Thread by @KyleWOrton

Avrom Sutzkever was sworn in as a witness at the Nuremberg Trials on 27 FEB 1946. Sutzkever was the only Jew to testify, despite the centrality of the Holocaust to the charge-sheet, and he had to testify in Russian (he was a Soviet witness), despite wanting to speak in Yiddish.

Sutzkever had said ten days earlier: "I want to speak in Yiddish … I wish to speak in the language of the people whom the accused attempted to exterminate. I wish to speak our mameloshn [mother tongue]. … May my language triumph at Nuremberg"

https://twitter.com/KyleWOrton/status/1452417857644531719

Sutzkever had been in Lithuania when the Soviets took it over with a Nazi green-light and was still there and interred in a ghetto when Stalin's allies betrayed him before he was ready. Sutzkever escaped in 1943, reached Soviet lines, and became a Partisan.

Sutzkever's presence at Nuremberg is interesting in many ways for what it reveals about the Soviets, and not only about the Soviet role in the Trials.

The fact Sutzkever, the only Jew to testify at Nuremberg, had to use Russian rather Yiddish reflected the Soviet hostility to national particularism, religious minorities, religion generally, and Jews specifically, which only intensified in its murderousness after the war.

The German-Jewish wartime diarist Victor Klemperer referred to Jews as "a seismic people", trained over 2,500 years to detect the tremors when threats were headed their way. Sutzkever evidently had this sensibility: he left the USSR in 1947 for Israel.

https://twitter.com/KyleWOrton/status/1452419510330445824

Notably: when the Soviets staged their own pre-Nuremberg trials, as at Kharkov, even when dealing with specifically anti-Jewish crimes by the Einsatzgruppen, the victims were referred to as "innocent Soviet citizens". At Nuremberg, it was convenient for Stalin to notice the Jews.

Final note: Sutzkever had worked for the Soviet "Anti-Fascist Jewish Committee" and when Stalin began the antisemitic campaign that would have culminated in deportations and worse for Soviet Jewry, the first victim was the chairman of the AFJC, Solomon Mikhoels, in January 1948.