Moscow: Der Emes, 1946. Item #1209
256 pp.: ill. 20x14 cm. In original cardboards. Good, covers rubbed and chipped, tear of the spine, stains occasionally.
One of 10 000 copies.
The laconic design of the book was created by Soviet artist Hersh Inger (1910-1995). In 1926-1930 he studied under Marc Epstein at the Kiev Art and Industrial School and thanks to him absorbed ideas of the Kultur-Lige. Until the 1930s he worked in the Cubist manner. During wartime, the artist lived in evacuation and produced some series of artworks about the Holocaust. In 1944, Inger had come back to Moscow where met Sutzkever.
Memoirs of Vilnius ghetto were written down in 1944 by outstanding Yiddish poet and former prisoner of this ghetto, Avraham Sutzkever (1913-2010) soon after he moved to Moscow.
The Vilna ghetto existed from September 6, 1941 to September 23, 1943. Out of 38 thousand prisoners, about 2 thousand people survived. Sutzkever and his family were captured into the ghetto and his newborn son was murdered. Continuing to write in the Vilna ghetto, he became one of the organizers of local cultural life and one of the leaders of the Jewish Resistance. He was an active member of the Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye and fled together with them to the Soviet partisans in the forest. Sutskever’s poems, written in the ghetto, were widely known among the Jewish partisans of Lithuania and inspired them to fight. At the request of Ehrenburg, Sutzkever and his wife were taken from a partisan base to Moscow by a special military aircraft in 1944. In Moscow, he got acquainted with Soviet Jewish public figures, talked about the Holocaust through radio broadcasts and at literary evenings, wrote the book of memoirs. As a witness, he participated in the Nuremberg trials and became known worldwide. In 1947, Sutzkever emigrated to Mandatory Israel and was engaged in military actions.
The book is richly illustrated with photographs of the ghetto (destroyed buildings, a barricade, a gate of the Vilna ghetto) and dwellers, among them is a portrait of artist Samuel Bak at age 6 years old whose family was being kept in the ghetto. The edition presented photographs of Jewish resistance fighters, including a group picture of the Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye and a portrait of Sutzkever with a machine gun. During the Vilnius occupation, a bulletin of the secret radio station and illegal anti-fascist ephemera were spread. They and other periodicals are featured as well.
The Russian translation of the memoirs was published only in 2008.
Worldcat shows copies located in Yale, Texas, Wisconsin-Madison, Ohio, California, Harvard, Cornell, Florida, Emory, John Hopkins, Pennsylvania, Brandeis, Yeshiva and American Jewish Universities, Yivo Institute, Hebrew Union College, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, US Holocaust Memorial Museum and NYPL.