This is a photograph of Avraham Sutzkever’s tin suitcase. Sutzkever (1913–2010) is considered one of the greatest Yiddish poets. The suitcase was made from the remains of a wing of an aeroplane and has a leather handle and a lock and key. The key is tied to the suitcase with a piece of rope.
The writer and poet Avraham Sutzkever lived in Vilna, Lithuania (now known as Vilnius) at the beginning of the twentieth century. When the Germans occupied Vilna in 1941, Sutzkever, like all the Jews of Vilna, was imprisoned in the Vilna ghetto, where he wrote and collected many documents recording life in the ghetto. After his mother and son were killed, Sutzkever and his wife fled to the forest and joined the partisans. In the forest, Sutzkever continued to write and managed to pass on his poems to Jewish writers in Moscow. His works were published to great acclaim in Russia, prompting friends who were close to the Soviet authorities to send a small two-seater aeroplane to the forest to rescue Sutzkever and his wife, Freydke. The plane, however, was shot down by the Nazis. The suitcase pictured in the photograph was made by the partisans from the wing of the plane so that Sutzkever could keep his literary works and the documents he collected. In 1944, another plane flew out to rescue Avraham Sutzkever, and this time the poet managed to reach his destination with the suitcase. The pilot sat in one seat and Sutzkever sat on the other with Freydka, the suitcase on her lap, sitting on Sutzkever’s lap.
In 1982, Avraham Sutzkever donated his personal archive to the National Library of Israel, including this suitcase.
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Avraham Sutzkever – Avraham Sutzkever was born in 1913 in a small city outside of Vilna, then part of the Russian Empire and now the capital of Lithuania. Sutzkever attended the Polish Jewish high school Herzliya and began writing and publishing poems in 1933. His earliest poems were written in Hebrew with later poems written in Yiddish. After the Germans invaded Vilna in June 1941, Sutzkever, his wife Freydka, and the rest of the Jews of Vilna were forced to move into the Vilna ghetto. While in the ghetto, Sutzkever and others hid famous works, such as Theodor Herzl’s diary and drawings by Marc Chagall, in the walls of the ghetto. In the ghetto, Sutzkever’s mother and new-born baby were killed. On September 1943 the poet and his wife escaped from the ghetto and fled to the forest, where they joined a group of partisans. Later on, in a heroic and eventful operation, he was smuggled out of the forest and brought to the Soviet Union bringing with him many of the cultural treasures of Vilna’s Jews. Among Sutzkever’s famous works are the poems “Kol Nidrei” and “Under the Star of Heaven,” which became the anthem of the Jews in the Vilna ghetto. In 1946, after the war, the Soviet authorities chose Sutzkever to testify in the Nuremberg trials against the Nazi criminals. A year later he immigrated to Israel and, in 1982, he donated his personal archive, including the tin suitcase, to the National Library of Israel. In 1985 Sutzkever won the Israel Prize for Yiddish Literature. He died in 2010 in Tel Aviv at the age of 96.
