On January 20, 2010, the Yiddish world lost a poet and hero. Born in 1913, Avrom Sutzkever spent his early childhood in Siberia and his youth in Vilna, where he belonged to the Yiddish writers' group Yung Vilne. During the Nazi occupation he used his forced labor detail to smuggle arms into the Vilna Ghetto and rare materials out of the YIVO archive, and documented the conditions of the ghetto in verse. After his escape to the partisans in 1943 he was airlifted to Moscow, and later testified at the Nuremberg trials. In 1947 he moved to Tel Aviv and founded the literary quarterly Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain, which he edited until 1995). His presence and his work brought new life to Yiddish in Israel, and he is the only Yiddish poet to have received the Israel Prize (1985). View Di festung and other books by Sutzkever in our digital library.