A Poet’s Recollections of How Jews Hid from the Nazis

Between 1944 and 1946, the great Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever produced a brief memoir of the Vilna Ghetto, which the Nazis created in September 1941 and destroyed two years later—after murdering most of its inhabitants or sending them to concentration camps, and letting countless others die of disease and starvation. In this selection from Justin Cammy’s translation, Sutzkever describes the malines (pronounced mah-LEE-ness), or underground hideouts, the inhabitants constructed to avoid the Germans and their local helpers. These makeshift bunkers were a testament to Jewish inventiveness and determination to live—and also, as Sutzkever relates, the locations of bone-chilling horrors all their own.