"[2] Abraham (Avrom) Sutzkever was born on July 15, 1913, in Smorgon, Vilna Governorate, Russian Empire, now Smarhon, Belarus.

In 1933, he became part of the writers’ and artists’ group Yung-Vilne, along with fellow poets Shmerke Kaczerginski, Chaim Grade, and Leyzer Volf.

Sutzkever and his friends hid a diary by Theodor Herzl, drawings by Marc Chagall and Alexander Bogen, and other treasured works behind plaster and brick walls in the ghetto.

[4] On September 12, 1943, he and his wife escaped to the forests, and together with fellow Yiddish poet Shmerke Kaczerginski, he fought the occupying forces as a partisan.

[4] Sutzkever's 1943 narrative poem, Kol Nidre, reached the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in Moscow, whose members included Ilya Ehrenburg and Solomon Mikhoels, as well as the exiled future president of Soviet Lithuania, Justas Paleckis.

[7] In February 1946, he was called up as a witness at the Nuremberg trials, testifying against Franz Murer, the murderer of his mother and son.

[7] Sutzkever was a keen traveller, touring South American jungles and African savannahs, where the sight of elephants and the song of a Basotho chief inspired more Yiddish verse.

[3] In Moscow, he wrote a chronicle of his experiences in the Vilna ghetto (Fun vilner geto,1946), a poetry collection Lider fun geto (1946; “Songs from the Ghetto”) and began Geheymshtot ("Secret City",1948), an epic poem about Jews hiding in the sewers of Vilna.