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Nuo Vilniaus geto iki Niurnbergo
AVROM SUTZKEVER (1913–2010) – garsus Vilniuje gyvenęs poetas. XX a. 4-ajame dešimtmetyje buvo vienas pagrindinių avangardinio žydų rašytojų ir dailininkų judėjimo „Yung Vilne“ narių. Nenustojo kurti uždarytas į Vilniaus getą, priklausė pogrindinei „Popieriaus brigadai“. Jis yra daugiau nei dviejų dešimčių poezijos ir eksperimentinės prozos knygų autorius. 1947-aisiais emigravo į Tel Avivą, 1985 m. apdovanotas Izraelio nacionaline premija.
JUSTIN D. CAMMY — žydų studijų ir lyginamosios literatūros profesorius Smitho koledže (Masačusetsas, JAV). Jo išverstas ir sudarytas angliškasis knygos Nuo Vilniaus geto iki Niurnbergo leidimas apdovanotas Šiuolaikinių kalbų asociacijos įsteigtu Leviantų atminimo prizu. Šio leidinio pagrindu Cammy kartu su istorike ir šios knygos vertėja Saule Valiūnaite parengė lietuviškąjį leidimą.
JUSTIN D. CAMMY — žydų studijų ir lyginamosios literatūros profesorius Smitho koledže (Masačusetsas, JAV). Jo išverstas ir sudarytas angliškasis knygos Nuo Vilniaus geto iki Niurnbergo leidimas apdovanotas Šiuolaikinių kalbų asociacijos įsteigtu Leviantų atminimo prizu. Šio leidinio pagrindu Cammy kartu su istorike ir šios knygos vertėja Saule Valiūnaite parengė lietuviškąjį leidimą.
400 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 2024
15 people are currently reading
178 people want to read
About the author
Abraham Sutzkever
46 books16 followersAbraham (Avrom) Sutzkever was one of the tiny percentage of creative artists who lived through and survived the devastation. He was one of fewer still who lived through it as a writer, producing between 1941 and 1945 some of his finest poems. The works of those years, written not in retrospect, and not at a distance, but during the daily wretchedness of ghetto life and under constant threat of death, constitute an exceptional instance in the history of art. Sutzkever knew that the writing of Yiddish verse could satisfy the demands of art. His ghetto poems are the more significant because they are not only expressions of the will to resist, but in their subtlety and power, obdurate proofs of survival in a body of work that stands beyond circumstance and time.
Ruth R. Wisse
Source: http://www.mosaic-press.com/product/b...
Ruth R. Wisse
Source: http://www.mosaic-press.com/product/b...
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
June 11, 2025
Reading this absolute masterpiece of a book felt like holding a lit match to the pages of history, illuminating horrors I’d scarcely imagined and resilience that left me breathless.
Sutzkever, a Yiddish poet turned partisan fighter, chronicles his survival in Vilna’s ghetto with love, excruciating sadness, and a bard’s lyricism. The book opens with the liquidation of the Jewish intelligentsia: Sutzkever watches as Nazis shoot his mentor, the librarian Herman Kruk, who collapses clutching a volume of Spinoza. Later, he describes infants drowned in sewage pits, their tiny hands “like starfish in the muck,” and the Yom Kippur massacre of 1941, where SS officers machine-gunned hundreds mid-prayer, their prayer shawls “catching bullets like sails in a storm.”
One chapter recounts the murder of Sutzkever’s newborn son poisoned after a few hours, while other babies were thrown from a hospital window by a Lithuanian collaborator; another details the burning of Vilna’s Great Synagogue, its Torah scrolls melting into “an alphabet of ash," while naked Jews were forced to tear more holy books and fan the flames as they dance around the fire. Amidst this carnage, moments of defiant levity emerge: Sutzkever and fellow prisoners stage a clandestine Purim play, parodying Hitler as a “clown with a Chaplin mustache,” a act of psychological guerilla warfare that briefly punctures the despair.
As a partisan in the Naroch Forest, Sutzkever sabotages German supply trains and retrieves weapons from mass graves, once disguising himself as a peasant to ambush an SS patrol—a scene taut with Hitchcockian suspense.
His testimony at Nuremberg, where he stood for the duration of his long account, refusing a chair, staring down Göring and Streicher, is the book’s moral apex. Denied Yiddish, he, the ONLY Jew allowed to bear witness by this precursor to the International Criminal Court, spoke in Russian, declaring his words “a Kaddish for the unborn.” The court’s stenographers wept; the defendants averted their eyes. Sutzkever’s account of exhuming his mother’s body to identify her for the tribunal—a moment of grotesque poetry—underscores his role as witness, avenger, and archivist.
Idolized by Vasily Grossman, Marc Chagall, and even Stalin himself, Sutzkever and his Paper Brigade fellow intellectuals saved priceless manuscripts from looting and burning, among them handwritten sections of works by Herzl, Bialik, Y.L. Peretz, Sholom Aleichem and The Vilna Gaon.
What stunned me was his refusal to aestheticize suffering: when describing the liquidation of the Oshmene children, he simply lists their names, ages, and the exact weight of their stolen gold teeth. The book’s power lies in such specifics, each horror meticulously catalogued, each act of resistance etched like a psalm.
I emerged from this book haunted but galvanized, my understanding of survival rewritten. Sutzkever’s fusion of reportage and elegy—drawing on diaries, partisan communiqués, and trial transcripts in Yiddish, German, Russian, Polish, and Hebrew—creates a scroll of memory.
The unrelenting brutality is devastating; the chapters on the “Aktion” to exterminate the ghetto’s elderly left me gasping for air. Still, his wit—comparing Nazi looters to “bibliophile vultures”—and his tender portraits of Vilna’s obliterated culturalcosmos -The Jerusalem of Lithuania - linger. Sutzkever’s 1944 poem "The Lead Plates of Romm’s Printing House", smuggled to Moscow on microfilm, became evidence at Nuremberg, proving the genocide’s intentionality.
This is less a memoir than a sacred text, weaponized against oblivion. Indispensable.
Sutzkever, a Yiddish poet turned partisan fighter, chronicles his survival in Vilna’s ghetto with love, excruciating sadness, and a bard’s lyricism. The book opens with the liquidation of the Jewish intelligentsia: Sutzkever watches as Nazis shoot his mentor, the librarian Herman Kruk, who collapses clutching a volume of Spinoza. Later, he describes infants drowned in sewage pits, their tiny hands “like starfish in the muck,” and the Yom Kippur massacre of 1941, where SS officers machine-gunned hundreds mid-prayer, their prayer shawls “catching bullets like sails in a storm.”
One chapter recounts the murder of Sutzkever’s newborn son poisoned after a few hours, while other babies were thrown from a hospital window by a Lithuanian collaborator; another details the burning of Vilna’s Great Synagogue, its Torah scrolls melting into “an alphabet of ash," while naked Jews were forced to tear more holy books and fan the flames as they dance around the fire. Amidst this carnage, moments of defiant levity emerge: Sutzkever and fellow prisoners stage a clandestine Purim play, parodying Hitler as a “clown with a Chaplin mustache,” a act of psychological guerilla warfare that briefly punctures the despair.
As a partisan in the Naroch Forest, Sutzkever sabotages German supply trains and retrieves weapons from mass graves, once disguising himself as a peasant to ambush an SS patrol—a scene taut with Hitchcockian suspense.
His testimony at Nuremberg, where he stood for the duration of his long account, refusing a chair, staring down Göring and Streicher, is the book’s moral apex. Denied Yiddish, he, the ONLY Jew allowed to bear witness by this precursor to the International Criminal Court, spoke in Russian, declaring his words “a Kaddish for the unborn.” The court’s stenographers wept; the defendants averted their eyes. Sutzkever’s account of exhuming his mother’s body to identify her for the tribunal—a moment of grotesque poetry—underscores his role as witness, avenger, and archivist.
Idolized by Vasily Grossman, Marc Chagall, and even Stalin himself, Sutzkever and his Paper Brigade fellow intellectuals saved priceless manuscripts from looting and burning, among them handwritten sections of works by Herzl, Bialik, Y.L. Peretz, Sholom Aleichem and The Vilna Gaon.
What stunned me was his refusal to aestheticize suffering: when describing the liquidation of the Oshmene children, he simply lists their names, ages, and the exact weight of their stolen gold teeth. The book’s power lies in such specifics, each horror meticulously catalogued, each act of resistance etched like a psalm.
I emerged from this book haunted but galvanized, my understanding of survival rewritten. Sutzkever’s fusion of reportage and elegy—drawing on diaries, partisan communiqués, and trial transcripts in Yiddish, German, Russian, Polish, and Hebrew—creates a scroll of memory.
The unrelenting brutality is devastating; the chapters on the “Aktion” to exterminate the ghetto’s elderly left me gasping for air. Still, his wit—comparing Nazi looters to “bibliophile vultures”—and his tender portraits of Vilna’s obliterated culturalcosmos -The Jerusalem of Lithuania - linger. Sutzkever’s 1944 poem "The Lead Plates of Romm’s Printing House", smuggled to Moscow on microfilm, became evidence at Nuremberg, proving the genocide’s intentionality.
This is less a memoir than a sacred text, weaponized against oblivion. Indispensable.
January 12, 2022
A carefully edited memoir written by a great poet who became the most important witness to the three year ordeal (1941-1944) in which over 95% of Vilna Jews lost their lives.
The footnotes to the book are especially comprehensive and useful, as is a comprehensive bibliography included.
The footnotes to the book are especially comprehensive and useful, as is a comprehensive bibliography included.
October 24, 2024
Kai pirkau, rekomendavo prieš miegą neskaityti, nes sapnuosiu košmarus, bet tarp jų yra tokių stebuklų, kad iš naujo permąstai, kas iš tiesų yra žmoniškumas ir kokia stipri gali būti žmogaus dvasia.
November 18, 2021
A vivid evocation of the gruesome fate faced by the 80,000 Jews who once occupied Vilna and the partisans who found a way to fight back, despite the desperate circumstances. Must be read to remind us that human decency is not a constant
December 27, 2024
Knygoje Vilnius liūdnas, permirkęs gyvuliškumo ir užmaršties. Niūrus dėl prarastų dešimčių tūkstančių nekaltųjų, o dar labiau - dėl išlikusiųjų, kurie atnešė tokią trapią ir skaudžią atmintį…
Naujai dabar atrodo išvaikščiotos miesto gatvės, dabar jau pramogų vieta tapęs Lukiškių kalėjimas, Vingio parkas, mišku apėję Paneriai… Kaip mirtimi kvėpuojantis poezijos puslapis, geto rūsyje užkastą rankraštis, devynmečio Samuelio Bako piešinys.
Kaip begalinė viltis, kad tai niekada nepasikartos…
Didelį įspūdį paliko meistriškai sudėliota knyga - išieškotas kiekvienas faktas, pavardė ir tarp kelių knygos leidimų pasiklydusios istorijų versijos.
Naujai dabar atrodo išvaikščiotos miesto gatvės, dabar jau pramogų vieta tapęs Lukiškių kalėjimas, Vingio parkas, mišku apėję Paneriai… Kaip mirtimi kvėpuojantis poezijos puslapis, geto rūsyje užkastą rankraštis, devynmečio Samuelio Bako piešinys.
Kaip begalinė viltis, kad tai niekada nepasikartos…
Didelį įspūdį paliko meistriškai sudėliota knyga - išieškotas kiekvienas faktas, pavardė ir tarp kelių knygos leidimų pasiklydusios istorijų versijos.
September 22, 2025
„Aš pats nekart slėpiausi malinoje. Gerai žinau jos skonį, laukinį susispaudusių kūnų siaubą. Kiekvienas šnabždesys, kiekvienas judesys stabdydavo širdį ir iki kaulų smegenų išsiurbdavo jėgas. Tokiomis aplinkybėmis žmogus pajėgus bet kam. Daug ką apie savo išgyvenimus pamiršiu. Jau dabar pradėjo blukti matyto kraujo spalva. Bet nepamiršiu momento, kai malinoje neužsidegė degtukas, nes nebepakako deguonies.“
February 26, 2025
Beribės blogio fantazijos liudijimas. Emociškai sunki, bet privaloma knyga kiekvienam Vilniaus žmogui.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews