Abraham Sutzkever

Abraham Sutzkever was born in 1913 in what is now Belarus. He was a Yiddish-language poet whose works chronicle his childhood in Siberia, his life in the Vilna (Vilnius) ghetto during World War II, and his escape to join the Jewish partisans. In 1915 Sutzkever and his family fled their home in eastern Europe to Siberia to escape World War I; they returned to the region in 1920 and lived near Vilna, where he later studied literary criticism at the University of Vilna. Sutzkever testified at the Nuremberg trials, and in 1947 he settled in Palestine (later Israel).