![]() ![]() Sutzkever’s diary from the time of occupation meticulously documents both sides of the Nazis’ destructive frenzy: “The Germans were to wipe from the face of the earth five centuries of Jewish culture in Vilna.” During his internment, he had to watch, daily, as German special forces hunted down “the printed Jewish word with the same zeal and relentlessness that the Gestapo exhibited when tracking down every last hidden Jew.” From January 1942 on, the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg ERR) rampaged through Vilna, its staff confiscating every artifact and book of Jewish provenance they could lay their hands on. ![]() The situation there represented in nuce what Polish-born Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin - initiator of the UN Genocide Convention of 1948 - had in mind when he emphasized that the “systematic and organized destruction of the art and cultural heritage in which the unique genius and achievement of a collectivity are revealed in fields of science, arts and literature” must be understood and legally addressed as “an attack targeting” this collectivity. The Jews of Vilna - one of the most prominent centers of Jewish cultural activity in Eastern Europe, home to precious collections and famous cultural and educational institutions - were exposed in the most drastic way to the cultural genocide that accompanied the Nazis’ systematic acts of mass murder. He considered the Nazis’ deliberate destruction of religious and cultural treasures a key element in their policy of annihilation, one that must be acknowledged during the court proceedings. The fact that Sutzkever chose to mention this brutal and traumatic “act in the circus,” as the Germans had called it, in the short amount of time available for his testimony indicates the existential significance he attributed to it. Forced to sing Russian songs at gunpoint as the sacred scrolls went up in smoke, the three came close to passing out. Barred from using his native Yiddish, he recalled a first incident, which occurred in the summer of 1941, in short Russian sentences: German soldiers had compelled him, a rabbi, and a boy from his neighborhood to dance naked around a bonfire in front of the Old Synagogue while throwing its Torah scrolls into the flames. While standing in court - Sutzkever refused to sit, feeling that he “was saying kaddish for the dead” - he frequently interspersed his testimony with personal reminiscences. Sutzkever had endured the occupation “from the first to nearly the last day,” having been interned in the ghetto there for more than two years. Lev Smirnov, deputy prosecutor for the Soviet Union, asked Sutzkever, one of only three Jewish witnesses to testify at the tribunal, to give an account of Jewish life in Vilna (Vilnius) under German occupation, the atrocious living conditions in the ghetto, and the Germans’ persecution and murder of Vilna Jewry. ![]() On the morning of February 27, 1946, the sixty-ninth day of the proceedings, Yiddish-speaking poet and partisan Abraham Sutzkever was called to the witness stand at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. ![]()
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