in 1918, and then as a founding member in 1919 of the literary circle Yung-Yidish

Notes to PaGes 270–2

10 11

12

13

14 15

425

in Łódź, where he remained a central figure in that city’s Yiddish cultural life. He co-founded the city’s wildly popular Ararat (Artistic Revolutionary RevueTheatre). He escaped Łódź in September 1939 for Białystok, and then fled into Soviet central Asia. He taught at the State Yiddish Theatre (Goset) in Moscow in 1944, and was arrested in 1950 during Stalin’s anti-semitic terror. He was released in 1955 but died soon after his repatriation to Poland. See Sutzkever, Poetishe verk, vol. 1, 166–7; A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, 108–9. Sutzkever’s poem, dated 6 February 1943, later appeared in the Soviet Union as “Kolnidre,” in Tsum zig: Literarisher zamlbukh (Moscow: Der Emes, 1944), 277–93; see also Lider fun yam hamoves (Poems from the Sea of Death, 1968), 161–81. For excerpts in translation see Joseph Leftwich, Abraham Sutzkever: Partisan Poet (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1971), 68–72. The poem was inspired by the roundup and murder of approximately four thousand Jews, timed to coincide with Yom Kippur 1941. This extended monologue conveys in stark detail the brutality of Nazi extermination units and the struggle of the faithful to retain their beliefs in a world of unimaginable horrors. Its climax occurs when its religiously observant speaker discovers that his son, who left home many years earlier for the Soviet Union, also has been captured and as a Red Army soldier faces imminent torture. To prevent his suffering at Nazi hands, the father plunges a knife into him. With echoes of the biblical binding of Isaac, Job’s suffering, Ezekiel’s Valley of Dry Bones, and the High Holiday liturgy, Sutzkever’s work integrates contemporary destruction with pre-existing tropes of Jewish suffering, catastrophe, and liturgical imagination. That the poem’s observant speaker relates the entire incident to a ghetto writer is a metapoetic gesture, which establishes Sutzkever as the recipient of testimony and a voice for those who have been rendered voiceless. Shmuel Halkin (1897–1960): influential Soviet Yiddish poet, translator, and playwright. During the war, Halkin was a leading member of the Jewish AntiFascist Committee (JaFC), sat on the editorial board of its Yiddish newspaper, Eynikayt (Unity), and wrote some of the finest early Yiddish Holocaust poetry composed on Soviet soil. He was arrested in 1949 as part of Stalin’s terror against Jewish intellectuals, and released from a prison camp only in 1955. Sutzkever was a great admirer of Halkin’s aesthetic style. Semyon Gudzenko (1922–1953): Russian-language Jewish poet. His anthology, Regiment Comrades (1944), represented the experience of ordinary Red Army soldiers. An area near Vilna known for its forested hills. Osip Mandelshtam (1891–1938): Russian-language poet, memoirist, critic, and translator, one of the most influential writers of the early Soviet Union. His initial refusal to accommodate his writing to the regime’s demands led to his

426

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

Notes to PaGes 272–3

arrest in 1934, and his efforts to ingratiate himself back into formal literary life concluded with a second arrest in 1938. Though baptized in 1911 (at one time considering himself a Christian Jew) he remained interested in the fate of the Jews and saw himself as a poet-prophet. Moyshe Kulbak (1896–1937): beloved Yiddish poet, novelist, and playwright who influenced literary circles in Berlin and Vilna, before settling in Minsk in 1928. Born in Smorgon – like Sutzkever – he taught in Vilna’s Yiddish secular high school. His poem “Shtot” (City) became an instant classic of Yiddish revolutionary poetry; his epic Raysn (White Russia) claimed eastern European landscapes as Yiddish homeland; and his ode “Vilna” was part of that city’s mythopoetics. Kulbak was arrested and shot during the Stalinist purges of 1937. Isaac Babel (1894–1940): Russian-Jewish writer and playwright who rocketed to fame with stories inspired by his experiences in the Soviet-Polish War of 1919–20 (collected as Red Cavalry in 1926). These tales overflow with Jewish characters and questions about the fate of the Jews in revolutionary times, and his stories about the Jewish underworld of Odessa became staples of modern Jewish fiction. Unable to reconcile himself to Stalinist policies and terror, he declared himself a “master of silence” in 1934. He was arrested in 1939 and executed by the Soviet regime in 1940. Boris Pilnyak (1894–1938): Russian writer who achieved fame while young for The Naked Year (1922), one of the earliest novels to depict the Russian civil war of 1918–20. Aside from Gorky, he was among the most read living Soviet writers, despite accusations of counterrevolutionary tendencies. He was arrested in 1937, forced to confess to a plot to kill Stalin, and executed in 1938. Boris Pasternak (1890–1960): recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1958), Pasternak was a highly assimilated Jew and prominent Russian-language avantgarde poet. He is best remembered in the West for his novel about the Russian civil war of 1918–20, Doctor Zhivago, which was banned in the Soviet Union. Andrei Zhdanov (1896–1948): appointed by Stalin to lead the cultural policy of the Soviet Union and considered its chief propagandist. In 1947 the Zhadnov Doctrine stated that the world was divided between two hostile camps, an imperialist and anti-democratic camp led by the United States and an antiimperialist and democratic camp led by the ussr . Pavel Antokolski (1896–1978): Soviet poet, theatre director, and translator; grandnephew of the Russian-Jewish sculptor Mark Antokolski. His travels to Ukraine in 1943 and to eastern Poland and liberated death camps in late 1944 made him a direct witness to the extermination of eastern European Jewry, which he wrote about for mainstream Soviet publications in 1945–46. Alexandr Gerasimov (1881–1963): heroic-realist Soviet artist who depicted such revolutionary leaders as Lenin. His painting Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin earned him the Stalin Prize in 1941.

Notes to PaGes 273–7

427

23 Khorloogiin Choibalsan (1895–1952): leader of the Mongolian People’s Republic who instigated mass purges against so-called opponents of the revolution in the 1930s. 24 Leonid Govorov (1897–1955): Soviet military commander who rose to prominence in 1941 during the Battle of Moscow and then took command of the Leningrad Front in April 1942. In 1944 he was appointed marshal of the Soviet Union, its highest military rank. 25 Shaul Tchernichovsky (1875–1943): Russian-born Hebrew translator and, with Bialik, the leading Hebrew poet of his generation, he settled in Palestine in 1931. Greatly influenced by classical Greek literature, he is often credited with returning Hebrew poetry to nature. 26 Konstantin Simonov (1915–1975): Soviet playwright, war correspondent, and poet. His poem “Wait for Me,” about a soldier asking his beloved to await his return from battle, was among the most famous Russian wartime poems. Stepan Shchipachev (1899–1980): Soviet poet. His volumes Front Verses (1942) and Strings of Love (1945) were very popular during the Great Patriotic War. Alexei Surkov (1899–1983): Soviet poet whose experiences as a war correspondent resulted in a series of poems that were adapted into songs, including “The March of the Defenders of Moscow” and “The Song of the Brave Ones.” 27 Mikhail Sholokhov (1905–1984): Soviet novelist, who earned an international reputation for And Quiet Flows the Don about the Don Cossacks during the Great War and the Russian Civil War of 1918–20. He was a leading figure of socialist realism, reputedly on good terms with Stalin. He was elected to the Supreme Soviet (parliament) of the Soviet Union in 1937, and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965. 28 Aleksey Tolstoy (1883–1945): Russian and Soviet writer, known for his historical novels and science fiction. His trilogy, The Road to Calvary, was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1943. After his death, the Soviet prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials looked to Tolstoy’s investigation of German war crimes for evidence that the use of mobile gas vans was part of a genocidal policy. 29 “Rede fun Sutzkever,” Eynikayt, 6 April 1944; an expanded text of Sutzkever’s speech can be read in Dos yidishe folk in kamf kegn fashizm (Moscow: Der Emes, 1945), 60–2. 30 Der Nister (The Hidden One): pseudonym of Pinkhes Kahanovitsh, 1884–1950. Master Yiddish prose writer, best known for his symbolist stories and for his late novel, The Family Mashber. During the Second World War he was a member of the JaFC in Moscow. He was arrested in 1949 and died in a Soviet prison hospital. 31 The girl referred to here is Fanya Fishman, originally from Rovno (now Rivne, Ukraine). Her mother and two sisters were killed during the mass slaughters,

428

32

33

34

35

36 37

38

39 40 41

Notes to PaGes 278–82

while she and her father escaped to the forest. When her father died, she was looked after by a unit of partisans. Ehrenburg was moved by her story and had her brought to Moscow, where he took her in. After the war he arranged to find her surviving brothers. When the brothers chose to emigrate to Palestine, Fanya decided to stay behind with Ehrenburg’s widowed and childless daughter, Irina, who adopted her in spring 1945. Elishe Rodin (1888–1946): Among the last remaining Hebrew poets in the Soviet Union. During the late 1920s and into the 1930s his Hebrew poems appeared in various publications in Mandate Palestine, leading to his imprisonment. When his son died on the front in March 1942, he compiled the volume La-Ben (To My Son) (Tel Aviv, 1943). He served briefly as a translator for the JaFC. See Sutkzever’s untranslated essay “Bagegenishn mit Elishe Rodin” (Encounters with Elishe Rodin), Di goldene keyt 45 (1962): 170–5. See Sutzkever’s poem “Remembrances of Pasternak,” in Lider fun togbukh (Diary Poems) (Tel Aviv: Di goldene keyt, 1977), 72; The Full Pomegranate: Poems of Avrom Sutzkever, trans. Richard Fein (Albany: suNY Press, 2019), 170–1. As a war reporter, Ehrenburg reached Vilnius even before Sutzkever. A photograph of Ehrenburg surrounded by Jewish partisans soon after the city’s liberation appeared in the JaFC’s Eynikayt, on 27 July 1944. Maksim Litvinov (1876–1951): Jewish revolutionary, prominent Soviet diplomat, Stalin’s foreign minister, 1930–39, and ambassador to the United States 1941–43. Shakhne Epshteyn (1883–1945): executive secretary of the JaFC and editor 1942–48 of its newspaper, Eynikayt. Yitskhok Nusinov (1889–1950): Soviet Yiddish and Russian Marxist literary critic who wrote influential works on the classic writers of modern Yiddish fiction. Nusinov belonged to the JaFC, was arrested in 1949, and died under interrogation in 1950. See “Farfroyene yidn” (Frozen Jews, dated Moscow, 10 July 1944), in Lider fun yam hamoves, 119–20, and “Der geto-fidler” (The Ghetto Fiddler, dated 17 June 1943), in Lider fun yam hamoves, 76–8; as “Frozen Jews,” in A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. and intro. by Benjamin Harshav; trans. Barbara Harshav (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 181–2, and Still My Word Sings: Poems, trans. and ed. Heather Valencia (Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf University Press, 2017), 108–11. The actual letter can be found in “Letters: Ilya Ehrenburg,” arC 4:1565 (1 / 1371), Sutzkever Archive, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. The Germans took many items from the Smolensk museum to Vilna in 1942. Sutzkever concealed some of them during his work with the Paper Brigade. From Pravda, 14 April 1945, written by Georgi Aleksandrov (1908–1961), head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (1940–47).

Notes to PaGes 282–5

429

42 Ehrenburg’s Yiddish anthology of materials documenting German crimes in occupied Soviet lands had the same title: Ilya Ehrenburg, ed., Merder fun felker (Murderer of Peoples), vols. 1 and 2 (Moscow: Der Emes, 1944–45). It included excerpts intended for The Black Book. 43 When Sutzkever’s essay on Ehrenburg was republished in Baym leyen penimer, he added that Yad Vashem published The Black Book in Jerusalem variously in Russian (1980), Yiddish (1984), and Hebrew (1991). 44 Vyacheslav Molotov (1890–1986): Stalin’s minister of foreign affairs 1939–49. 45 Goering was convicted by the Nuremberg Tribunal. The night before his execution he ingested cyanide and took his own life. One theory is that a German woman persuaded one of the guards to provide him with medicine that was, in fact, poison. 46 For more on the accusations against Ehrenburg, see Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 253–76, 312–18. Although Ehrenburg in Pravda in 1948 condemned Jewish nationalism (for critics, evidence of his collaboration in closing the JaFC), in the Committee’s newspaper, Eynikayt, also in 1948, he described himself as “a Soviet citizen, a Russian writer, and a Jew.” See Redlich, Propaganda and Nationalism in Wartime Russia: The Jewish Antifascist Committee in the USSR, 1941–1948 (Boulder, Co: East European Quarterly, 1982), 95.

Peretz Markish and His Circle 1 First published as “Peretz Markish un zayn svive,” Di goldene keyt 43 (1962): 27–46; translated here from Sutzkever, Baym leyenen penimer (Face Reading) (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1993), 63–90. 2 Peretz Markish (1895–1952): leading revolutionary and avant-garde Yiddish expressionist poet and essayist. He was a key member of the Kiev Group of Yiddish Writers in 1918 and contributed to its journal, Eygns. When he relocated to Warsaw he became an influential voice in the modernist group Khalyastre (The Gang). During the early 1920s he also spent time in Berlin, Paris, and Palestine before returning to the Soviet Union in 1926. From 1939 to 1943 he headed the Yiddish section of the Soviet Writers Union. He served on the executive committee of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JaFC), and on the editorial board of its newspaper, Eynikayt (Unity). His epic poem, Milkhome (War, 1948), appeared months before his arrest in 1949. He was executed along with several other leading Yiddish writers and Jewish intellectuals on 12 August 1952. 3 Tlomackie 13 was the address of the Association of Yiddish Writers and Journalists in Warsaw. 4 Isaac Meyer Vaysenberg (1881–1938): Polish-born Yiddish prose master whose novella A Shtetl (1906) redefined this mythopoetic space through naturalist descriptions and psychological engagement with the politics of the 1905 Russian

430

5

6

7

8

9

Notes to PaGes 286–90

revolution, and the effects of the Łódź insurrection in June. Vaysenberg, based in Warsaw, served as a mentor, critic, and leading representative of Polish Yiddish letters between the wars. “Di kupe” (The Mound, 1921 / 22) – an extraordinary example of Yiddish literature of destruction – was Markish’s response to massacres of Jews during the Polish-Russian war of 1919–20. In one such pogrom in Horoditsh, bodies of murdered Jews were piled into a mound and left untouched for several days. Like Bialik’s “City of Slaughter” about the Kishinev pogrom, Markish’s “The Mound” served as a foundational text for writers in the ghettos. Milkhome (War) (Moscow, 1948): Markish’s epic war poem combines Jewish and Soviet resistance to the Nazis with the harrowing experience of the destruction of eastern European Jewry. Fragments first appeared in the collection Tsum zig (To Victory) (Moscow: Der Emes, 1944). After Markish’s execution the poem was republished in two volumes in New York in 1956. Just before his arrest in 1949 he completed the drama Der ufshtand fun geto (Ghetto Uprising), inspired by events in Vilna. Izi Kharik (1898–1937): among the most influential interwar Soviet Yiddish poets, he spent most of his literary career in Minsk. He was arrested in 1937 and executed in Stalin’s Great Purges. Yisroel Tsinberg (1873–1938 / 39): Jewish literary historian and Yiddish critic, author of the monumental, multi-volume Di geshikhte fun der literatur bay yidn (A History of Jewish Literature, 1929– ). During the early Soviet period he was the academic secretary of the Jewish university in Petrograd. After all independent Jewish institutions were shuttered, he continued to hold a salon for those interested in Jewish culture. He was accused of counter-revolutionary activities and arrested in 1938, dying in a transit camp. Moyshe Litvakov (1875 or 1880–1939): leading Soviet Yiddish literary critic; executed by the Soviet regime in 1939. After Vilna’s liberation in July 1944, Sutzkever helped to rescue cultural treasures hidden in the ghetto by the Paper Brigade (which included him) and to house these objects in the new Jewish museum he co-founded, first in the apartment he shared with Shmerke Kaczerginski. Their struggle with the local authorities to protect tens of thousands of rare manuscripts, books, ephemera, and artworks helped convince him that Jewish life had no future in postwar Soviet Vilnius. Solomon Lozovskii (1878–1952): secretary-general (1921–37) of Profintern, the Communist trade union international, and head (1937–39) of Goslitizidat, the Soviet government printing house. He served 1939–46 as deputy foreign minister, and in 1941 became deputy head of the Sovinformburo. When the JaFC came under the aegis of the Central Committee for Foreign Affairs, Lozovskii became responsible for authorizing its actions. Accordingly, when JaFC members were accused of counterrevolutionary activities and espionage,

Notes to PaGes 292–9

431

Lozovskii too was arrested in 1949 and became its most prominent accused. He was executed along with several other JaFC members on 12 August 1952.

With Shloyme Mikhoels 1 First published as “Mit Shloyme Mikhoels,” in Di goldene keyt 43 (1962): 153–69; translated here from Sutzkever, Baym leyenen penimer (Face Reading) (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1993), 90–12. 2 Itsik Feffer (1900–1952): leading Soviet Yiddish poet and a founding member of the Jewish section of the All-Ukrainian Union of Proletarian Writers. During the Second World War he was an informer for the Soviet NkvD while vice-chair of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JaFC). He and Shloyme Mikhoels travelled to the United States in 1943 to raise funds for the JaFC and bolster Jewish support for the Soviet war effort. He and many other members were arrested in 1948, and he was executed along with other leading Yiddish writers and Jewish intellectuals on 12 August 1952. 3 Ber Mark (1908–1966): prominent Polish-Jewish historian and journalist active in Communist circles in interwar Poland. Mark took part in the defence of Warsaw following the German invasion of Poland. He escaped to Belorussia, where he revived the Jewish section of its Academy of Sciences, and then fled to the Soviet interior when Germany attacked the ussr in 1941. After some time on a collective farm he went to Moscow, where he stayed until 1946, when he returned to Poland. He became director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw in 1949. 4 Sutzkever here refers probably to Lazar Kaganovich (1893–1991), one of Stalin’s most loyal supporters and a member of the Politburo (central policymaking committee). 5 See Moyshe Knapheys, “Di Sutzkever-teg in Buenos-Aires,” Di prese (Buenos Aires), 10 June 1953. Moyshe Knapheys (b. 1910): Yiddish poet and prose writer from Warsaw who published several poetic volumes in both Poland and the Soviet Union prior to the Second World War. He was a refugee in Soviet central Asia during the war. After brief periods in Poland (1946) and Paris (1948) he settled in Argentina (1952), where he remained an influential Yiddish writer, activist, and journalist. 6 Yakov Kreizer (1905–1969): prominent Second World War Soviet general who commanded troops in several major battles, including Smolensk, Moscow, and Stalingrad. He was the first Soviet general during the war to be named Hero of the Soviet Union by Stalin. Yakov Etinger (1887–1951): a Jewish Soviet physician who was arrested in the anti-semitic Doctors’ Plot and accused of conspiring to assassinate

432

7

8

9 10

Notes to PaGes 299–320

Soviet leaders. He died after torture during interrogation. After his murder a secret letter fabricated by the Central Committee at Stalin’s request stated that Etinger had confessed to the murder in 1945 of the committee’s secretary, Aleksandr Shcherbakov. Aaron Kats (1901–1971): Red Army major-general and member of the JaFC. He was responsible for the draft and organizing army divisions. Kats was arrested in 1948 along with other JaFC members and released in 1953 following Stalin’s death. Doctors’ Plot (1951–53): a purge ordered by Stalin in which a group consisting mostly of Jewish doctors was accused of conspiring to assassinate Soviet and Party leaders. The campaign resulted in increased anti-semitism and antiZionism in the Soviet press. King Lear, act 3, scene 4. Binyomin Zuskin (1899–1952): Yiddish actor and director at the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre (Goset), and a member of the JaFC. He was executed along with other leading Yiddish writers and cultural figures on 12 August 1952.

Afterword 1 For a sketch of Sutzkever’s life, see Justin Cammy, “Introduction,” in Avrom Sutzkever, The Full Pomegranate: Poems of Avrom Sutzkever, trans. Richard Fein (Albany: suNY Press, 2019), xvii–xlvi; Heather Valencia, “Sutzkever’s Life and Work,” in Still My Word Sings: Poems, ed. and trans. Heather Valencia (Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf University Press, 2017), 233–87. For the most comprehensive catalogue of Sutzkever’s life and works (in Yiddish and Hebrew), see Avraham Novershtern, Avrom Sutzkever: tsum vern a ben-shivim: oysshtelung (Avrom Sutzkever: On the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday) (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1983). 2 Max Weinreich, “Der yidisher visnshaftlekher institut (YIvo),” in Vilne: a zamlbukh gevidmet der shtot Vilne (Vilna: A Collection Dedicated to the City of Vilna), ed. Yefim Yeshurin (New York: Vilner brentsh 367 arbeter-ring, 1935), 323; quoted in Cecile Kuznitz, YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 112. English-language Jewish scholarship tends to refer to the city as Vilna, its imperial Russian and Hebrew names. Given its multinational population, each group had its own name for the city, and its official name depended on who was in control. Tsarist Vilna, Polish Wilno, Lithuanian Vilnius, and Yiddish Vilne are all the same city, yet their names privilege specific national and religious histories, cultures, urban spaces, and built landscapes. The city also earned the moniker “the Jerusalem of Lithuania,” reputedly after Napoleon passed through town on his Russian campaign in 1812; amazed by the density of its Jewish institutions, he dubbed it “the Jerusalem of the North.” Despite interwar claims

Notes to PaGes 321–3

3 4 5

6

7

433

for Vilna as world capital of Yiddish culture, it had long also been a centre of Hebrew and Zionist activity. In the 1920s and 1930s these included its own Hebrew-speaking schools, clubs, and Zionist political groups. For more on Vilna as a Jewish cultural centre see Israel Cohen, Vilna (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1943); Samuel Kassow, Vilna: Jerusalem of Lithuania, recording (National Yiddish Book Center, 1996); Lucy Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time: A Memoir 1938–1947, ed. Nancy Sinkoff (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008); Mordechai Zalkin, “Vilnius,” in YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, vol. 2 (New Haven, Ct: YIvo Institute for Jewish Research and Yale University Press, 2008), 1970–7; and Kuznitz, YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture. Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time, 79. Binishe lider (Vilna: Bin, 1932), 20–1. For background on Yung-Vilne see Justin Cammy, “The Politics of Home, the Culture of Place: ‘Yung-Vilne’: A Journal of Literature and Art (1934–1936),” in Marina Dmitrieva and Heidemarie Petersen, eds., Judische Kultur(en) im Neuen Europa: Wilna 1918–1939 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2004), 117–33; Cammy, “Tsevorfene bleter: The Emergence of Yung-Vilne,” in Antony Polonsky, ed., Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 14 (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001), 170–91; and Avraham Novershtern, “Yung-Vilne: The Political Dimension of Literature,” in Yisrael Gutman, Jehuda Reinharz, and Chone Shmeruk, eds., The Jews of Poland between Two World Wars (Hanover, Nh: University Press of New England, 1989), 383–98. When the Red Army took control of the Vilna region from Poland early in the war, Moscow pressed the Lithuanian government to accept Soviet troops on its territory as part of a mutual-assistance pact. If it agreed, it would get the city back; refusal would lead to its annexation to the neighbouring Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Lithuania said “yes” and added the city on 10 October 1939. Some Lithuanian residents celebrated their independence with four days of attacks against the city’s Jewish population and an intense program of depolonization. The Red Army entered the city again in June 1940, and it became capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. Membership in the Union of Soviet Writers was required for those who hoped to publish under Soviet rule. Sutzkever’s membership card, #4081, featuring an official stamp and photograph, is in arC 4:1565, manila envelope 69-1-5, Sutzkever Archive, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. Years later Sutzkever remained defensive about this period of his as a “Soviet” writer. In a letter to American authorities written from Montreal in 1959, he expressed his frustration at having been twice denied visas to lecture in the United States, in 1949 and 1957. He provided a full accounting of his activities from this period, protesting: “Why I did not receive a U.S. visitor’s visa I frankly do not understand. I never in my life belonged to the Communist party. I also

434

Notes to PaGe 324

did not nor do I belong to any other party. I occupy myself my entire life with literature and poetry and for this I am known by the whole Jewish and nonJewish world … When I think of the reasons why I may have been denied a U.S. visitor’s visa several possibilities come to my mind. Maybe because in the year 1941 when Wilno was occupied by the Russians I was the director of the Yiddish division of Soviet Radio in Wilno. Or maybe because in the years 1939–1941 I wrote a few poems, I underline not more than a few, which may have been influenced by the Soviet propaganda. Or maybe because I was a member of the Soviet Writers Association. And I say again that I could not help being this while being there.” arC 4:1565 (47), Sutzkever Archive, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. 8 The mass murder of Jews at Ponar provides an anatomy of genocide that is different from the industrialized murder factories made infamous by such places as Auschwitz and Treblinka. Most Jews in Vilna were executed in close proximity to their homes, in this local parkland, and shot at close range. In this sense, the fate of Vilna Jewry was much closer to that of many other Jewish communities in former Soviet territories than to that of a community like Warsaw, whose Jews were deported from the ghetto to a death camp. 9 Several of these incidents would inspire Sutzkever’s ghetto and postwar poems, including “Ikh lig in an orn” (I Lie in a Coffin, 1941), “Oytoportret” (SelfPortrait, 1951), and “Nodl-shayn” (Needleshine, 1978). Sutzkever noted in a speech in Montreal: “I myself had an experience which is terrible to relate, but which I remember very clearly: in 1941, during a massacre in the ghetto, when I was hiding in an attic with only a tiny point of light coming in through the rooftiles, I noticed, lying […] beside me, a dead Jew. It was hot, and the corpse was naked, I completely forgot that it was a dead man lying there, I forgot entirely where I was, and groping with my fingers I found a little piece of coal and started writing a poem on the body of the dead man, as if it were paper.” “SelfPortrait” situates this incident in a cellar, whereas in this speech several years later he locates it under a roof, perhaps yoking together two distinct episodes of writing in extremis. If his speech describes the incident so as to shock his live audience into imagining his writing conditions, the poem reflects on the ethics of using the dead as the raw material for his writing. See Sutzkever, “My Life and My Poetry” (Yiddish recording), Jewish Public Library, Montreal, 24 May 1959; published in Still My Word Sings, 31. 10 “It was dawn, a golden morning, and we were led along between deserted gardens. There were no Jews left there, the gardens were very overgrown, and I – on the way to my death – suddenly began to stare at the large amount of dew on the green cabbage leaves. At that moment I thought to myself: ‘Have a good look at it, you fool, who have been alive for almost thirty years and haven’t ever noticed that on cabbage leaves there is more dew than anywhere else.’ That is

Notes to PaGes 324–8

11 12

13

14 15 16

17

18

435

what I was thinking at that moment. And when they led us both into the hills and told us to dig a trench for ourselves, and I was digging the trench, I spied a little worm which, as I dug, I cut in two, and thought to myself: ‘Look at this little worm, when you cut him in two, he doesn’t stop living, in fact the opposite: he becomes two worms, and with another cut, there are three.’ And in my head I wrote my poem ‘Execution.’ I did survive, as you see, because they shot over our heads – they just wanted to have a little game with us, so to speak.” Sutzkever, “My Life and My Poetry,” in Still My Word Sings, 45. Video recording of a 1991 speech by Sutzkever, YIvo Institute for Jewish Research, New York. See Sutzkever’s handwritten essay “Tsu der geshikhte fun Rozenberg-shtab in Vilne” (Towards a History of the Rosenberg Task Force in Vilna), in rG 223:678, Sutzkever-Kaczerginski Archive, YIvo Institute for Jewish Research, New York. For more on the work of the Paper Brigade in the Vilna ghetto and postliberation recovery of its materials, see David Fishman, The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis (Lebanon, Nh: ForeEdge, 2017). Ruzka Korczak, Lehavot ba’efer (Flames in the Ashes) (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Po’alim, 1946); the quotation is from the third edition (Merhavia, 1965), 96. See Rokhl Pupko-Krinski, “Mayn arbet in YIvo unter di daytshn” (My Work in YIvo under the Germans), YIVO-bleter 30 (1947), 214–22. Yitskhok Rudashevski, “Togbukh fun vilner geto,” in rG 223, Part 1, Folder 10, Sutzkever-Kaczerginski Collection, YIvo Institute for Jewish Research, New York. See also Yitskhok Rudashevski, The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto, ed. Percy Matenko (Tel Aviv: Ghetto Fighters’ House, 1973), and “Vilna Ghetto,” in Alexandra Zapruder, ed., Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust (New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press, 1972), 190–225. Rudashevki’s diary was discovered in his ghetto hideout after the liberation of Vilna by his cousin Sore Voloshin, who escaped the liquidation of the ghetto. She turned it over to Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski, who, recognizing its value, smuggled it out of Soviet Lithuania. Sutzkever published it (with some omissions) in the journal he edited in Tel Aviv, Di goldene keyt 15 (1953), 18–56, and then sent it to the YIvo archives in New York. For more on the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JaFC), see Shimon Redlich, Propaganda and Nationalism in Wartime Russia: The Jewish Antifascist Committee in the USSR, 1941–1948 (Boulder, Co: East European Quarterly, 1982), 39–49. In a note accompanying a copy of “Kol Nidre,” Sutzkever writes: “Comrade Reader: You, a normal person, for whom the name Vilna ghetto is only a concept, not a lived reality, will not appreciate this poem Kol Nidre the way a person who lived through the times it described. But I am not currently in a

436

19

20

21 22

Notes to PaGes 329–30

position to offer a gloss to the poem. Read it, and keep in mind that everything in it is true. Perhaps it is a truth that is even too great for literature, but then art is much stronger than death. A. Sutzkever, Markov Brigade.” For more on the circulation history and analysis of the poem, see Hannah Pollin-Galay, “Avrom Sutzkever’s Art of Testimony: Witnessing with the Poet in the Wartime Soviet Union,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 21:2 (winter 2016): 12–18. See also note 11 in “Ilya Ehrenburg.” See Sutzkever, “My Life and My Poetry” (my translation of the above excerpt differs slightly from that of Valencia in Still My Word Sings, 47). Israeli poet Dori Manor, in the documentary film Black Honey: The Life and Poetry of Avrom Sutzkever, dir. Uri Barbash (2018), cites Sutzkever as having told him that “sometimes I walked in anapests and sometimes I walked in amphibrachs,” with each section of the minefield having its own distinct poetic rhythm to which he and Freydke stepped. In the same film the archivist of the National Library of Israel’s Sutzkever collection displays a metal trunk of documents, allegedly constructed by the partisans out of the wings of a downed aircraft, in which the memoirist carried his manuscripts to Moscow. Such remarks may reflect the writer’s carefully constructed poetic self-mythology more than actual events. Portions of Sutzkever’s speech appeared in the JaFC’s Yiddish Eynikayt (Unity) on 6 April and 11 May 1944 and then in Dos yidishe folk in kamf kegn fashizm (Moscow: Der Emes, 1945), 60–2. Eynikayt headlined an article “The End of the Jerusalem of Lithuania” on 14 October 1943, only a month after the ghetto’s liquidation. Sutzkever’s speech the following spring allowed readers both to transform the information into an active response by joining the struggle against Nazism and to begin constructing a collective memory of Jewish heroism and sacrifice. Ilya Ehrenburg, “Torzhestvo cheloveka,” Pravda (29 April 1944). See a sampling of such letters written to Sutzkever in Novershtern, Avrom Sutzkever, 163–8. For instance, L. Koriski (22 June 1944) sent greetings from the front: “I, along with several dozen guys from Vilna and hundreds of soldiers from Lithuania, officers and regular soldiers fighting in the Lithuanian division of the Red Army, impatiently await your book.” Khayim Shoykhet (10 October 1944) appeals to him to “jot down a few words, if only in a short letter, with your first impressions of Vilna, about Jewish Vilna … Are there real possibilities for the rebuilding of our cultural life in Vilna? In Lithuania? Did any Jews manage to save themselves? … Several dozen Yiddish teachers and hundreds of Jewish children await your response.” Hannah Pollin-Galay (“Avrom Sutzkever’s Art of Testimony,” 1–34) notes that between April and December 1944 the writer received one hundred and thirty-five letters: fifty in Russian and eighty-five in Yiddish. She sees in them two literary

Notes to PaGes 331–3

23

24

25

26

437

modes – monumental and local. The monumental reached out to Sutzkever as a mythic hero who served as “a symbolic bridge” between the general anti-fascist struggle and the particular Jewish contribution to it. “Monumentalizing Jewish destruction,” according to Pollin-Galay, partly through Sutzkever’s poetry and journalism, “constituted a full conceptual system” whereby Jews began to process the catastrophe. In contrast, the local mode reached out to Sutzkever as a fellow Vilna native able to understand the specificity of the letter-writers’ losses. PollinGalay sees Sutzkever as a translator between these two modes of contact. Sutzkever later recalled: “It was not until my time in the ghetto that the great power of the Yiddish word revealed itself within me, demanding that I should save it from being buried under the ruins. I was to save it from the Germans, who had got their claws into our sacred YIvo … And now I see myself gathering up manuscripts of Y.L. Peretz, binding them together with string, and lowering them to the ground, right opposite the SS building on the other side of the street. Šimaitė, a Lithuanian woman, takes Peretz’s manuscripts from me and hides them in the University Library, risking her life in doing it. Just as these manuscripts dangled between heaven and earth, so too did our lives at the time. When the city was liberated, I ran to the YIvo building, but it had been burnt down. All that remained were two iron rods sticking out from the ruins like two iron hands, screaming to the heavens. Whenever I hear the sound ‘YIvo,’ I see the iron YIvo hands in Vilna, and hear their screaming.” Sutzkever, “My Life and My Poetry,” 19. The Jewish Museum of Art and Culture was established on 26 July 1944 by Sutzkever (chairman), Shmerke Kaczerginski (secretary), and Abba Kovner (director of collections). Juozas Banaitis, who was the new head of the Arts Administration of the People’s Commission of Education, provided initial permission. However, the Soviet Lithuanian commissar of education, Juozas Žiugzda, understood that Moscow was not in the mood to sanction a Jewish museum and proceeded to recognize their work only under the rubric of a Commission to Collect and Process Documents of Jewish Culture, with no budget. It was not until November that it was finally recognized as a museum. Despite the museum’s work, Soviet authorities routinely disposed of Jewish books and documents, and Žiugzda pressed its leaders to turn over to state institutions materials they discovered. See Fishman, The Book Smugglers, 137–52. See entries for 12–14 September 1944 in Sutzkever’s “Yoman Geto Vilna” (Vilna Ghetto Dairy), in arC 4:1565 (13 / 53), Sutzkever Archive, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. Sutzkever’s items in the JaFC’s Eynikayt include: his speech “Rede fun Sutzkever,” delivered at a plenum of the JaFC on 2 April 1944 (published 6 April 1944); the ghetto poems “Friling” (Springtime) (27 April 1944) and “Di lererin Mire” (Teacher Mira) (25 May 1944); his speech “Der vidershtand in vilner ghetto” (Resistance in the Vilna Ghetto), delivered at the JaFC’s third plenum

438

27

28

29 30

31 32

Notes to PaGes 334–6

(published 11 May 1944); “Tsvey taybelekh zaynen ibern vaser gefloygn” (Two Doves Glide over the Water) (8 June 1944), about the opera singer Lyube Levitski, which appears in this memoir [p. 111–12]; and “Vos mir hobn geratevet in Vilne” (What We Rescued in Vilna) (12 October 1944). During these years, a journal also called Eynikayt was published in New York by a pro-Soviet organization, and it included many articles sent from the Moscow JaFC. A few of Sutzkever’s articles appeared there, including “In a heyl unter der erd in Vilne, hot er geratevet zayn mamen” (He saved his mother in an underground cave in Vilna) (February 1945), about the architect Gershn Abramovitsh, which appears in the memoir [p. 175ff ]; “Der vidershtand in vilner geto” (Resistance in the Vilna Ghetto) (June–July 1945); and “Oystsug fun shvartsn bukh: Vilner tsvey getos” (Excerpt from The Black Book: Vilna’s Two Ghettos) (September 1945), about the Book of Official Regulations and the Jewsnatchers, excerpted from chapters by the same title in the book. See Avraham Novershtern, Avrom Sutzkever-biblyografye (Tel Aviv: Yisroelbukh, 1976), 49, 54–5. Cited by Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 201; from Pravda (Moscow, 25 Aug. 1941), 3–4. See Zelig Kalmanovitch, “A Diary of the Nazi Ghetto in Vilna,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Studies 8 (1953): 9–81; Herman Kruk, Togbukh fun vilner geto (Diary of the Vilna Ghetto) (New York: YIvo, 1961), and The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944, trans. Barbara Harshav, ed. and intro. by Benjamin Harshav (New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press, 2002). When Sutzkever returned to Moscow in September 1944 he took parts of Kruk’s diary with him, and he later ferreted them to YIvo in New York, fearing for their fate in Soviet Vilnius or in Moscow. Kaczerginski discovered a much larger section of the Kruk diary in October 1944 in a wartime bunker used by the Paper Brigade. In August 1943, fearing the potential liquidation of the ghetto, Kruk had buried copies of his diary and ghetto archive in different hideouts. His diary remains an invaluable contemporary document of the Vilna ghetto, narrated from the author’s clear socialist Bundist viewpoint. “Letters from Freydke,” in arC 4:1565 (1 1286:1 and 2), Sutzkever Archive, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. He took one such German document with him as material evidence in support of his testimony at the Nuremberg Tribunal. See “My Testimony at Nuremberg: Diary Notes,” translated in this volume (pp. 237–52). “Letters from Freydke.” In April 1946, when The Black Book project was still on the agenda, an editorial

Notes to PaGes 337–40

33

34 35 36

37

38

39 40

41

439

committee meeting discussed Sutzkever’s original contribution. The differences between it and From the Vilna Ghetto confirm substantial additions. See Ilye Altman, “Toward the History of The Black Book,” Yad Vashem Studies 21 (1991): 221–49. A. Sutzkever, Fun vilner geto (From the Vilna Ghetto) (Moscow: Der Emes State Publishing House, 1946). A publication note announced in Russian: “Editor M. Altshuler; Designer G. Inver; Technical Editor: M. Pogoster” and indicated an initial print run of ten thousand copies. The Paris edition may have appeared slightly before the Moscow edition, as we explain below. “Letters: Ilya Ehrenburg,” in arC 4:1565 (1 / 1371), Sutzkever Archive, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. “Letters from Freydke.” See Ilya Ehrenburg, ed., Merder fun felker: materyaln vegn di retsikhes fun di daytshishe farkhaper in di tsayt-vaylik okupirte sovetishe rayonen (Murderer of Peoples: Materials Regarding the Murderous German Assailants in Temporarily Occupied Soviet Regions), vols. 1 and 2 (Moscow: Der Emes, 1944–45). Cited in Mordechai Altshuler and Sima Ycikas, “Were There Two Black Books about the Holocaust in the Soviet Union?,” Jews and Jewish Topics in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe 17 (1992), 53. See also Ilya Altman’s introduction to the Russian translation of The Black Book (Vilnius, 1993), viii–ix. See Sutzkever’s memoir “Ilya Ehrenburg” (translated in this volume, pp. 268–84), which includes Ehrenburg’s letter to him. For more on the history of The Black Book see Altshuler and Ycikas, “Were There Two Black Books?,” 27–55, and Khaye Lifshits, “Azoy is aroysgegebn gevorn Der shvartser bukh” (The Story behind the Publication of The Black Book), Sovetish heymland (Dec. 1990): 54–9. See Chone Shmeruk, Jewish Literature in the Soviet Union during and following the Holocaust Period (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Post Press, 1960). Such was also the fate of books on the Minsk ghetto by Hersh Smoliar and on the Kovno ghetto by Yelin and Gelpern, all solicited for The Black Book. Repeated delays allowed their authors to publish independent Yiddish volumes on each ghetto. Vilner geto 1941–1944 (Paris: Farband fun di vilner in frankraykh, 1946). The copyright date is 1945, despite a publication date of 1946. The first hundred copies were released in numbered volumes from 1 to 100, suggesting its significant historical currency just as the full scope of the war’s horror was coming into focus. The foreword is a revealing document (none appears in the Soviet edition) – an early example of the struggle to establish meaning and to distinguish between Holocaust memory and Holocaust history: “It is too early to judge the extent and horror of Hitler’s crimes. To understand the past, history demands distance, and our generation has survived events that defy comprehension … Our mind

440

42

43

44 45

46

Notes to PaGes 340–1

is not able to wrap itself around such a cruel degree of truth. Ordinary humans refuse to believe, and even if they would believe, the mind would not be capable of assimilating it. But nothing can efface the truth: evidence and testimony are available” (5–6). The foreword continues: “Our victory over Hitlerism reinforces our attachment to our defenders, to those who were the front line of combat. We owe our future to them, and our spirit remains strong. Today our duty is to organize and stand tall. This book is a contribution to this collective task. We thank Sutzkever, the Vilna native, the poet and the partisan, for the call to action that constitutes his book” (8). Readers might wonder what N. Faynshteyn, the author of this foreword, intended in early 1946 by his mention of the book as a “call to action”? Was it a call to remember, a call to avenge the deaths of millions, a call to root out fascism in Europe, a call to rebuild Yiddish culture and Jewish life? See N. Faynshteyn, “Foreword” (in Yiddish), Vilner geto, 5–8. The differences between the Moscow and Paris editions, as we explain below, extend well beyond titles. Indeed, the entry on Sutzkever in the “Lexicon of Yiddish Literature,” for which he almost certainly provided information, notes that M. Altshuler, its Soviet editor, “edited and abridged the book.” Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, vol. 6 (New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, 1965), 360. Geto Vilne (in Hebrew), trans. Natan Livne (Tel Aviv, 1947). Livne also translated a book about the fate of the Jews of Lvov. Both translations were done at his own initiative. An early French version appeared as Ghetto de Vilna, traduit par Ch. Brenasin (Paris: Cooped, 1950), earning Sutzkever a prize from the French writer Georges Duhamel, member of the Académie française. Sutzkever’s book was then seemingly forgotten until recent editions appeared in Russian (2008), German (2009), Lithuanian (2011), French (2013), Hebrew (2016), and now English (2021). The YkuF farlag edition in Buenos Aires was based on the Paris text, and its printing was concluded on 30 June 1947. Khaykl Lunski, Fun vilner geto: geshtaltn un bilder: geshribn in shvere tsaytn (From the Vilna Ghetto: People and Portraits: Written in Difficult Times) (Vilne: Fareyn fun di yidishe literatn un zhurnalistn in Vilne, 1920). The literary critic Shmuel Niger noted about Lunski something that would also apply to Sutzkever several decades later: “He recounts everything not as a historian but as a chronicler – that is, as a person who has himself lived through it all with the people.” Sh. Niger, Di tsukunft (New York, June 1921). Although the ghetto was liquidated in September 1943, the dates 1941–1944 in the Paris title hint at commentary to come on Sutzkever’s own return to the city after its liberation and his encounters there with survivors. However, his volume offers no insights on his half-year (mid-September 1943–mid-March 1944) in the forest living with Freydke and other partisans or on his spring and early summer 1944 in Moscow before returning to liberated Vilnius.

Notes to PaGes 341–4

441

47 The terms Shoah and Holocaust are products of different political, linguistic, and ideological contexts. For most Yiddish-speaking victims and survivors, then and now, khurbn was the most intuitive and historically resonant term. See Alan Mintz, Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), and David Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1984). 48 For more on this see David Cesarani and Eric Sundquist, eds., After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence (London: Routledge, 2012), and Harriet Murav, “In Mourning: Responding to the Destruction of the Jews,” in Harriet Murav, ed., Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in PostRevolution Russia (Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press, 2011). 49 See also the collection Bleter vegn Vilne (Pages about Vilna) (Łódź: Farband fun vilner yidn in Poyln bay der tsentraler yidisher historisher komisye, 1947). 50 See the section on The Black Book in Sutzkever’s essay “Ilya Ehrenburg,” translated in this volume, pp. 268–84. 51 Translator and literary scholar Heather Valencia told me that when she asked Sutzkever why he had not tried to have Vilna Ghetto republished or translated, he replied, “It’s not worth the effort.” Justin Cammy in conversation with Valencia at the symposium “Vilna and the Poetry of Avrom Sutzkever,” Lund University (Sweden), 16 November 2017. Sutzkever’s attitude might help explain why, until very recently, translators and scholars paid scant attention to the book. 52 The Soviet banning of private enterprises and business was especially difficult for Jewish merchants, and some were even exiled into the interior of the Soviet Union. Those associated with Zionist organizations were also highly suspect. The exiles were saved from the horrors of the Holocaust suffered by those who had been permitted to remain. For more about the Soviet-occupied territories during this period see Dov Levin, The Lesser of Two Evils: Eastern European Jewry under Soviet Rule, 1939–1941 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995). 53 Abba Kovner was a central figure in the Vilna ghetto resistance in excerpts of Sutzkever’s writing published in Eynikayt (New York) in June–July 1945, as well as in the Paris edition of the book. Kovner’s role in setting up the resistance remains contentious. His close friends and especially the Israeli historian Dina Porat see him as directly responsible for it; others, such as Mark Dvorzhetski and Nisan Reznik (from the Zionist youth movement Ha-no’ar ha-Tsiyoni and a fellow FPo leader), argue that underground members chose Kovner to help lead them. See Mark Dvorzhetski, Yerushalayim de-Lite in kamf un umkum: zikhroynes fun vilner geto (Jerusalem of Lithuania in Struggle and Annihilation: Memoir of the Vilna Ghetto) (Paris: Union of Jewish Workers in America and the Jewish People’s Union in France, 1948). See also Dina Porat, The Fall of a Sparrow: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner (Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press, 2009), and Nisan Reznik, Nitsanim Mi-efer: Sipuro shel haver Ha-no’ar

442

54

55

56 57

58 59 60

61 62 63

64

Notes to PaGes 345–50

ha-Tsiyoni me-mikime Irgun ha-FPO be-’Geto Vilnah (Sprouts from the Earth: The Story of the Zionist Youth in the United Partisan Organization in the Vilna Ghetto) (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2003). As Timothy Snyder argues, the Soviets claimed that “all resistance to fascism was by definition led by communists; if it was not led by communists, then it was not resistance,” Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 355. Sutzkever, “Peretz Markish un zayn svive” (Peretz Markish and His Circle), in Baym leyenen penimer (Face Reading) (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1993), 86; excerpts from this essay are translated as “Peretz Markish and His Circle” (pp. 285–91) in this volume. See Rūta Vanagaitė and Efraim Zuroff, Our People: Discovering Lithuania’s Hidden Holocaust (Lanham, mD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020) Di ershte nakht in geto (The First Night in the Ghetto) (Tel Aviv: Di goldene keyt, 1979), 8; as “The Circus,” in A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. and intro. Benjamin Harshav, trans. Barbara Harshav (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 126–9. The poet’s note says, “Written in a hiding place, early July 1941.” See also Y. Szeintuch, “Di biografye fun lid ‘Der tsirk’” (The Biography of the Poem “The Circus”), in Yikhes fun lid: Lekoved Avrom Sutzkever (The Genealogy of Poetry: In Honor of Abraham Sutzkever) (Tel Aviv: Yoyvl-komitet, 1983), 258–79. “My Life and My Poetry,” 47. Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, 280, 316. The poem made a deep impression, according to Yitskhok Rudashevski, whose diary notes that Sutzkever recited the poem publicly a second time on 4 October 1942, a week after Gershteyn’s death: “He [Sutzkever] writes that ‘the human feelings are now like candles without a wick and are melting into each other.’ ” See Rudashevski, The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto, 65. Glik’s Yiddish partisan hymn appeared in print perhaps for the first time in the Soviet Union in Sutzkever’s From the Vilna Ghetto. “Di blayene platn fun Roms drukeray,” in Poetishe verk, vol. 1, 335; as “The Lead Plates of the Romm Printers,” in A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, 168–70. Sutzkever retroactively dates this poem 12 September 1943, the day he and his wife escaped from the ghetto, even though the first known draft was not composed until he was already in the forest. By all accounts, the incident imagined by the poem did not happen, leading David Roskies to argue that “the truth of the poem obviously transcends its factuality.” See David G. Roskies, “The Burden of Memory,” in Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1984), 225–57. The JaFC commission that reviewed and criticized submissions to The Black Book emphasized again in 1945 that it was a “documentary collection, whose

Notes to PaGes 351–9

65 66 67

68 69 70 71

72

73 74

75

76 77

78

443

importance is a matter of the veracity of the facts it presents and the absence of characteristic components of a work of literature.” Altshuler and Ycikas, “Were There Two Black Books?,” 53. Trial of Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, vol. 8 (Nuremberg: International Military Tribunal, 1947), 302–8. See “To My Child,” in Still My Word Sings, 94–9. Pollin-Galay adds that this episode was removed from the Moscow edition because it violated standards of Soviet wartime chronicle by delving into the psychological effects of war. See Hannah Pollin-Galay, “The Epic Demands of Postwar Yiddish: Avrom Sutzkever’s Geheymshtot (1948),” East European Jewish Affairs 48:3 (2018): 342–4. Ruth R. Wisse, “The Last Great Yiddish Poet?,” Commentary (November 1983), 41. The poem is dated 31 December 1942. Lider fun yam hamoves, 39–40; Poetishe verk, vol. 1, 273–4; A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, 154–5. Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, 173–4. Among the Yiddish intellectuals who took such a position was Zelig Kalmanovitsh, who was later imprisoned in the ghetto. See also Yankev Glatshteyn’s famous Yiddish poem “A gute nakht, velt” (Good Night, World), 1938. The poem is dated Vilna ghetto, 16 March 1943. In Poetishe verk, vol. 1, 295; see David Roskies, The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1988), 497–9. Black Honey: The Poetry and Life of Avrom Sutzkever, dir. Uri Barbash (2018). Sutzkever confessed his strong desire for revenge in the diary notes for his testimony at Nuremberg and in a later essay on Ehrenburg, both translated in this volume. In his diary notes he expresses satisfaction upon encountering the ruins of a German city, and in his recollections of Ehrenburg he reveals that he seriously considered smuggling a gun to Nuremberg to shoot Hermann Goering before the eyes of the world. From these we see that what Sutzkever published was only a fraction of what he felt in private. For a broader context, see David Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012). We elected not to include photographs of Nazi perpetrators in this translation. See also L. Shpizman, ed., Froyen in di getos (Women in the Ghettos) (New York: Pioneering Women’s Organization, 1946), and Judy Batalion, The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos (New York: William Morrow / HarperCollins, 2021). Since Sutzkever and Kaczerginski were close, the latter would have been aware of the scope of his friend’s volume and wanted to provide a different perspective. He also was not beholden to the Moscow-based JaFC, since he remained in Vilna until he left for Łódź. Kaczerginski’s immediate postwar output was

444

Notes to PaGe 359

remarkable: a collection of songs from ghettos and camps, an account of Vilna’s destruction, a chronicle of the partisan struggle, and a sharp political tract about the fate of Yiddish culture under Stalinist rule. 79 The Sutzkevers’ time in the forest was filled with harrowing moments, and not only because of autumn and winter. Sutzkever recalls that as German forces were moving in on the partisans in November 1943, he, Freydke, and Kaczerginski decided to hide in the swamps: Why did we go into the swamps? Because the Germans had dogs and saws, and when they captured a partisan, especially a Jew, they would saw him to pieces. The dogs, however, became disoriented in the swamps … It was cold. I remember that once when I woke up in the morning, it seemed to me that I was welded to the earth. What had happened? The water in the swamp had frozen round me, and when I moved my head, the frame broke up round me – like glass. We lay there for about three days, eating wild berries and a few wet peas we still had in our pockets. Our boots were frozen onto our feet, so we decided that we must scramble out of the swamp for at least half an hour to dry ourselves in the sun … Suddenly we heard German voices, so we went back to the swamps, and as we crept further in, my wife remembered that she had left the ring that I had given her as a wedding present, which she persuaded herself was a good-luck ring, on the hillock where we had dried ourselves. Wearing that ring she had been in the hands of the Gestapo four times, and had escaped, she had been in the Lukishki Prison, she had even been at Ponar – and the ring had saved her. So she said: “Wait a while for me, I am going back to rescue my ring.” And before we could say anything she disappeared … We heard the voices of people being shot or captured … It was terrible … Imagine how we felt: we were both in despair, thinking that she had been captured and was no longer alive. We lay on the hillock as the sun went down. Suddenly, I noticed something strange: on the little hill I saw a hollow tree … And in my despair I ran to the tree, grabbed a stone and began striking the tree with it, thinking that if she had got lost somewhere among the swamps, she would hear the knocking, would realize that we were here and would be able to crawl back. As I was hitting the tree, the stone broke and I was broken too; I collapsed in exhaustion, covered in sweat, despairing, and lay there, half-conscious … I suddenly saw among the undergrowth of branches and bushes a strange figure moving across the swamp. Her hair was dishevelled, her body half naked, with blood running down her neck in a rivulet … At first I thought it was a ghost, but the figure came nearer and nearer … and suddenly I saw that on her finger sparkled the gold ring. Because of the gold ring I realized that this was my wife. (“My Life and My Poetry,” 51–3)

Notes to PaGes 360–4

80

81

82 83 84

85

86

445

Sutzkever takes from this episode an artistic lesson: “When he is completely anguished and despairing, the poet grabs some word or other and begins to beat with the word and with his head and with his heart against a deaf wall, and he carries on beating until he collapses in despair, exhausted, broken, and then it happens, in a blessed moment, when he is lying there in despair, that his poem emerges out of the wilderness, the poem he has summoned. It is also frightened and bloody, but on his poem sparkles a gold ring, and the poem smiles through its tears” (53). For a detailed discussion of this poem, see Pollin-Galay, “The Epic Demands of Postwar Yiddish,” 331–3. Her comparison of how Sutzkever presents the underground network of hideouts in Vilna Ghetto and in Secret City reveals striking differences between chronicle and epic poetry as literary modes. In the former, she suggests, he strove for “empirically accurate testimony,” based on his interviews and first-hand experience in order to meet “the burden of history.” The exception to this was Shloyme Beylis, a Vilna Jew who was not even in the ghetto, who bluntly denounced all cultural efforts there and saw them as a dangerous distraction from its residents’ ability to confront their ultimate fate head-on. Shloyme Belis, Portretn un problemen (Portraits and Problems) (Warsaw: Yidish-bukh, 1964), 313–416. “The Lead Plates of the Romm Printers,” 168–70. “Narotsh Forest,” in Sutzkever, Laughter beneath the Forest: Poems from Old and New Manuscripts, trans. Barnett Zumoff (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav,1996), 40. Hersh Smoliar, Fun minsker geto (Moscow: Der Emes, 1946); trans. as Hersh Smoliar, The Minsk Ghetto: Soviet-Jewish Partisans against the Nazis (New York: Holocaust Library, 1989). At a JaFC meeting in April 1946, when The Black Book project was discussed, Smoliar’s memoir was mentioned in the same breath as Sutzkever’s. See Altman, “Toward the History of The Black Book,” 194. Hersh Smoliar, Sovetishe yidn hinter geto-tsoymen (Soviet Jews behind the Ghetto Walls) (Tel Aviv: Farlag Y.L. Peretz, 1985), 7. Smoliar’s reputation as a Communist ensured that his book was translated into and published in Russian quickly – one year after it first appeared in Yiddish. Although Sutzkever’s memoir was translated into Russian in the Soviet Union (see the Sutzkever Archive at the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem), a Russian edition was not published until after the fall of the Soviet Union. Possible reasons for this delay include part II, about Jewish cultural life in the ghetto; the author’s decision in 1946 to leave Moscow for Poland; and his own lack of interest in pressing the matter. With the memoir available in Yiddish (and, soon afterwards, in Hebrew) his primary audience was secure. For more on this, see Elissa Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 19–21.

446

87 88

89 90

91

92

93

94

Notes to PaGes 365–7

Bemporad’s is an excellent study of how the Soviet project smothered traditional Jewish life and a broad spectrum of Jewish political expression in Minsk. Smoliar, Sovetishe yidn hinter geto-tsoymen, 252. Sutzkever’s contemporaries noted the synergy between spiritual and physical resistance in the Vilna ghetto. See also Mark Dvorzhetski, “Dos kultur-vezn in vilner geto” (Cultural Organization in the Vilna Ghetto), Parizer shriftn 2–3 (March 1946), 28, and “Literatur un kunst in geto-Vilna” (Literature and Art in the Vilna Ghetto), Parizer shriftn 4 (Sept. 1946), 18–28, which identifies acts of spiritual resistance as a form of assertion against Nazi domination. M. Yelin and D. Gelpern, Partizaner fun kaunaser geto (Kovno Ghetto Partisans) (Moscow: Der Emes, 1948). Sutzkever and his colleagues in Yung-Vilne themselves helped to renew ties between Vilna and Kovno when they partnered with fellow Yiddish writers there to publish Naye bleter: zamlbukh far literatur un kunst (New Pages: Anthology of Literature and Art) (Kaunas, 1939) and Bleter 1940: zamlbukh far literatur un kunst (1940: Anthology of Literature and Art) (Kaunas, 1940). Ber Mark’s Der oyfshtand fun varshever geto (The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising) (Moscow: Emes Press, 1947) highlights another unique aspect of Sutzkever’s memoir. Although Warsaw was not a centre of Litvak culture like Vilna, Minsk, or Kovno, Mark reflects the typical Soviet focus on armed Jewish resistance, not on daily life and culture in the ghetto à la Sutzkever. Several of these witness descriptions are found in hand-written notes that Sutzkever collected from the Vilna ghetto, now in the Sutzkever Archive, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. On the process of gathering witness testimony, see also the list Shmerke Kaczerginski amassed in Vilna in 1944: “I asked some of my acquaintances to write out their experiences of the recent past. These materials formed the basic research on the murder of the Jewish community.” Kaczerginski, Tsvishn hamer un serp: tsu der geshikhte fun der likvidatsye fun der yidisher kultur in Sovetn-Rusland (Between Hammer and Sickle: Towards a History of the Liquidation of Jewish Culture in Soviet Russia) (Paris: Published through a Group of Friends from Vilna, 1949); expanded 2nd ed. (Buenos Aires: Der Emes, 1950), 40. Such witness descriptions are central to Kaczerginski’s volume Khurbn Vilne (The Destruction of Vilna), which in effect continues and expands on the testimonies in Sutzkever’s work. He also includes witness descriptions from some smaller Jewish communities in the Vilna region. A. Sutzkever: Selected Prose and Poetry, 49. Creative partnership with the dead also informs his story cycle Green Aquarium (1953–54), as when the poet attempts to read his verse to a murdered woman and she interrupts him: “My dear. I know the words by heart. I gave you the words myself.” A. Sutzkever, 359. The letter’s description of Germans’ sado-sexual acts on Jewish children was so graphic that those parts were edited out. Sutzkever believed that only those who had been in the ghetto could confront the full scope of the truth.

Notes to PaGes 368–72

447

95 An earlier version of this scene appears in Sutzkever’s essay “Vos mir hobn geratevet in Vilne” (What We Rescued in Vilna) Eynikayt (12 Oct. 1944), with a slightly different formulation: “On the shores of the Viliye the young armed partisan Tevke Galpern stood guard lest the waves cleanse the German.” Galpern is mentioned by name in Part III of the memoir, dealing with the partisan underground. 96 For more on Polish refugees in the Soviet Union see Eliyana Adler, Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2020). 97 arC 4:1703, Hurban Vilna File 258:1, Sutzkever Archive, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. 98 arC 4:1703, Hurban Vilna File 312, Sutzkever Archive, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. 99 Jan Schwarz, Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015), 19. 100 The citation for the medal can be found in arC 4:1565, manila envelope 69-1-5, Sutzkever Archive, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. Sutzkever was also awarded the [Soviet] Order of the Partisans. He did not solicit this recognition, and refusing it would have endangered him as an enemy of the regime. 101 Fishman, The Book Smugglers, 201–3. 102 Joseph Leftwich, Abraham Sutzkever: Partisan Poet (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1971), 84. Ehrenburg kept materials sent to him for The Black Book in special albums that he donated to the Jewish Museum that Sutzkever helped set up in liberated Vilnius. In a letter to Ehrenburg dated 8 December 1947, the museum director confirms receipt of Ehrenburg’s albums from Rafael Khovles (an artist who had been a member of the pre-war Yung-Vilne literary group who had been sent to Moscow to gather them). The letter notes that the museum’s exhibition is closed, although it continues to gather materials. P.21.1, file 8, Black Book Materials, Yad Vashem Archives, Jerusalem. When the authorities permanently shuttered the museum in 1948, the albums were returned to Ehrenburg. 103 See Joshua Rubenstein and Ilya Altman, The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), xxxii–xxxiii. These versions of The Black Book were severely truncated and included mainly materials previously published in the Soviet Yiddish and Russian press. 104 Ehrenburg’s daughter, Irina, arranged for sections of a handwritten, incomplete manuscript of The Black Book (without the chapter on Lithuania) to be smuggled to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and then later the donation of her father’s archive. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a complete, corrected, and approved galley of The Black Book, dated 14 June 1947, was discovered and turned over to her by an acquaintance. See Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman,

448

105

106

107 108

Notes to PaGes 372–5

The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, trans. and ed. David Patterson (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002). The Jewish refugee community in Poland was shocked when news arrived of a pogrom perpetrated by Poles against Jews in Kielce on 4 July 1946, more than a year after war’s end. Forty-two Jews were murdered, and an equal number injured by Polish officials and civilians. The event convinced many Jews that it would be impossible to rebuild communal life in Poland. See Sutzkever’s searing farewell ode, “Tsu Poyln” (To Poland) (dated July–September 1946), in Poetishe verk, vol. 1, 567–77. In 1948 Stalin’s agents staged a traffic accident in Minsk that killed Mikhoels. On 12 August 1952, a number of other leading Yiddish writers with whom Sutzkever had associated in Moscow were also executed, including Peretz Markish, Dovid Bergelson, Dovid Hofshteyn, and Itsik Feffer. The tabernacle in the desert. “Gezegenish,” in Poetishe verk, vol. 1, 355–9; as “Farewell,” in A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, 178–81. The poem includes the author’s notation: “Vilna Ghetto and Narotsh Forests, 1943–1944.”

Vilna Ghetto Chronology 1 Sources: Mark Dvorzhetski, Yerushalayim de-Lite in kamf un unkum: zikhroynes fun vilner geto (Jerusalem of Lithuania in Struggle and Annihilation: Memoir of the Vilna Ghetto) (Paris: Union of Jewish Workers in America and the Jewish People’s Union in France, 1948), 497–500; Yitzhak Arad (né Yitskhok Rudnitski), Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1980); Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944, ed. and intro. by Benjamin Harshav, trans. Barbara Harshav (New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press, 2002); Guy Miron and Shlomit Shulhani, The Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of the Ghettos during the Holocaust, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2009), 878–89. 2 Readers interested in comparing the published text of From the Vilna Ghetto (Moscow, 1946) with earlier drafts of particular chapters should consult the State Archives of the Russian Federation (GarF) in Moscow, where one can see how the editorial process significantly shaped the final version. For instance, the opening chapter of the published memoir was originally titled “The First Day” and begins not with Sutzkever learning about the onset of war through an aggressive German voice on the radio but with his reflections on the evening and night before, 21 June 1941. He attended a Yiddish theatre performance and then retired with friends to Velfke’s, the Vilna watering hole and restaurant popular with Jewish writers and actors. When he finally stumbles home at 4 a.m.

Note to PaGe 375

449

on 22 June, Sutzkever notes that he stayed awake reviewing the proofs for his poem Siberia, which he was on the verge of returning to the printer. “My heart told me that it would not appear in print, that war would prevent it. I gazed down at the pages, and reminded myself of my Siberian childhood that sparkled from its every word and verse. I inhaled the scent of the garden from my open window. Birds were chirping, perched on a cornice. I pondered a cherry tree and its white blossoms until my eyes grew heavy. At 7 a.m. I was awakened by a distant noise … ” We then learn that when Vilna comes under attack Sutzkever not only calls on Noyekh Prilutski (their conversation appears in abbreviated form in the book) and the editorial offices of Emes, the local Soviet-Yiddish newspaper, but, in an attempt to gather information, also visits the radio station where he worked as artistic director of the Yiddish section. The station’s manager confides to him that colleagues are planning to evacuate. This early draft concludes with Sutzkever at his mother’s house, though not before he describes a nightmarish vision that does not make it into the published volume: A flame in human form is clinging to my back. I cannot see the figure. But I am certain that it is there. I spin around like the hands on a watch in a circular blue palace, and my sole desire is to see this fiery figure. I hear it speak to me: “Stop! The moment you catch a glimpse of me you will perish.” The room where I am spinning about is uncannily high, and its uppermost level is capped by a star-filled heaven. I decide that I must observe this figure who is fused to my back. I grasp behind me and feel the shape of a child. The child is laughing and again warns me that I should not even consider casting my eyes upon it! At that moment I am reminded that I have a hand mirror in my pocket. Perhaps I can observe the figure behind me through the mirror. But as I raise the glass to my eyes I feel a flame take hold of my throat. It chokes me and cuts into me with its fiery sharpness. I fall to the ground, and wrestle it. I cannot catch my breath, and, soon enough, I am dead … When I opened my eyes, Mother was standing over me and wiping down my forehead … Readers will notice that the opening chapter of the published volume launches the reader directly into the war. It is far less meditative and selfreferential than Sutzkever’s earlier draft of a first chapter, and less inclined to focus on his inner world. His editors adjusted and curtailed his prose to meet the expectations of Soviet war chronicle as a genre. Fond P-8114, opis’ 1, delo 232, pp. 2–9, GarF.

450

Note to PaGe 383

List of Place Names in Vilna 1 My inspiration for this chart was that prepared by Benjamin Harshav and Barbara Harshav in Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and Camps, 1939–1944 (New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press, 2002), 707–11.

Further Reading

General Arad, Yitzhak (né Yitskhok Rudnitski). Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the Holocaust. New York: Holocaust Library, 1982. Barbash, Uri, dir. Black Honey: The Life and Poetry of Avrom Sutzkever (film). 2018. Beinfeld, Solon. “The Cultural Life of the Vilna Ghetto,” in Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual, vol. 1 (1984), ed. Alex Grobman. Chappaqua, NY: Rossell Books, 5–26. Cammy, Justin. “Introduction,” in Avrom Sutzkever, The Full Pomegranate: Poems of Avrom Sutzkever, trans. Richard Fine. Albany: suNY Press, 2019: xvii–xlvi. Dawidowicz, Lucy. From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938–1947. Introduction by Nancy Sinkoff. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008. Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, trans. and ed. David Patterson. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002. Fishman, David. The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis. Lebanon, Nh: ForeEdge, 2017. Leftwich, Joseph, Abraham Sutzkever: Partisan Poet. New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1971. Novershtern, Avraham. Avrom Sutzkever: tsum vern a ben-shivim (in Hebrew and Yiddish). Jerusalem: Jewish National and University Library, 1983. – Avrom Sutzkever-biblyografye. Tel Aviv: Yisroel-bukh, 1976. Pollin-Galay, Hannah. “‘A Rubric of Pain Words’: Mapping Atrocity with Holocaust Yiddish Glossaries.” Jewish Quarterly Review 110:1 (winter 2020): 161–93. – “Avrom Sutzkever’s Art of Testimony: Witnessing with the Poet in the Wartime Soviet Union.” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 21:2 (winter 2016): 1–34.

452

Further reading

– “The Epic Demands of Postwar Yiddish: Avrom Sutzkever’s Geheymshtot (1948).” East European Jewish Affairs 48:3 (2018): 331–53. Roskies, David. “The Burden of Memory,” in Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1984: 225–57. Rubenstein, Joshua. Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Schwartz, Jan. “After the Destruction of Jewish Vilna: Avrom Sutzkever’s Poetry, Testimony and Cultural Rescue Work, 1944–1946.” East European Jewish Affairs 35:2 (2005): 209–25. – Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015. Shneidman, N.N. The Three Tragic Heroes of the Vilnius Ghetto: Witenberg, Sheinbaum, Gens. Oakville, oN: Mosaic Press, 2002. Ver vet blaybn? What Will Remain (film). Dir. Christa Whitney and Emily Felder (Yiddish Book Center, 2020). Wisse, Ruth. “The Last Great Yiddish Poet?” Commentary 76 (Nov. 1983): 41–8. – “The Poet from Vilna.” Jewish Review of Books 2 (summer 2010): 10–14.

Diaries from the Vilna Ghetto Available in English Translation Kalmanovitch, Zelig. “A Diary of the Nazi Ghetto in Vilna.” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Studies 8 (1953): 9–81. Kruk, Herman. The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944, ed. and intro. by Benjamin Harshav. trans. Barbara Harshav. New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press, 2002. Rudashevski, Yitskhok. The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto. Tel Aviv: Lohamei Hagetaot and Ha-Kibbutz ha-Me’uhad, 1973. – “Vilna Ghetto,” in Alexandra Zapruder, ed., Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust. New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press, 2002: 190–225. Sakowicz, Kazimierz. Ponary Diary 1941–1943: A Bystander’s Account of Mass Murder. New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press, 2005.

Postwar Memoirs or Collections on the Destruction of Vilna Balberyszski, Mendl. Shtarker fun ayzn. Tel Aviv: Ha-menorah, 1967; as Stronger Than Iron: The Destruction of Vilna Jewry 1941–1945: An Eyewitness Account, trans. Abraham Cykiert and Theodore Balberyszski. Jerusalem: Gefen, 2010.

Further reading

453

Dvorzhetski, Mark. Yerushalayim de-Lite in kamf un umkum: zikhroynes fun vilner geto (Jerusalem of Lithuania in Struggle and Annihilation: Memoir of the Vilna Ghetto). Paris: Union of Jewish Workers in America and the Jewish People’s Union in France, 1948. Kaczerginski, Shmerke. Ikh bin geven a partisan: Di grine legende. Buenos Aires: Friends of the Author, 1952; as I Was a Partisan: The Green Legend, trans. Rachel Field (forthcoming). – Khurbn Vilne (New York: CYCo, 1947); as The Destruction of Vilna, trans. Maurice Wolfthal (forthcoming). – Tsvishn hamer un serp: tsu der geshikhte fun der likvidatsye fun der yidisher kultur in Sovetn-Rusland (Between Hammer and Sickle: Towards a History of the Liquidation of Jewish Culture in Soviet Russia). (Paris: Published through a Group of Friends from Vilna, 1949); expanded 2nd ed. (Buenos Aires: Der Emes, 1950). Korczak, Ruzka. Lehavot ba-efer (Flames in the Ash). Tel Aviv: Sifriat Po’alim, 1946; Merhavia, 1965. Ran, Leyzer. Ash fun Yerushalayim de-Lite (Ash from the Jerusalem of Lithuania). New York: Vilner farlag, 1959. – ed. Yerushalayim de-Lite ilustrirt un dokumentirt (The Jerusalem of Lithuania Illustrated and Documented). New York: Vilna Album Committee, 1974. Reznik, Nisan. Nitsanim Mi-efer: Sipuro shel haver Ha-no’ar ha-Tsiyoni memikime Irgun ha-FPO be-’Geto Vilnah (Sparks from the Ash: The Story of a Member of the Zionist Youth from the United Partisan Organization in the Vilna Ghetto). Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2003. Shur, Grigorii. Evrei v Vil’no: khronika, 1941–1944 gg. (Jews in Vilna: Chronicle 1941–1944). St Petersburg: Obrazovanie-Kul’tura, 2000.

Sutzkever’s Holocaust Poetry and Prose in Yiddish Sutzkever published more than two dozen books over a career spanning almost seventy years. The list below includes items written during the Second World War and selected postwar publications that include significant materials on the destruction of Vilna Jewry. Baym leyenen penimer (Face Reading). Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1993. Di ershte nakht in geto (The First Night in the Ghetto). Tel Aviv: Di goldene keyt, 1979. Di festung: lider un poemes, geshribn in vilner geto un in vald 1941–1944 (The Fortress: Poems Written in the Vilna Ghetto and the Forest, 1941–1944). New York: Ikuf, 1945. Di nevue fun shvartsaplen: dertseylungen (Prophecy of the Inner Eye: Stories). Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1989.

454

Further reading

Fun vilner geto (From the Vilna Ghetto 1941–1944). Moscow: Der Emes State Publishing House, 1946; Vilner geto 1941–1944 (Vilna Ghetto 1941–1944). Paris: Association of Vilna Natives in France, 1946; Vilner geto 1941–1944. Buenos Aires: Ikuf, 1947. Geheymshtot (Secret City). Tel Aviv: Friends of the author, 1948. Griner akvaryum (Green Aquarium). Tel Aviv: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1975. Lider fun geto (Poems from the Ghetto). New York: Ikuf, 1946. Lider fun yam hamoves (Poems from the Sea of Death). Tel Aviv and New York: Bergen-Belsen Press, 1968. Ode tsu der toyb (Ode to the Dove). Tel Aviv: Di goldene keyt, 1955. Poetishe verk (Poetic Works), 2 vols. Tel Aviv: Jubilee Committee, 1963. Yidishe gas (Jewish Street). New York: Matones, 1948.

Sutzkever’s Holocaust Poetry and Prose in Translation Translations of Sutzkever’s Holocaust poetry and prose appear in multiple anthologies of Yiddish poetry and Holocaust literature. Among the most useful is David G. Roskies, The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1988. The list below is limited to translated volumes of Sutzkever’s writing that include significant selections from his writing during and about the Holocaust. A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. and intro. by Benjamin Harshav; trans. Barbara Harshav. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Burnt Pearls: Ghetto Poems of Abraham Sutzkever, trans. Seymour Mayne. Oakville, oN: Mosaic Press, 1981. The Full Pomegranate: Poems of Avrom Sutzkever, trans. Richard Fine, intro. Justin Cammy. Albany: suNY Press, 2019. “Green Aquarium,” trans. Ruth Wisse and Avrom Sutzkever. Prooftexts 2:1 (Jan. 1982): 95–121. Laughter beneath the Forest: Poems from Old and New Manuscripts, trans. Barnett Zumoff. Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1996. Still My Word Sings: Poems, trans. and ed. Heather Valencia. Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf University Press, 2017. Sutzkever: Essential Prose, trans. Zackary Sholem Berger. Amherst, ma: Yiddish Book Center, 2020. Ten Poems: Vilna Ghetto 1943, ed. Lara Lempertiene. Vilnius: Jewish Heritage, 2020.

Index

In some cases where first names are unknown, only surnames appear. Abramovitsh, Gershn, 116–18, 129–30, 216, 360–1 Abramovitsh, Khayke, 130 Abramowicz, Maria, 66, 106 absence, aesthetic of, 355 Adamowicz, Irena, 145, 415n23 Aganiovska, Vera, 162 Agolik, Nisn, 186 Aksen, Dr, 67 Aktion, 47, 48, 207, 377, 378, 380, 397n15 Albine, 172 Aleksandrov, Georgi, 281, 288, 428n41 Alksnis, 146 Altshuler, Mordecai, 363, 439n33, 440n42, 443n64 American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 84 An-ski, Sh. (Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport, 1863–1920), 409n109 An-ski Museum of the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society, 167, 217, 409n109; anti-fascist movement, 265, 339, 367–8. See also Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JaFC) anti-Jewish laws, 10–12, 44–5, 67–8, 103, 242, 395n50

anti-semitism: anti-Jewish laws, 242; in Lithuania, 347; within partisan ranks, 327; Polish, 343; in Soviet Union, 334, 341, 368, 372 Antokolets, Dr, 101 Antokol prison, 150 Antokolski, Mark, 104, 217, 218, 357, 366, 409n108, 421n17, 426n21 Antokolski, Pavel, 273, 426n21 Argentina, Yiddish schools in, 341 arms, 52–3, 123, 137–41, 147, 149, 153–6, 158, 164–6, 172–80, 182–3, 185, 188, 190, 201, 211, 216, 237, 325, 327, 358, 362, 415n24, 416n40, 417n41, 418–19n56 Aronovitsh, Arone, 181 art/artists, 95–9, 107–13, 272–3, 320, 329, 348, 357, 366, 372. See also specific artists A shpigl af a shteyn (A Mirror on a Stone, 1964), 267 Association of Fighters against German Occupation, 160 Association of Vilna Jews in France, 340 Auerbukh, 170 Auschwitz, 239, 333 Ausweise, 260 Aynhorn, Zelda, 77 Ayznshtat, Tevl, 134

456

Index

Babel, Isaac, 272, 426n17 Babi Yar, 239, 246–7, 277, 422n9 Bak, Sam. See Bak, Shmuel (Zalmen) Bak, Shmuel (Zalmen), 67, 97, 107–11, 357, 400n37 Banaitis, Juozas, 437n24 Baranowski family, 41 Bartoszewicz, Janowa, 55–9, 66, 346–7, 358 Bartoszewicz, Kazimierz, 55 Bartoszewicz family, 55 Bas, Mrs, 195 Bastatski family, 21, 22, 31, 34 Beethoven, Ludwig von: Leonore No. 3, 95; Ninth Symphony, 95 Begin, Menachem, 394n47 Beit Hatfutsot (Museum of the Diaspora), 413–14n118 Beker, Shloyme, 174 Belarus, 319, 333 Belkind, 70 Belorussia, Jewish partisans in, 269, 276 Benyakovksi, Nadye, 91 Beregolski, Yankev, 24, 40–1, 94, 185, 195, 393–4n37 Berek, Arn, 93 Bergelson, Dovid, 217, 280, 289, 293, 328, 345, 421n16, 448n106 Berger, Henning, 94, 405n82 Berliand, Senia, 247 Berlin, Germany, 240–2, 250–2 Berlin Symphony Orchestra, 244 Bernshteyn, Leo, 96, 279 Bernshteyn, Mire, 88–9, 186, 349, 358, 402n54, 402n56 Bernshteyn, Rivele, 129, 412n137 Betar, 406n92, 415n27 Beylis, Shloyme, 445n81 Beylits, 203 Beys-Yehude School, 31

Bialik, Chaim Nahman, 93, 96, 98, 105, 107, 112, 216, 275, 337, 404n73, 411n121 Białystok Ghetto, 358, 414n12, 416n31 Big, Asya, 179, 358, 403n60, 413n6, 419n58 Bin (The Bee), 321 Birobidzhan, 294 Black Book, The, 265, 281–2, 284, 346, 363, 368, 387n1, 439n40, 442–3n64, 445n84, 447n103; Ehrenburg and, 266, 281, 284, 331–3, 336, 338–40, 342, 371–2, 421–2n3, 429n43, 447n102; JaFC and, 338–9, 387n1, 442–3n64, 445n84; smuggled to Yad Vashem, 447n104; Sutzkever and, 332–6, 338–9, 340, 342, 346, 438–9n32 Blitz, Yekusiel Ben Yitskhok, 98, 408n100 Blumgarten, Shloyme (Solomon) (Yehoash), 96, 98, 216, 326, 407n99 Blyakher, Shapse, 24, 40–1, 93–4, 96, 189, 394n38 Bodman, 187 Boraks, Edek, 138, 143, 156–7, 162, 414n12 Borkowska, Anna, 143–4, 346–7, 358, 414–15n19 Borovski, Khyene, 135, 146, 413n4 Boruta, Kazys, 106, 410n119 Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, 242 Brauze, Moyshe, 154–5, 228, 414n13 Brenayzen, 78 Breytbart, Dr, 101 Broderzon, Moyshe, 270, 424–5n9 Brodski, 247 Broydo, Rokhl, 90, 186, 212, 402–3n58 Budnik, Dovid Iossifovich, 239, 246–7, 422n11 Bukhman, 43

Index

457

Bund, 341, 344, 365, 366, 404n72, 414n15, 419n58 Burak, Dr, 101 Burakas, F., 33–4, 80 Burakiski, Rokhele, 173 Burshteyn, Frume-Rive, 191–2, 420n5 Bushel, 90 Buxtorf, Yohanan, 98, 408n100 Byalovake, paratroopers of, 146–57

Crimea, 280 cultural life, 88–99, 112, 324, 337, 348, 360, 364–5, 436n22, 445n85. See also art/artists; Paper Brigade; writers Culture House at Strashun 6, 98–9 Cvirka, Petras, 65, 399n30 Czechoslovakia: Jews from, 75–6; number of Jews killed in, 254 Czezowski, Tadeusz, 67

camps. See specific camps censorship, 288, 339, 343, 344, 345–6, 348, 356, 371, 443n67 Chagall, Marc, 96, 105, 167–9 Cheap Houses, 8, 150–3, 388n6 children: murder of, 190–7, 259–60, 330, 338, 350–1; purchase of, to rescue them, 71 chimney sweeps, role of, 87 Choibalsan, Khorloogiin, 273, 427n23 Chopin, Frédéric, 95, 96, 112 Choral Synagogue, 53, 121 Christian Democratic Party, 243 Ciburys, 146 clothing of the murdered, 75–6, 261 Cold War, 266 Commission to Gather Documents of Jewish Culture, 369–70 Committee for Coordinating Secular Yiddish Schools in Argentina, 341 Committee for Relief and Assistance, 83 communication, with outside world, 143–4 Communism, 266, 323, 344, 364, 365 Communist Party, 135, 170, 413n3, 413n5 Communists, 413n4, 415n26 corpses, 201–5; incineration of, 198–201, 205–6 Council of Elders, 389n13 Council of Trade Unions of Vilna, 169

Dachau concentration camp, 410n120 Davidov, Vladimir, 247 Dawidowicz, Lucy, 321 Daykhes, Lize, 97, 407n98 decapitation, 22 Degner, Ellen, 72–3, 113–14 Degner, Hans, 72 Denazification Law #8, 244 Der Emes (Truth), 7, 372 Der Nister (Pinkhes Kahanovitsh), 277, 299, 427n30 Der Stürmer, 102–3, 409n105, 423n20 Desler, Salek, 162, 171, 177, 353, 416n36, 418n51 Deutsche Vokszeitung, 242 Dietrich, 58 Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain) (journal), 373, 404–5n76 disabled, killing of, 70 Distel, Leyb, 148 Dmitriev, 239, 422n11 Doctors’ Plot, 300, 431–2n6, 432n8 Dodd, Thomas, 261 Dogim, Yitskhok, 203, 206, 208–10, 214 Doliner, Leonid, 247 Don Cossak, 67 “Dos naye lid” (The New Song), 397n19 Drischer, 195 Dudziec, Jadwiga, 145, 415n23 Dürer, Albrecht, 245, 423n16

458

Index

Durmashkin, Volf, 95, 112, 189, 405n88 Dvořák, Antonín, 95 Dvorzhetski (Dworzecky), Mark, 341–2, 345–6, 359, 441–2n53 Dzigan, Shimen, 372, 405n86 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 233, 237–9, 250, 265, 268–84, 287, 299, 367, 427–8n31, 428n34, 429n42, 429n43; accusations against, 429n46; address at JaFC, 269; The Black Book and, 266, 281, 284, 331–3, 336, 338–40, 342, 371–2, 421–2n3, 429n43, 447n102; first acquaintance with, 268–71; friendship with, 268; in the good years, 271–6; JaFC and, 328, 421–2n3; jealousy of, 275–6; the Jew, 276–8; Jewish nationalism and, 429n46; Julio Jurenito, 268, 275; last meeting with, 284, 371–2; lecture on, 268; letters to, 280, 337; Padenie Parizha (The Fall of Paris), 276; popularity in Soviet Union, 272; popularity of, 275, 334; prehistory of friendship with, 268–9; “‘Smert’ geroia” (Death of a Hero), 275; Soviet style of reportage, 334; Stikhi o voine (Poems about War), 275; Svoboda (Freedom), 275; thirst for revenge, 281; Thirteen Pipes, 268, 275; “Triumph of a Human Being,” 268–9, 270, 329–30, 421–2n3; in Vilna, 279; Voine (War), 271 Ehrenburg, Irina, 284, 427–8n31, 447n104 Ehrenburg, Lyubov Mikhailovna, 272, 276, 277, 284 Eichmann, Adolf, 413–14n118 Eisen, 216 Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman, 320, 397n16

Emes (Truth) Press, Moscow, 336, 365, 372, 387n1, 425n11, 427n29, 429n42, 430n6, 436n20, 439n33, 439n36, 445n84, 446n89, 446n91; Buenos Aires, 446n92 Entin, Solomon, 156 Epshteyn, Shakhne, 280, 291, 327, 428n36 Epshteyn-Leventhal, Beba, 389n11 Ester Rokhl Kaminska theatre museum, YIvo, Vilna, 410n116 Etinger, Yakov, 299, 300, 431–2n6 Expressionism, 107 Eydelson, 93 Eynikayt (Unity), 289, 293, 298, 327, 330, 333, 338, 345, 372, 402n56, 429n2, 437–8n26, 441–2n53 Farber, Yuri, 208–9 Farn nitsokhn (To Victory) detachment, 182, 184 fascism, 248, 254, 259, 281, 329, 334, 345–6, 367–8, 442n54. See also An-ski Museum of the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society: anti-fascist movement Faulhaber, 198 Faynshteyn, Daniel, 97, 106, 410n118 Faynshteyn, N., 439–40n41 Fedecka, Maria, 67, 400n36 Feffer, Itsik, 293, 327, 431n2, 448n106 Feldman, 150 Feldshteyn [Feldstein], Tsemakh, 96, 109, 186, 406–7n95, 411n124 Fessel, Avrom, 67 Feygus, Dr, 101, 212 Feygus, Mme, 95 Fiedler, 198, 202, 208 Figuren, 201–5 Figuren-diggers, 204 Fincks. See Hingst, Hans

Index Fingerhut, Dr, 186 First Assault (provokatsye), 141 First World War, 320, 346, 363 Fishman, David, 399–400n35 Fishman, Fanya, 427–8n31 Fishman, [Yoel], 43 Folks-gezunt (journal), 101, 389–90n15 food, access to, 81–8 forced labour, 66, 324–6, 362, 392–3n31, 398n27, 400n41, 403n60, 405n84, 411n125, 412n138, 419n1 forced labour camps, 412n138, 419n1. See also specific camps found documents, 356–7 Frank, Hans, 248, 250, 423n21 Frid, Anatol, 43, 397n12 Fridman, 148 friendship, 189, 273 From the Vilna Ghetto / Vilna Ghetto (Sutzkever), editions of: publication in Argentina, 340, 341, 440n42; publication in France, 340, 341, 342, 343, 357, 358, 397n13, 419n3, 439–40n41, 440n42; publication in Israel, 341; publication in Soviet Union, 341, 342, 343–5, 346, 358, 370, 419n3, 440n42, 443n67 Frumkin, Moyshe, 51 Furtwängler, Wilhelm, 244 Galpern, Mme, 60 Galpern, Tevke, 147, 184 Gamburg, Avrom, 200 Gaon of Vilna, 105, 217, 320, 397n16; study house of, 308. See also Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman Garbel, Solomon, 73 Gdud, Motl, 25–6 Gelboym, Taybl, 143 Gelpern, Dimke, 333, 365–6, 439n40 Gens, Jacob, 43–4, 69, 177, 352–3, 354,

459

396–7n11, 406n92, 416n36, 418n51 Gent, Dr, 186 Gerasimov, Alexandr, 273, 290, 426n22 German Labour Department, 46, 85 German-Lithuanian Nationalists, 10–11 Gershovitsh, Tamare, 90, 95, 113, 189 Gershteyn, Nine, 92, 106–7, 403n67 Gershteyn, Yankev, 50–1, 89, 96–7, 349, 397n17, 407n96, 442n60 Gershuni, Gershn, 14, 42, 389–90n15, 389n15 Gersimov, Alexandr, 426n21 Gertman, Shike, 173, 286, 327, 418n52 Gestapo, 24, 63–5, 76, 79, 85, 101–2, 104, 121–2, 132, 134, 138, 140, 143, 149, 157, 166, 172, 198, 256, 352–3, 357, 389–90n15, 396–7n11, 398n27, 416n36, 418n51 Geto yedies (Ghetto News), 90 Geyger, Max, 95 “Ghetto-Press,” 96 ghetto vocational school, 44, 50, 133 Gininberg, 166 Ginsburg, Ilya, 217, 421n17 Gira, Liudas, 65, 332 Gitelman, Dovid, daughter, 123 Giterman, Yitskhok, 84, 402n52 Glants-Leyeles, Arn, 405n78 Glatshteyn, 326 Glazer, 210–11 Glazman, Yoysef (pseudonym Avrom), 96, 116, 137, 138, 162, 173, 406n92 Glezer, 147 Glik, Hirsh, 163, 288, 349, 416n38, 442n61 Goering, Hermann, 283–4, 367, 429n45, 443n74 Gol, Shloyme, 200–1, 206, 208, 210–12, 214

460

Index

Goldberg, Motl, 203–4 Goldberg, Zelik, 148, 189 Goldfaden plays, 216 Goldschmidt, Eliohu Yankev, 102, 408n103, 414n13 Goldshteyn, Berele, 74 Goldshteyn, Borekh, 136–9, 147, 153–4, 158, 189, 414n14 Goniec Codzienny (The Daily Messenger), 51–2, 64, 160–1 Gonionski, Mire, 162 Gordon, Hirsh, 140 Gordon, Jacob, 417n45 Gordon, Khayim-Meyer (Khayim the Gypsy), 13–14, 31–2 Gordon, Leybl, 140, 141 Gordon, Lize, 92, 162, 403n66 Gordon, Yankev (Jacob), 93, 404n75 Gordon brothers, 173 Gorky, Maxim, 105, 217 Gotthard, Herbert, 79, 102, 104, 408n102, 409n106 Govorov, Leonid, 274, 427n24 Grade, Chaim, 42, 321, 372, 396n8 Grade, Libe, 42 Great Provocation, the, 29, 33 Great Synagogue, 13, 397n16 Grigoriev, Lioshka, 251 Grigoriev, Yakov, 239, 246, 247, 250–1 Grinvald, Dine, 184 Grodnensky. See Grodzensky, A.I. Grodno, 277 Grodzenski, Arn-Yitskhok, 60, 398n24 Grodzenski, Khayim-Oyzer, 13, 93, 389n14 Grodzensky, A.I., 253, 259 Grosman, Khaye, 157, 358 Gross, Max, 172, 179 Grossman, Vasily, 275, 281, 328, 339–40, 371, 416n31 Gudzenko, Semyon, 272, 425n13

Gurvitsh, Grishe, 183 Gutgeshtalt, Hirsh, 96, 189, 405–6n89 Gutman, Shmuel, 123 Gzmilewska, Wictoria, 66, 410n114 Hague, The, 253 Halkin, Shmuel, 271, 277, 298, 425n12 Hamburg University, 72–3 Ha-noar ha-Tsioni, 344 Ha-Shomer ha-Tzair, 344, 345, 413–14n118, 413n4, 414n14, 414n16, 415n20, 416n31, 417n44, 418–19n56 Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 103, 371 Hehalutz ha-Tzair-Dror, 344, 418n54 Help through Work Society, 389–90n15 Herder, Feldwebel, 33, 35, 395n51 Hering, August, 27, 38, 100, 256, 394n46 heroism, 179 Herzl, Theodor, 105, 410n113 hideouts, 445n80; caves, 116–18; living in the sewer system, 127; underground city, 119–31. See also malines; sewers Himmler, Heinrich, 46, 68–9, 79, 104, 198 Himpel, Alexander, 102 Hingst, Hans, 11, 28–9, 64, 68, 79, 86, 249–50, 253, 256–8, 261, 389n9, 390n20 Hirsch, Maurice de, 388n6 Hirshbeyn, Peretz, 94, 405n81 Histadrut, 373 Hitler, Adolf, 7, 19, 59, 65, 69, 117, 136, 143, 151, 157–9, 242–4, 265–6, 283, 322, 343 Hitler Youth, 68 hkP concentration camp, 110, 119, 123, 126, 132, 148, 150, 185, 192, 197, 212, 411n125, 412n135, 412n138

Index Hofmekler, 21 Hofshteyn, Dovid, 448n106 Holocaust, theatre productions about heroism in, 340 Holocaust literature, 321–2, 333, 340, 341–2, 349–50, 356, 358, 439–40n41 Holocaust memory, 341–2, 346, 356, 441n47 Holocaust photography, 357 hospital, ghetto (Jewish), 42, 45, 60, 63–4, 80, 83, 99–101, 113, 114, 118, 121, 170, 180, 249, 259–60, 350–1, 360, 406–7n95 Hoyz, 136–7 Ilyashevitsh, Yidl, 63 Institute for Study of the Jewish Question (Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage), 408n102, 408n104 International Court of Justice, 253 Inzikhistn (Introspectivists), 322 Ippolitov-Ivanov, Mikhail, 95 Israel, 266, 280, 284, 372. See also Palestine Itskovitsh, 148 Ivanter, Dr, 186 Jackson, Robert H., 423n15 Janek, 145 Jankauskas, Julian, 66, 114–15, 165–6, 179–80, 347, 399n34 Jannings, Emil, 399n31 Januszkiewicz, Professor, 100 Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JaFC), 233, 237–8, 265–6, 281, 289, 293–4, 329–33, 340, 370, 429n2, 430–1n9, 431n2, 437–8n26; The Black Book and, 338–9, 387n1, 442– 3n64, 445n84; Ehrenburg and, 269, 328, 421–2n3; in Moscow, 327–8; publishes Eynikayt, 333; Sutzkever

461

and, 254, 276–7, 293, 298; testimony collected by, 333 Jewish Colonization Organization, 388n6 Jewish Council, 43, 389–90n15 Jewish cultural expression, 340 Jewish cultural resistance, 325–7, 337, 347, 349–50, 358, 359–63, 366–7, 369, 371, 399–400n35, 409–10n111. See also Paper Brigade Jewish Museum of Art and Culture, 215, 266, 332, 335, 338, 369, 371, 413–14n118, 437n24, 447n102 Jewish nationalism, 266, 429n46 Jewish partisans, 181, 265, 269, 271, 276–81, 286–8, 294–5, 325–30, 337, 348, 356, 357, 368, 414n10, 414n11, 440n45; heroism of, 281; Nekome (Revenge) Jewish partisan brigade, 174, 176, 216, 415n20; Nekome (Revenge) unit, 413–14n118, 415n20, 417n44, 418–19n56; organization of, 135; reorganization of, 172–4; return to Vilna after liberation, 373; women among, 358 Jewish police, 43–4, 73, 171, 354, 396–7n11, 406n92, 416n36, 418n51 Jewish press, 409n110 Jewish Question, 325 Jewish resistance, 344, 349, 359–63, 366, 367, 441–2n53; appeal to other communities, 156–8; armed, 138–41, 144, 165; code for mobilization, 174–6; first appeal, 135–8; first operation, 153–6; as Maccabees, 349; reorganization of, 172–4; role of women in, 358. See also Jewish partisans Jewish State Theatre, 112 Jewish Technical School, 148, 189 Jewish Vocational School, 133

462

Index

Judenrat, 13–14, 22–4, 33–4, 43, 46, 80–2, 87, 90, 101, 352–3, 389n13, 390n18, 396–7n11, 396n7 Jurgis (Ziman), 181 Kachanowska, Teresa, 71 Kaczerginski, Barbara, 165, 229, 399n34 Kaczerginski, Shmerke, 23, 67, 106, 216, 321, 331, 338, 342, 348, 359, 392–3n31, 403n65, 408n102, 410n115, 413–14n118, 430n8, 435n16, 437n24, 438n28, 443–4n78; hiding in the swamps, 444–5n79; rescue of materials and, 164, 166, 345, 371–2, 446n92; Soviet Writers Union and, 370 Kadish, 29–30, 249, 257 Kaganovich, Lazar, 431n4 Kahan, Shimshn, 23, 393n32 Kailis labour camp, 70, 90, 110, 180, 182, 190–2, 197, 212, 380, 398n27, 400n41, 403n60, 405n84, 412n138 Kaiserwald concentration camp, 410n115 Kalmanovitsh, Zelig, 41, 42, 95–7, 106, 189–90, 293, 335, 395n4, 419–20n4 Kaltenbrunner, Ernst, 250, 423n22 Kamay, Dr, 67 Kamermakher, 79, 198 Kaminska, Esther-Rokhl, 164, 167–9, 417n45 Kaminska, Ida, 372 Kaplan, Yankl, 88, 90, 135, 137, 179, 247, 403n60, 413n6 Kaplan-Kaplanski, Dovid, 22, 33, 392n28 Kaplinski, Shmuel, 138, 140, 182, 227, 414n15 Karablikov, 146 Karniks, Yitskhok, 93 Kassel, 19, 256

Kats (Rabbi), 34 Kats, Aaron, 299, 432n7 Kats, Khiene, 60 Kats, Teme, 80, 136, 401n47 Katsenelenbogen, Shaul, 93, 403n69 Kazimir (Sumauskas), 181 Kempner, Josef, 156 Kempner, Vitke, 144, 154–5, 182–3, 216, 226, 228, 344, 345, 358, 413–14n118, 414n13, 415n20 Khabad, Motke, 40, 395n3 Khapunes (Jew-snatchers), 10, 12–13, 15–16, 22–3, 43, 60, 74, 79, 82, 89, 121, 125, 249, 255 Kharik, Izi, 288, 430n7 Khash, 29–30, 63, 249 Khayimson, Malke, 60, 89, 398n25 Khazan, 173 Khomich, I.F., 238, 422n6 Khrushchev, Nikita, 278 khurbn, 441n47 Khvoynik, Avrom, 137, 179, 403n60, 413n6 Kielce, Poland, pogrom in 1946, 447–8n105 Kiev, 246 Kittel, Bruno, 78, 115–16, 122, 131–4, 143, 167, 170–2, 176–7, 179, 181, 184, 198, 361, 401n46 Kivelisha, Yevgeny, 239, 422n11 Kivilsha, Dr, 251 Klooga concentration camp, 186–9, 405–6n89, 406n90, 419n1, 419–20n4 Knapheys, Moyshe, 298, 299–300, 431n5 Komber, 100 Komsomol (young Communists), 146, 179 Kon, Pinkhes, 14, 22–3, 34, 249, 257, 390n17, 392n29 Kopanski, Eliohu, 125–6

Index Korablikov, Makar, 146, 415n26 Korczak, Reyzl (Ruzkha), 167, 175, 184, 226, 325, 342, 344, 345–6, 359, 417n44 Koriski, L., 436–7n22 Korsakas, Kostas, 65, 399n30 Kosciuszko, Tadeusz, 106 Kotler, Shmulik, 195 Kotliar, Volodye, 247 Kovaiatis, Monika, 128 Kovalski, Itsik, 149, 160, 184, 415n27 Kovner, Abba, 137–8, 143–4, 153, 170, 182, 216, 331, 338, 344–5, 357–8, 370, 413–14n118, 413n6, 415n20, 417n44, 419n61, 437n24, 441–2n53 Kovner, Mikhl, 143 Kovno (Kaunas), 281; ghetto in, 333, 365–6, 439n40 Kozhen, Nosn, 23, 270, 393n34 Kozlowski, 180 Krasner, 34 Kravetski, 238 Kreizer, Yakov, 299, 431–2n6 Krinski, Rokhl (Rachela), 106, 166, 410n115 Krinski, Sore, 410n115 Kross, 198 Kruk, Eliezer, 14 Kruk, Herman, 96, 98, 106, 189, 335, 348, 369, 371, 404n72, 406n90, 406n94, 406–7n95, 438n28 Kryzyzewski, Goldele, 192 Kubiliūnas, Petras, 64, 396n29, 398n29 Kuklia, Valdimir, 247 Kulbak, Moyshe, 272, 426n16 Kuperberg, 148 Kuznetsov, Russia, 250–1 Kviek, Maria, 31 labour, division of, 203–4 Lakner, 69 Lampe, Maurice, 23, 249

463

Landau, Alfred, 165–6, 216, 417n43 Landsberg, Poland, 240 Langbort, 14 Latvia, 333 Law for the Protection for German Blood and Honour, 395n50 Lawrence, Geoffrey, 249, 250, 253, 423n19 Lazar, Khayim, 183 Leather Workers Union, 169 Lefin, Mendl, 98, 408n100 Legel, 198, 202 Leningrad, 344; German blockade of, 274 Leopold III, King, 240 Lerer, Moyshe, 189, 419–20n4 Levin, Hirsh, 148 Levin, Lyove, 184 Levin, Marek, 195 Levin, Mates, 140 Levin, Moyshe, 23, 393n32 Levin, Zelik, 195 Levitski, Lyube, 93, 111–14, 358, 404n74 Levyik, H. (Levyik Halpern), 326 Leyeles, Arn (Glants-Leyeles), 326, 405n79 Leykin, 90 Leyvik, H., 405n80 Liber, Dr, 97 Libo, Dr, 67 Lipkovitsh family, 67 Lipovski, Esther, 93–4, 186, 405n85 Literatura i iskusstvo, 345 Lithuania, 322; anti-semitism in, 347; collaborators in, 333, 346, 347, 357; ennobling actions of non-Jews in, 346–7; in First World War, 320; under Polish rule, 346; Soviet occupation of, 419–20n4 Lithuanian Auxiliary Police Battalions, 388n7

464

Index

Lithuanian Communist Party, 172–3 Lithuanian Jewry, destruction of, 275, 276, 333 Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, 322–3 Litvak culture, 320, 365 Litvakov, Moyshe, 288, 430n7 Litvinov, Maksim, 280, 428n35 Łódź, Poland, 266, 371, 372 Lomakin, Nikolai Ivanovich, 239, 246, 251, 422n11 Lozovskii, Solomon, 281, 290–1, 299, 339, 430–1n9 Lubotski, Borekh, 90, 92, 96, 184, 403n59 Lubotski, Donye, 184, 185 Lubotski, Ime, 184–5 Lubotski, Nyuse, 184 Luftwaffe (German Air Force), 9 Lukishki Market, 253, 257 Lukishki Prison, 10, 13, 15, 19, 28–31, 33, 37–8, 46, 56, 60, 63, 68, 76, 78–9, 113, 153, 198, 207, 253, 256, 257, 394n47 Lukosius, Balys, 125, 194 Lunski, Khaykl, 99, 102, 340–1, 408n101, 440n45 Lunski, Sheyne, 135 Lurie, Itsik, 125 Madeysker, Sonye, 135, 138, 146, 160, 162, 178–80, 227, 358, 413n5 Magid, Khonen, 184 Magun, Lize, 157–8, 174–6, 358, 414n16 Maimonides, 91, 102 Majdenek, 239 malines, 119–31, 360–1, 366 Mandelshtam, Osip, 272, 425–6n15 Manor, Dori, 436n19 Margis, 415n25. See also Senkiewicz, Vitold (Margis)

Mark, Ber, 296, 333, 431n3, 446n91 Mark, Moyshe, 174 Markeles, Noime, 106, 410n117 Markish, Peretz, 233, 265, 266, 280, 285–91, 298, 327, 371, 372, 429n2, 430n5, 448n106 Markov, Fyodor, 173, 181, 286, 327, 328, 419n61 Markovitsh, Blume, 150 Marrano Jews, 93 Marusis, Major, 162 mass exterminations, 80, 340, 366, 367, 405n84, 434n8 Matikanski, Yoshke, 73 Matskevitsh, Itsik, 138, 148–9, 154, 173, 228, 414n13 Maxwell-Fyfe, David, 261 May Day, 164 Mayer, 75–6 Mayerovitsh-Shvarts, Esther, 391n322 Mazitsh, Shurke, 147 Mefitsey-Haskole Library, 14, 23, 34, 98, 141, 176, 390n19 memorials, 340 Menakhem-Mendl under the Swastika, 21 Mendele Mokher Sforim (Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh), 96, 216, 337 Merder fun felker (Murderer of Peoples), 338 Michejda, Komel, 100 Mickiewicz, Adam, 27, 394n44 Mikhelson, 202 Mikhoels, Shloyme (Solomon), 233, 237, 254, 265–6, 268, 280, 283, 292–301, 297, 327, 328, 334, 370–1, 431n2, 448n106 Mikhtom, Bentsye, 23, 222, 393n32 Mikolauskas, 142 Mikulska, Maria, 411n126 Milkonovitski, Shabse, 43, 397n13

Index Minkowski, Maurycy, 167, 168, 417n46 Minsk, 239, 448n106; ghetto in, 333, 364, 365, 366, 439n40; Jewish cultural institutions in, 363–4 Mirskaya, 289 Mitskuner, Sheyne, 332 Molotov, Vyacheslav, 283, 429n44 Morgenshtern, Tserne, 77 Moscow, Soviet Union, 242, 252, 254, 265–9, 271, 334, 335–7, 370–1; decision to leave, 371–2; evacuation of, 292; JaFC in, 327–8; political landscape of, 346; Righteous among Nations in, 414n16; Sutzkever in, 368–71; Yiddish writers, 288, 327; Yiddish writers in, 355 Moscow State Yiddish Theatre (Goset), 292, 294, 334 Moscow Writers’ Club, 271 Moysensko, 146 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 95 Müller, Dr Hans, 102, 103, 400n40 Murer, Franz, 14, 22–3, 52, 64, 72, 85–6, 90, 112–13, 153, 161–2, 350–1, 390n20; edicts of, 44–5, 93, 165; “expert” in Jewish affairs, 68–9; Judenrat and, 43–4, 81; ration cards, 82; in Sutzkever’s testimony, 253, 256–61 Museum for the Study of Oriental Peoples (Frankfurt), 102–3 music, 94–5 Mussolini, Benito, 165, 417n42 Napoleon, in Vilna, 27 Narotsh Forest, 173, 176, 184, 269, 271, 286, 292, 327, 358, 414n10, 414n11, 417n44, 440n45 National-Socialist German Workers Party (NsDaP), 69 Natshe Forest, 181

465

Nazi Party, 33, 103 Nazis, 323–4, 327, 344, 354, 425n11 Nazism, 330, 334, 339, 357 Nazi–Soviet Molotov–Ribbentrop protocol, 333 Nekome (Revenge) Jewish partisan brigade, 174, 176, 216, 415n20 Nekomenemer (the Avengers) Jewish detachment, 182 Nėris, Salomėja, 399n30 Neugebauer, Rudolf, 24, 48, 76, 79, 81, 131, 136, 174–6, 198, 394n41 Neumann, Stadtkommandant, 11, 255 Niepodleglosc (Independence movement), 144; eponymous newspaper, 158 Niger, Shmuel, 440n45 “Night of Murdered Poets, The,” 266 “Night of the Yellow Permits,” 52–4, 60, 63, 112, 145, 207; 24 October 1941, 377; part II: 3–4 November 1941, 377 NkvD, 294 non-Jews: help offered by, 357; as partisans, 145–6; women, 358 Norvaiša, Balys, 13, 389n12 Notes, Avrom, 97 Nuremberg, Germany, 242–50; bombardment of, 245 Nuremberg Laws, 33, 103, 242, 395n50 Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, 233, 235, 253–61, 265, 266, 281, 298, 348, 422n11, 422–3n14, 429n45; Sutzkever’s diary notes, 237–52, testimony at, 253–61, 351, 367, 370, 371, 399n32; talk on, 371 Nürnberger Nachrichten, 244 Nusinov, Yitskhok, 280, 428n37 Oberhardt, Walter, 64, 350, 398n27 Office of Statistics, 98–9

466

Index

Old Prayer House, 397n16 Olitski, Moyshe, 90, 402n57, 407n57 Olkenitski, Ume, 106, 112, 186, 410n116, 419–20n4 Operation Barbarossa, 323–4, 343, 387n1 Opeskin, Leyb, 185, 412n133; “The Maline Jew,” 120–1, 349 Orbeli, Iossif Abgarovitsch, 239, 243, 245, 250, 422n8, 422n11 ort Jewish Vocational School, 403n62 Oshmene, ghetto in, 358, 414n11, 414n16 Ostmann, Eberard von, 388–9n8 Ostrovski, Leonid, 247 Ovnt-kurier (The Evening Courier), 398n24 Paganini, Nicolò, 95 Paleckis, Justas, 269, 278, 279, 286, 287, 328, 331 Palestine, 251, 252, 280, 329, 338, 372–3 Paper Brigade, 325, 326, 360–1, 362, 369, 371, 392–3n31, 409–10n111, 421n17, 428n37, 430n8, 438n28 paratroopers of Byalovake, 146–57 Paris, France, 266, 372–3 partisans: non-Jewish, 145–6, 327; organization of, 135–85; Soviet, 327. See also United Partisan Organization (Fareynikte partizaner organizatsye, or FPo) Pasternak, Boris, 272–3, 278, 289, 426n19 patches, 10–11, 14, 17–18, 31, 45, 68, 75–6, 118, 165, 154, 173, 255 Patria, 372–3 Peretz, Y.L., 96, 98, 104, 106, 297, 323, 397n18, 437n23; Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain), 94, 112, 404–5n76; “Hope, springtime is not far off ” (poem), 50–1

Peretz Gymnasium, 22 Perlove, Gitele, 77 permits, colour-coded, 46–8, 52–3. See also “Night of the Yellow Permits” Peter the Great, 106 Pevtz, Tevke, 60 Peysakhovitsh, Dr, 101 photographs, 357, 358 Pilnyak, Boris, 272, 426n18 Pilovski, Yisroel, 140 Pinski, Dovid, 94, 405n83, 405n85, 405n88 Plagge, Karl, 412n135 Plechavičius, Povilas, 399n33 poetry, found, 349 pogroms, 11, 76, 249, 447–8n105 Pohl, Johannes, 102–4, 408n104, 409n106, 409n110 Poland, 266, 280, 284, 320, 333; antisemitism in, 343; collaborators in, 357; ennobling actions of non-Jews in, 346–7; number of Jews killed in, 254; repatriation to, 371–2 Polish Communist Party, 169 Polish Workers Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza, or PPr), 157, 416n32 Pollin-Galay, Hannah, 436–7n22, 443n67, 445n80 Ponar (Ponari), 27, 76–8, 210–15, 255, 257–9, 260, 261, 280, 323–4, 328, 356, 398n27, 404n72; mass graves of, 206–7, 286, 332, 349, 350, 357; mass killings at, 80, 366, 367, 405n84, 434n8; structure of the pyres at, 205–7; tunnel under, 208 Porat, Dina, 441–2n53 Porubanek airfield, 148 Potanin, Konstantin, 202 Pravda, 265, 268–9, 270, 271, 273, 281, 288, 329–30, 421–2n3, 429n46 Prilutski, Noyekh (also Prilutzky), 7, 24, 60, 197, 249, 253, 257, 343,

Index 387–8n2, 394n40; arrest of, 102; Yiddish Phonetics, 102 Prilutski, Paula R., 24, 60, 394n40 print shop, secret, 158–62 prisoners of war, 345; assistance for, 150 Proletarski Trud collective farm, 251 Przewalsi, Jan, 146, 160–2 Ptashek, Nikolai, 17–18, 31 Public Committee for Relief and Assistance, 83 Pupko-Krinski, Rokhl, 326 Pushkin Museum, 104 Puziriski, 72 Rabinovitsh, Ruvn, 184 Rabinovitsh, Sholem. See Sholem Aleichem Rabinovitsh, Y., 95, 164 Rabon, Yisroel, 23, 393n33 radio, secret, 144 Radomski, Paul, 246, 423n18 Raf, Yoshke, 139 Raginski, M.Y., 250 rail transport, sabotage of, 182 Rajzman, Samuel, 422n11 Rappoport, Shloyme Zanvl, 409n109 Ratner, Itsik, 91, 147, 189 Raybove, 198 Real-Gymnasium, 41, 77, 88, 91, 112, 186, 349, 396n6, 396n9, 410n120 Red Army, 8, 21, 143, 151–2, 158, 164, 180, 212, 291, 322, 323, 328, 357, 412n135, 433n6; encircling off Germans in Vilna, 131; entry into Vilna, 123; Jewish members of, 294, 330; liberation of Vilna and, 111 refugees, 331, 447–8n105 Reich Citizenship Law, 395n50 Reinys, Mgr, 67 Repin, Ilya, 105–6, 410n112 reportage genre, 334, 359

467

resistance, 138–9, 165, 171; diversionary tactics of, 138, 147–9; sabotage by, 147–9, 182; secret print shop of, 158–62; secret radio and, 144. See also Jewish partisans; partisans; United Partisan Organization (Fareynikte partizaner organizatsye, or FPo) revenge, thirst for, 15–16, 215–16, 350, 356–7, 367, 443n74 Reyzen, Avrom, 216, 397n19, 411n122; “Di vant” (The Wall), 107 Reyzen, Zalman, 323, 343 Reznik, Nisan, 137, 414n10 Richter (German), 191–2 Righteous among Nations, 399– 400n35, 414–15n19; Yad Vashem, 414–15n19, 415n24, 415n26, 416n30 rights, 10–12, 28–9, 44–5, 81 Rincewicz, Josef (train conductor), 197 Ringelblum, Emanuel, 402n52 Rodin, Elishe, 278, 428n32 Rolland, Romain, 105 Rom, Mme, 97 Roma, 31–2 Romm Press, 349, 409n110 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 244 Rosenberg, Alfred, 65, 101–7, 239, 242, 248, 250, 399n32, 408n104 Rosenberg Headquarters for the Baltics, 105 Rosenberg Task Force (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg), 101, 103–6, 164, 167, 224, 324–5, 326, 392–3n31, 395–6n5, 399n32, 400n40, 406n90, 408n102, 408n104, 410n115, 410n117, 410n118, 417n41 Roth, Joseph, 270, 424n3, 424n6 Rotkin, 149 Roytblum, 94 Rozenboym, 53–5

468

Index

Rozental, Khayele, 94, 405n87 Rozonovitsch, Hersh, 146 Rubin, Dore, 94 Rubinstein, Yitzhok, 13 Rudashevski, Yitskhok, 151, 326, 435n16, 442n60 Rudenko, Roman, 243, 422–3n14 Rudenski, Tsilke, 193 Rudnicki, Professor, 115 Rudnitski, Leah, 40, 186, 395n1 Rudnitski, Leyzer, 212 Rudnitski, Yitshkhok (Yitzhak Arad), 182, 419n61 Rudnitski Forest, 177, 180–6, 210, 279, 414n15, 417n44 Russian Revolution, 363 Rutenberg, Yekusiel, 94, 405n86 Ruzhinski, 67–8 Salomejo Neris, 65 Samuel Bak Museum, 400n37 Sarabski, Rokhl, 411n123 Sauliai (riflemen militia), 64 Savisauga (regional guard), 64 Scheinbaum, Yehiel, 344 Schibuk, 41, 49 Schmid, Anton, 416n30 Schmid, Josef, 156 Schneider, 198 Schönhaber, 256 schools, 88–93. See also specific schools and kinds of schools Schubert, Franz, 95 Schultze, Dr, 190 Schulze, Frau, 240 Schweinberger, Horst, 11–12, 15, 19, 27–30, 34, 38, 40, 43, 51, 63, 68, 76, 103, 113, 136–7, 211, 218, 249, 253, 255, 257–9, 351; Jewish hospital and, 100 Second Assault (provokatsye), 43 Second Jewish Council, 43. See also Judenrat

Sedlis, Dr Eliohu, 45, 67, 397n14 Segal, Rabbi, of Novigorod, 76 self-censorship, 345 Semionov (resistance fighter), 182 Semyatitski, Khayim, 24, 107, 133, 394n39 Senkiewicz, Vitold (Margis), 146, 415n25 Seriozhin, Captain, 150 sewers: as secret passages, 94, 117, 118, 121–2, 126–31, 176–8, 181, 184, 215–17, 360, 373 Shabad-Gavronski, 14 Shadovski, Max, 94, 96, 405n84 Shalit, Moyshe, 23, 393n35 Shalit, Mrs, 24 Shapiro, Zalmen, 9 Shats, Shmuel, 207 Shavl (Šiauliai), 333 Shchipachev, Stepan, 275, 427n26 Shenin, Lev, 250 Sher, Yankev, 96, 406n91; “From the Old Ghetto,” 97 Sheres, Tevke, 110 Shereshnyevski, Berl, 135, 146, 162, 170, 181, 184, 227, 413n3 Shereshnyevski, Roze, 135, 173 Sheynboym, Ilye (Yehiel), 175, 418n54 Shmukler, Gershn, 13 Shoah, 441n47 Sholem Aleichem, 21, 23, 88, 96, 98, 104–5, 165, 272, 289, 337, 391n27, 405n78; The Great Windfall, 23; letters of, 216; Tevye the Dairyman, 94 Sholem-Aleichem schools, 341 Sholokhov, Mikhail, 275, 427n27 Shoykhet, Khayim, 436–7n22 Shrayber, Matisyahu, 90, 403n62 Shriftzetser, Leyb, 21, 60, 391n26 Shteynholts, 134 Shulhoyf (also Vilna Synagogue Courtyard), 50, 88, 117, 357, 397n16, 402n55

Index Shum, Rabbi, 14 Shumacher, Yisroel, 372, 405n86 Siberia, 288, 320, 322 Šidlauskas, Juozas, 389n12 silence, 341, 356; anguish of, 271 Šimaitė, Ona, 67, 106, 164, 346–7, 358, 371, 399–400n35, 410n120 Simonov, Konstantin, 275, 427n26 Sliep, Avrom, 90, 113, 186, 403n61 Slivkin, Shmuel-Meyer, 189 Smirnov, Andrei, 422n11 Smirnov, Lev, 239, 247, 248, 249, 250, 254, 254–61, 422n7 Smolensk museum, 105, 281, 428n37 Smoliar, Hersh, 333, 363, 364–5, 439n40, 445n84, 445n85 Smorgon, Belarus, 319 Snyder, Timothy, 442n54 Social Welfare Committee, 82–3 Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish Population (toz), 71, 389–90n15, 400–1n42 Society of Friends of Knowledge, 104 solidarity, 358 Sonderkommando, 249, 255, 257, 258–9, 351 Soutine, Chaim, 272 Sovetskii pisaatel (Soviet Writer) press, 276 Soviet commanders, assistance for families of, 150 Soviet dictatorship, 288 Soviet Information Bureau (Sovinformburo), 238, 273, 290, 299, 339, 422n4, 422n5, 430–1n9 Soviet partisans, 327 Soviet press, 330 Soviet Union, 343, 370–1; anti-Jewish repression in, 340, 368, 372, 441n52; anti-semitism in, 334, 341, 368, 372; censorship in, 339, 343–6, 348; Extraordinary State Commission

469

for Ascertaining and Investigating German-Fascist Crimes, 422n11; Jewish cultural expression in, 340; Operation Barbarossa and, 323–4 Soviet Writers Club, 370 Soviet Writers Union, 323, 330, 370, 433–4n7 Soviet Yiddish culture, 265–6, 296, 327, 364, 370, 372 Soviet Yiddish writers, 265–7, 277, 284, 289, 372 Spanish inquisition, 93 Spinkler, Dr Gerhard, 165 Spinoza, Baruch, 96 Spokoyni, 119, 140, 178 Sporket, Albert, 69, 102, 104–5, 167–9, 400n40 Stakauskas, Juozas, 67, 111, 411n126 Stalin, Joseph, 266, 273, 275, 276–7, 322, 323, 329, 371, 372, 422n4, 448n106 Stalin Prize, 290 Stankiewicz, Stanislaw, 122 Star of David, yellow, 255–6, 278 Stefan Batory University, 321 Stolitski, Khaim, 119 stormtroopers (shturmist), 16, 19–20, 24, 31, 48–9, 59, 94, 139 Strashun, Matisyahu, 102, 402n55 Strashun Library, 89, 102, 103, 104, 337, 387n2, 397n16, 402n55 Streicher, Julius, 250, 251, 409n105, 423n19, 423n23 Stutthoff, 410n115 Surkov, Alexei, 275, 427n26 Sutzkever, Abraham (also Abrashe, Abrashinke, Avrom), 15–16, 27–8, 32, 34–5, 47, 69–70, 96, 112, 166, 214–16, 218, 222, 254–61; arrival in Moscow, 265; Bastatski family, 32; birth of, 319; The Black Book and, 332–6, 338–9, 340, 342,

470

Index

346, 438–9n32; childhood of, 319–20; commitment to craft, 324; commitment to Vilna community and its memorialization, 334–5; concealed machine-gun, 168; decision to leave Moscow, 371; denied visa to visit United States, 433–4n7; desire to testify in Yiddish, 237, 239, 243; Ehrenburg’s article about, 268–9, 270, 329–30; Ehrenburg’s influence on, 334; escapes to forest, 327, 328, 332; faith in poetry, 324, 328–9; fantasy of killing Goering, 283–4, 367, 443n74; father-in-law and, 56–7; father’s execution and, 62; final visit to Moscow, 371; in the forest, 180; founds Jewish Museum of Art and Culture, 437n24; in ghetto hospital, 63; handwritten testimony found by, 446n92; in hiding, 16–18, 21–2, 53, 123; hiding books and art, 105–6, 117 (see also Paper Brigade); hiding in the swamps, 444–5n79; Jewish cultural resistance and, 105–6, 117, 325–7, 337, 349–50, 359–63, 366–7, 369, 371, 409–10n111 (see also Paper Brigade); last meeting with Ehrenburg, 284, 371–2; leaves Moscow for Łódź, 372; letter to Ehrenburg, 280, 337; in liberated Vilna, 197–8; marriage of, 388n5; modesty about his poetic oeuvre, 349–50; in Moscow, 233, 368–9, 370–1; murdered child of, 259–60, 330, 350–1; Nazi occupation of Vilna and, 323–4; in Palestine, 372–3; in Paris, 372–3; as partisan-poet, 330; poetry compared to memoir, 349–57; presentation of hideouts, 445n80; public address before

JaFC, 254; rage at Germans, 237, 240–1, 243; receives Stalin Prize, 290; reputation of, 330; rescue from forest, 265, 269, 328–30, 343, 421– 2n3; rescue of hidden materials, 337, 353, 357, 366, 369, 430n8; rescuers of, 398n23; responsibility felt by, 237; return to Moscow, 252, 254; return to Vilna after liberation, 341–2, 353, 440n45; Rosenberg Task Force (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg) and, 417n41; Rosenberg Task Force in Vilna and, 103, 164; sewers and, 127; in Siberia, 320; sister of, 62–3; as slave labourer, 324–6, 362, 392–3n31; sources and, 335; as “Soviet” writer, 433–4n7; speaks standing, as if saying kaddish, 237, 249; speech before JaFC, 276–7, 293, 298; as symbol of Jewish struggle against fascism, 329; taken to the ghetto, 36–7; talk on Nuremberg at Vilnius Dramatic Theatre, 371; in Tel Aviv, 373; testimony at Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, 233, 235, 253–61, 265, 266, 281, 298, 348, 351, 367, 370, 371, 399n32; thirst for revenge, 15–16, 350, 367, 443n74; translation of his testimony, 253–61; in Vilna, 319; in Vilna after liberation, 336–8, 430n8; visits graves at Ponar, 210; wife gives birth (child killed by Murer), 64; witnesses execution of Soviet prisoners of war, 150; works at Vilna train station, 71; work permits and, 48, 52; Zalkindson and, 114–15. See also Sutzkever, Abraham, works by Sutzkever, Abraham, works by, 177; “Afn toyt fun Yankev Gershteyn”

Index (Upon the Death of Yankev Gershteyn), 407n96; “A nem ton dem ayzn” (Take Up Arms), 164, 325, 348, 362; “A vogn shikh” (A Cart of Shoes), 351, 398n28; “Bashafung” (Creation), 270; “Der geto-fidler” (The Ghetto Fiddler), 280, 428n38; “Der novi” (The Prophet), 395n4; “Der tsirk” (The Circus), 347, 391n24; diaries of, 233, 237–52, 278–9; “Di blayene platn fun Roms drukeray” (The Lead Plates of the Romm Printing House), 349, 409n110; Di festung (The Fortress), 339, 397–8n21; “Di lererin Mire” (Teacher Mire), 402n56; “Dos keyver-kind” (The Grave Child), 97, 348, 358, 406–7n95; “Dray royzn” (Three Roses), 351; “Es klapn di shleyfn” (My Temples Are Throbbing), 270; “Farfroyene yidn” (Frozen Jews), 280, 428n38; “First Day” (re 22 June 1941), 375, 448n2; From the Vilna Ghetto, 331–2, 336–8, 340–4, 347–8, 349–57, 358, 359–63, 364–70, 373, 438–9n32, 445n80 (see also From the Vilna Ghetto [Sutzkever], editions of Vilna Ghetto 1941–1944); “Fun a farloyrener poeme” (From a Lost Poem), 398n28; Geheymshtot (Secret City), 360, 373, 400n36, 412n136, 445n80; “Ikh lig in an orn” (I Lie in a Coffin), 23, 348, 434n8; “In kloyster af Rudnitskergas” (In the Church on Rudnitske Street), 397–8n21; “Itsik Vitenberg,” 418n51; “Kerndlekh vayts” (Grains of Wheat), 409–10n111; “Kol Nidre,” 271, 287, 327, 328, 329–30, 348, 425n11, 435–6n18; “Legende”

471

(Legend), 407n97; “The Liberation of Underground Museums,” 289; Lider (Poems), 322, 388n4; Lider fun togbukh (Diary Poems), 366–7; Lider fun yam hamoves (Poems from the Sea of Death), 342, 398n23, 398n26, 398n28; “Lid tsu di letste” (Song for the Last), 355; “Mayn mame” (My Mother), 351, 398n28; “Mayn reterin” (My Rescuer), 398n23; “Mit Shmerken, ven es brenen velder” (With Shmerke, When Forests Are Burning), 392– 3n31; “Nodl-shayn” (Needleshine), 434n8; “Oytoportret” (SelfPortrait), 434n8; “Penimer in zumpn” (Faces in Swamps), 17, 348, 390–1n22; Sibir (Siberia), 8, 322, 388n4; “Tsum kind” (To My Child), 351, 352, 398n26; “Tsum toyt fun mayn reterin” (On the Death of My Rescuer), 398n23; “Tsum yortog fun geto-teatr” (On the Anniversary of the Ghetto Theatre), 354; “Tsu Poyln” (To Poland), 404–5n76, 447–8n105; Tsvilingbruder, 398n23; “Under Your White Stars,” 348; “Un vel ikh tsu mayn heymshtot oyle-regl zayn in vinter” (And I will make a winter pilgrimage to my hometown), 398n23; Valdiks (Woodlore), 322, 410n116; “Vos mir hobn geratevet in Vilne” (What We Rescued in Vilna), 345; “Yehoash,” 407n99 Sutzkever, Abram Gerzevitch. See Sutzkever, Abraham Sutzkever, Freydke, 266, 273; decision to leave Moscow, 371; escapes to forest, 327, 332; family of, 330, 332, 337; hiding in the swamps,

472

Index

444–5n79; leaves Moscow for Łódź, 372; letters from, 336; letters of, 338; marriage of, 388n5; in Moscow, 335; murdered child of, 338, 350–1; Nazi occupation of Vilna and, 323–4; during Nuremberg testimony, 238; pregnancy of, 338; rescue from forest, 233, 328–30, 343, 421–2n3 Sutzkever, Reyna (Rina): birth of, 338; leaves Moscow for Łódź, 372 Sutzkever, Reyne, 15, 17, 22, 28, 30–1, 37, 40, 42, 50, 52, 55–7, 59, 62, 260, 330, 350–1, 398n28; death of, 64, 93; in Lukishki Prison, 29; possessions donated to purchase weapons, 149 Sutzkever, Rokhl, 97, 108, 112, 142, 186, 407n97 Sutzkever family, as refugees, 320. See also specific family members Syrets concentration camp, 246, 423n17 Szmaglewska, Seweryna, 422n11 Sztandar Wolnosci (The Banner of Freedom), 162, 179 Talmud, Vilna edition of (also Vilna Shas), 349, 409n110 Tapeyde, 246 Tarkovski, Stanislav, 239, 246, 247, 422n11 Tarlo, Gitele, 258 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 95 Tchernichovsky, Shaul, 275, 427n25 Tel Aviv, Israel, 233, 265, 266, 341, 373 Teper, Yosef, 22, 23, 392n30 Territorialism, 365, 424n4 testimony, 341–2; found, 215–16, 446n92. See also Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal Teumin, Emilia, 238, 422n4 Tiktin, Zalmen, 141–3, 146

Timauskas, 146 Tolstoy, Aleksey, 275, 427n28 Tolstoy, Leo, letters by, 105 Torah scrolls, burning of, 18–21 Toybnhoyz, 92 Trakunski Sisters, 198 Trapido, 80–1 Treger, Zelde, 177, 183–4, 216, 345, 358, 418–19n56 Trotski, Saul, 14, 34 Trubakov, Ziame, 247 Trunk, Yehiel Yeshaye, 270, 424n8 Tshernikhov, Yoysef, 270, 424n4 Tshetshik, 294 Tshmelina, 203 Tsinberg, Yisroel, 288, 430n7 Tsum zig (To Victory), 287, 425n11, 430n6 Turbovitsh, Leyb, 42, 90–1, 97, 186, 396n9 Tuwim, Julian, 270–1, 278, 424n7 Ukraine, 333 Umru, Dovid, 7–9, 23, 37, 60, 388n3 Union of Jewish Bakers in Vilna, 63 Union of Jewish Writers and Journalists in Poland, 372 Union of Writers and Artists in the Vilna Ghetto, 95–9, 348 Union of Yiddish Writers in Vilna (also Union of Jewish Writers and Journalists in Vilna), 23, 24, 398n24 United Partisan Organization (Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye, or FPo), 91, 93, 142–9, 158, 164, 167, 182, 327, 331, 358, 362, 369, 403n60, 410n117, 412n11, 414n10, 414n13, 414n16, 415n27, 419n58; arsenal of, 140; in Białystok, 138; establishment of, 137–9; heroes of, 179; hymn of (by

Index Hirsh Glik), 163; mobilization of, 174–6; new organization of, 172–4; non-Jewish members of, 145; secret radio and, 144; special section of, 162–3; Vitenberg and, 135, 169–70, 197, 216, 344, 357, 413n2 United States, 338 University of Hamburg, 114 Vaivara concentration camp, 418n53, 419n1 Valencia, Heather, 441n51 Vanka, 145 Vaynig, Naftoli, 186 Vaynshtayn, 148 Vayntroyb, Binyomen, 187 Vaysenberg, Isaac Meyer, 285, 429–30n4 Vayskop, 84, 401n51 Vazgel, 147 Velikiye Luki, Russia, 329 Venclova, Antanas, 65, 390n30, 399n30 Vidutski, Dodik, 149 Vigodski, Yankev (also Wigotzky or Wygodski), 14–15, 249, 257, 390n16 Vilbig Choir, 189 Vilkins, Khayim, 247 Vilmer emes, 395n1 Vilna (Vilnius), 253, 320; as centre of Jewish culture, 343–4; changing possession of, 322–3; destruction of, 293, 337, 345–6, 359; Ehrenburg’s impressions of, 279; at end of Second World War, 319; establishment of two ghettos in, 359; fall of, 323–4, 343, 387n1; German invasion of, 322, 387n1; German occupation of, 343; Holocaust literature about, 341–2; intermarried couples in, 67–8;

473

interwar Jewish community in, 320–1; as Jewish cultural space, 335; Jewish population after liberation, 331; after liberation, 197–8, 287–8, 335, 336–8, 341–2, 345, 353, 369, 371, 373, 430n8, 440n45; liberation of, 131, 295–6, 330–1, 335, 357, 368, 413–14n118; map of, xi; name of, 432–3n2; Nazi occupation of, 323–4, 327, 359; non-Jews in, 64–8; occupied by Red Army, 322, 433n6; under Polish rule, 346, 363; as Soviet city, 333; under Soviet rule, 364; struggle to renew Jewish life in, 345; Sutzkever’s final visit to, 371, testimony about, 255–61; before world wars, 320; Yiddish culture in, 320–1; youth club in, 326–7. See also Vilna ghetto Vilna-Colony (Wileńska Kolonia Kolejowa), 143, 414n18 Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, 400n37 Vilna ghetto, 80, 258, 285, 286, 295, 334–5, 338, 364, 366, 373; adaptation to ghettoization, 359–60; as autonomous Jewish space, 354–5; books in, 98–9; cultural section of, 98–9; daily life in, 359–60; establishment of, 359; first ghetto, 98; gates of, 38–9; health and sanitation in, 99–101; hospital in, 69–70, 99–101, 191; Jewish police in, 352–3, 396–7n11; journey to, 36–7; liberation of, 126; liquidation of, 51, 131, 327, 329, 345–6, 397n20, 412n138, 440n45; loss of 3,000 people, 98; map, xi; return to, 59–63; role of women in, 358; schools in, 88–93, 349; second ghetto, 50–1, 98; survivor testimonies, 341–2;

474

Index

Sutzkever’s writing in Black Book and, 332–3; Technical School in, 91; theatre in, 94, 324, 354, 358, 404n72, 405n85; Union of Writers and Artists in, 348 Vilna Jewry, 365; adaptation to ghettoization, 334–5; destruction of, 261, 280–1, 345–6, 364, 368 Vilna Old Age Home, 389–90n15 Vilna Party Committee, 182–3 Vilna Philharmonic, 238 Vilna Troupe, 396n7, 405n84 Vilna–Warsaw rail line, 27 Vilner emes (The Vilna Truth), 323, 343, 388n3 Vilner tog (Vilna Daily), 392n28 Vilnius Dramatic Theatre, 371 Vilnius University, 7, 9–10, 13, 43, 65, 104, 106, 321, 325, 343, 347, 371, 399–400n35 Viskind, Max, 93, 404n71 Vitalin(a), Frida, 41, 60, 396n7 Vitenberg, Itsik, 135, 141, 146, 153–4, 162, 164, 167, 173, 181, 185, 275, 295, 417n46, 418n50, 418n51; arrest of, 171; death of, 172; FPo and, 135, 169–72, 197, 216, 344, 357, 413n2; pseudonym Leon, 137; Vitenberg Affair, 369 Volger, Elkhonen, 407n97 Volkoviski, Aleksandr (Alik), 91, 189, 403n63 Volmark, 98 Von Renteln, Adrian, 64, 151 Voroshilov Brigade, 286, 327 Vultz, 97 Wagner, Richard, 29–30, 142–3 Warsaw, occupation of, 322 Warsaw Ghetto, 358

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 164, 333, 416n39 Wefel, Franz, 96 Weinreich, Max, 321, 322 Weiss, Martin, 11, 27, 32, 43, 61–2, 64, 68, 70–8, 76, 78, 113, 131, 190, 194–6, 195, 198, 204, 255, 257, 258, 389n11, 394n46 White Armbands, 9, 388n7 “white permits,” 82–3 Wigotzky, Jacob. See Vigodski, Yankev Wilezanska, 163 Wilnaer Zeitung (German-language newspapers), 70 Winter Aid Committee, 83–4 Wirblis, 166 Wisse, Ruth, 353, 355–6 Witos, 170, 180 Witzenhausen, Yosef, 98, 408n100 work permits, 46 writers, 8, 23, 24, 65, 95–9, 162, 265–7, 269–71, 275, 277, 284, 287–8, 320, 323, 325, 327–30, 333–4, 337–8, 348, 368, 370, 372. See also art/artists; specific writers Wulff, Dr Gerhard, 102 Wulff, Horst, 43, 72, 157, 401n43 Wygodski, Jacob. See Vigodski, Yankev Yad Vashem: The Black Book smuggled to, 447n104; Righteous among Nations, 399–400n35, 414–15n19, 415n24, 415n26, 416n30 Yashunski, Grigory, 43 Yavrov, Mrs, 194 Yehoash (pen name of Shloyme Solomon Blumgarten). See Blumgarten, Shloyme (Solomon) (Yehoash) Yelin, Meir, 333, 365–6, 439n40

Index Yiddish, 60; as mame-loshn, 270 Yiddish culture, 321–2; in Vilna, 320–1 Yiddish Literary Union (Warsaw; also Tlomackie 13; Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists in Warsaw) 285, 424n8 Yiddish PeN club, 321 Yiddish press, 323, 333, 336, 340, 372 Yiddish self-expression, 266 Yiddish theatre, 93, 94, 324, 340, 354, 358, 404n72, 405n85 Yiddish wartime poetry, 349–50 Yiddish writers, 289, 333; in Moscow, 288, 327, 355; work sent abroad, 338–9. See also specific writers YIvo (Yiddish Scientific Institute), 41, 63, 104, 115, 189, 216, 249, 321–2, 343, 360, 365, 371, 388n5, 395n4, 395–6n5, 417n43; Esther Rokhl Kaminska theatre museum, 167, 410n116; Ethnographic Committee, 409n109; in New York, 371, 395–6n5; Paper Brigade and, 325–6; Rosenberg Task Force (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg) and, 164, 167, 392–3n31, 395–6n5; theatre collection, 417n45; in Warsaw, 419–20n4 YIvo-bleter, 395n4 Yizker-bikher, 340 Yogikhes kloyz, 396n10 Yokhai, Berl, 184 Ypatinga (Special Squad), 12–13, 33–4, 64–5, 76, 80, 121, 162, 194 Ypatingasis būrys, 346, 389n12

475

Yugoslavia, number of Jews killed in, 254 Yung-Vilne (Young Vilna), 23, 321–3, 331, 343, 348, 372, 392–3n31, 393n32, 406n94, 407n97, 416n38 Zaleski, 146 Zalkind family, 133 Zalkindson, Dr, 97, 114–16, 189 Zalmanovitsh, Yankl, 133 Zalmen-Ber, 24 Zan, Tomasz, library of, 105 Zawadski, Josef, publishing house of, 104 Zehnpfennig, Adolf, 11, 255, 388–9n8 Zeitung für das deutsche Volk, 242 Žemaitis, Vladas, 411n126 Zhabinski, Tolye, 149 Zhdanov, Andrei, 273, 372, 426n20 Zhukovski, 195 Zilber, Reyzl, 157 Zilber, Sore, 157 Zilber sisters, 358 Zionism, 365, 366, 414n11 Zionist Revisionists (Beitar), 344 Zionists, 344, 413n4 Ziskovitsh, Lyube, 137, 414n11 Ziugzda, Juozas, 369–70, 437n24 Znamya (Banner), 338 Zorya, Nikolay, 250 Zuskin, Binyomin, 301, 432n10 Zusman, Herts, 121–2 Zweig, Stefan, 94, 96, 404n76