VIRTUAL LECTURE | Lunch and Learn Series: The Making of Holocaust History and Testimony

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Justin D. Cammy, editor and translator of From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg: Memoir and Testimony, as part of the Park Avenue Synagogue Adult Education Lunch and Learn Series. Cammy will join Rabbi Savenor for this virtual event.

In 1944, the famous Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever was commissioned by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in Moscow to write a memoir of his two years in the Vilna Ghetto. Published in 1946, it appears now in English for the first time on the 75th anniversary of the end of the Nuremberg Trials, at which Sutzkever personally testified. Smith College professor Justin Cammy, editor and translator of the volume, discusses what we can learn about this early moment in the making of Holocaust history and memory.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In 1944, the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever was airlifted to Moscow from the forest where he had spent the winter among partisan fighters. There he was encouraged by Ilya Ehrenburg, the most famous Soviet Jewish writer of his day, to write a memoir of his two years in the Vilna Ghetto. Now, seventy-five years after it appeared in Yiddish in 1946, Justin Cammy provides a full English translation of one of the earliest published memoirs of the destruction of the city known throughout the Jewish world as the Jerusalem of Lithuania.

Based on his own experiences, his conversations with survivors, and his consultation with materials hidden in the ghetto and recovered after the liberation of his hometown, Sutzkever’s memoir rests at the intersection of postwar Holocaust literature and history. Both shocking and moving in its intensity, From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg returns readers to a moment when the scale of the Holocaust was first coming into focus, through the eyes of one survivor who attempted to make sense of daily life, resistance, and death in the ghetto.