Abraham (Avrom) Sutzkever, born 15 July 1913 in Smorgon (Belarussian: Smarhon) in today’s Belarus, was a Yiddish poet, a partisan, and a witness to Nazi crimes against Jews. His writings provide early evidence of the persecution and murder of Polish and Lithuanian Roma and the struggle to find a language to describe their fate. Sutzkever died on 20 January 2010 in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Early Poetry
Sutzkever started writing poetry early on, briefly in Hebrew and then in Yiddish, and this brought him into the circle of a group of avant-garde Yiddish writers called Yung Vilne [Young Vilna]. While we have no record when Sutzkever first thought about Roma, we know that one of his closest friends in Yung Vilne, the poet Shimshn (Shimshon) Kahan (1905–1941), developed a sustained interest in Roma. Kahan translated Romani songs into Yiddish and he published a poem calling for a ‘Gypsy Republic’ in 1932. With the exception of a romanticising short poem, ‘Gypsy Autumn’ (1936), Sutzkever himself did not leave much evidence for his interest in the topic before World War II.
Persecution, Resistance and Escape
His engagement with Romani themes transformed as a result of his experiences during the war. Sutzkever was already a well-regarded Yiddish poet when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. He lived in the Vilna (Lithuanian: Vilnius) Ghetto from June 1941 to September 1943, where he was part of resistance efforts and secret activities to save Jewish cultural documents (the so-called Paper Brigade). He lost his infant son in the ghetto and would become one of the most prominent witnesses to speak about anti-Jewish atrocities in the ghetto. Before the liquidation of the ghetto, Sutzkever escaped with his wife into the forests, where he joined communist partisans, and he was subsequently airlifted from Nazi-controlled territory to Moscow in a special operation.
Writings about the Persecution and Murder of Roma
Soviet prosecutors soon called Sutzkever to act as a witness at the Nuremberg Trial, as one of only three Jewish victims to testify before the International Military Tribunal.
One of the few sources speaking of direct encounters he had with Roma during World War II appears in a prose account of the Vilna ghetto’s fate, which he published in Yiddish and Russian in 1946.1Sutzkever, From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg, 31–32. Sutzkever describes how he meets a group of Roma early during the occupation, when suddenly one of them speaks to him in Yiddish. First confusing the man with the brother of Maria Kwiek (Kviek), a Romani singer he knew, he soon learns that it is a Jewish school friend, Khayim (Chajm) Gordon, who has been hiding among travelling Roma. According to his own account, Gordon has survived a mass shooting and managed to join a Romani group that had been forced to bury the Jewish dead.
At other points in his memoir, he mentions eyewitness testimonies from Jewish survivors who speak of the murder of Roma at Ponar (Lithuanian: Paneriai).2Ibid., 74. One of the Jews forced to participate in the disinterment of victims at the site (see Aktion 1005) testified that he witnessed the murder of 15 Roma.3Ibid., 208, mistranslates the Yiddish original as 50 (instead of 15). Cf. Abraham Sutzkever, Fun Ṿilner geṭo (Moskow, Der Emes, 2009), 240; Abraham Sutzkever, Ṿilner Geṭo, 1941–1944 (Paris: Farband fun di Ṿilner in Franḳraykh, 1946), 220. Another mentioned how Martin Weiss (1903–1984), an SS-officer who was among other things in charge of Lithuanian shooting squads at Ponar, raided and captured a group of Roma with their horses and wagons in a forest and had them executed.4Sutzkever, From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg, 78.
Sutzkever did not return to prose writing about the ghetto and rarely referred back to his memoir, written under constrained conditions in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Instead, he used the language of poetry to convey the events, tragedy, and emotions of persecution and mass murder. Sutzkever’s first poems to deal with Romani experiences appear in a cycle he had already started during the war. In ‘Epitaphs,’ which he wrote between 1943 and 1946 in Vilna, Moscow, and Paris, each ‘epitaph’ speaks from the perspective of a victim of Nazism. Epitaph 13 takes the voice of a ‘Gypsy’ awaiting his execution for stabbing a German. A second pioneering poem on the Romani genocide, entitled ‘Encamped Gypsies of Lithuania and Poland,’ followed soon after.5Sutzkever, ‘Taboren Zigeiner.’ In Sutzkever, Lider fun yam ha-moves, 273. Translated as ‘Encamped Gypsies’ in Joskowicz, Rain of Ash, 1. His poem is a lament for a genocide that happened not just in parallel but in proximity to that of the Jews. In one line he speaks of ‘a rain of ash over Mother Vilija,’ referring to the river that runs through Vilnius and that passes close by the area of Ponar. An extended meditation on the question, ‘Who will commemorate the Gypsy extermination in song?’, his poem struggles with the challenge of adequately remembering another group’s genocide, which he believed to have had few survivors.
Roma feature in some later poems as well. The longest reference is in a part of his large cycle of poems ‘Secret City’ [Geheymstodt], which deals with the Vilna ghetto. ‘Secret City’ includes a long section on ‘Petro, the Gypsy,’ which tells the story of a Romani knife sharpener who saved Jewish children by smuggling them from the ghetto to Roma groups in the forest.6Sutzkever, Lider fun yam ha-moves, 264–265.
He revisits the theme of Roma and the ghetto in another poem, ‘The Gypsy Maria Kvieck,’ published in 1979 in his journal Di goldene keyt [The Golden Chain], which he edited for decades in Israel. This later piece returns to the figure of Maria Kviek, the Romani singer he mentioned in his prose memoir of 1946. In the poem, she is 18 years old and has left her home town of Troki (Lithuanian: Trakai) to find her lover, Shimshn Kahan, in the deserted streets of Vilna. Kahan could not respond. He was dead by then, shot at Ponar, where many Roma had been murdered as well.7Dieckmann, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik, 1396.
