Skip to main content
Work with the NEU
From celebrated poet to resistance fighter and witness at Nuremberg Trials
SUE TURNER recommends the first ever English edition of a memoir of Abraham Sutzkever, a poet turned resistance activist in the Vilna Ghetto in Lithuania
DETERMINED: A detachment of the United Partisan Organization with its leader Abba Kovner (center, standing). Kovner was member in the socialist Zionist youth movement HaShomer HaTzair and a cousin of the Israeli Communist Party leader and anti-Zionist activist Meir Vilner. Kovner testified at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 [UPO member/Wikipedia]

From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg – Memoir and Testimony
by Abraham Sutzkever
McGill-Queen’s University Press £28.50

 

ABRAHAM SUTZKEVER was born in 1913 to a leather dealer and raised in the rich cultural heritage of Lithuanian Jews with Vilna (Vilnius) at its core, a city of Poles, Jews, Belorussians, Lithuanians and Russians.

By the 1930s Vilna was highly regarded as a centre for secular Yiddish culture, boasting five daily Yiddish newspapers, a Yiddish education system and a research institute for the study of eastern European Jewish history and culture.
 
Sutzkever became a celebrated poet in international Yiddish circles, writing lyrically about beauty and nature with little interest in exploring social and political themes.

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
Similar stories
FOTW
Film of the week / 21 August 2025
21 August 2025

Despite an over-sentimental narrative, MICHAL BONCZA applauds an ambitious drama about the Chinese rescue of British POWs in WWII

DISTINGUISHED: Portrait of Hans Hess c1962 (photographer unk
Features / 20 June 2025
20 June 2025

NICK MATTHEWS previews a landmark book launch taking place in Leicester next weekend

scorched
Books / 29 May 2025
29 May 2025

RON JACOBS salutes a magnificent narrative that demonstrates how the war replaced European colonialism with US imperialism and Soviet power

AIR WAR: A spitfire squadron flies to battle the Nazis, 1945
Features / 23 May 2025
23 May 2025

MAT COWARD tells the extraordinary story of the second world war Spitfire pilot who became Britain’s most famous Stalag escaper, was awarded an MBE, mentored a generation of radio writers and co-founded a hardline Marxist-Leninist party