Vilna Ghetto digitized

The National Library of Israel plans to digitize a collection of documents that belonged to the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever, who experienced the horrors of the Holocaust in the Vilna Ghetto.

Most of the ghetto’s Jews were killed by the Nazis, but thanks to Sutzkever, some of the ghetto’s rich cultural life was preserved.

Sutzkever managed to preserve the documents from the Vilna Ghetto using a tin suitcase he assembled after he fled the city.

Despite the hardships, the ghetto had a vibrant community that attended concerts and lectures, provided education to its youths, and maintained a functioning library.

“The documents indicate that as things deteriorated and food became scarce, people began to read more books,” said Gil Weissblei, who works in the library’s Archives Department. “It was a very moving discovery for me, as a human being.”

Sutzkever would later join the United Partisan Organization, an underground Jewish movement which operated in the ghetto and in nearby forests. It attacked Nazi targets, and in 1944 it took part in the Soviet liberation of the city. In those forests, Sutzkever found the scrap metal to build a suitcase, repurposing what was left of a downed aircraft.