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Chaim Yellin was born in 1912 and was raised and educated in Lithuania, where he became a famous Yiddish writer and playwright. Although he was Jewish when he was young, he later embraced communism.  When Lithuania was attached to the USSR in June 1940, Yellin was given a senior position in a State ministry. He was captured during the German invasion and imprisoned in the Kovno ghetto with his family and the other Jews of the city. He became active in the communist underground in the ghetto and tried to establish contact with the partisans in the forests in order to organize for ghetto inmates to join their ranks.  In late 1941, Yellin was appointed commander of the union of communist organizations in the ghetto, which stockpiled arms and ammunition with a view to an uprising.

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My Father Taught The Great Yiddish Poet Chaim Grade

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The photograph was preserved by Avraham Tory, Kovno ghetto inmate and secretary of the Jewish Council in the ghetto.  Tory maintained a diary in the ghetto which he buried underground.  About 700 of its 1500 pages survived, and the diary was published in 1988. Tory survived in hiding after escaping the ghetto some four months before its liquidation.

In 1939 approximately 40,000 Jews lived in Kovno. Kovno was released on 1 August  1944. Less than 2,000 Jewish people from Kovno survived the war.

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In early fall 1943, Yelin received a mysterious note addressed to "the Jewish author Chaim Yelin" and signed "G." The note came from Gessia Glezer. Glezer was a Soviet Jewish paratrooper who often visited Kovno and stayed with Kutorgiene. She came this time with a proposal to send Jewish partisans to join Soviet partisan units in the Augustow Forest south of Kovno.

The Augustow Plan proved to be a disaster. Traveling by foot, almost all of the 100-plus Jewish fighters were captured. The two who arrived safely learned that there had been no partisan activity there. Yelin quickly established new contacts and sent more than 300 Jewish youths, many by truck, to the Soviet partisan bases of the Rudniki Forest.

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Picture of Chaim with his friends in the Konvo that possibly wrote newspapers together

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He was caught by the Gestapo on 6 April 1944, interrogated and tortured. In order to avoid a general comeback against the rest of the ghetto because of his actions, he lied about his identity and presented himself as a Russian paratrooper. He was executed at the beginning of May 1944.

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Chaim was born to a Jewish family. His parents, Eliezer Yellin and Esther Rivel, spoke Hebrew which was the language of instruction for Jews in the town at the time. During WWI the Jews of Lithuania were expelled by order of the Chief of Staff of the Russian Army in 1915, and his family was pushed to Voronezh. There they witnessed the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War. As a result, his father changed his views considerably and Yiddish became spoken more in their home. The family returned from Russia to Lithuania in 1921 and settled in Kovno. Upon their return, his father founded a Jewish general library in the city, which operated alongside the Culture League.

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In early 1943, Yellin's organization joined forces with the anti-fascist Lithuanian underground.  Yellin made contact with communist partisans active in the Rudniki forest, and smuggled arms and ammunition into the ghetto. Under his leadership, during the winter of 1943-44 the ghetto underground raised funds, bought weapons, trained fighters and obtained vehicles for the purpose of smuggling groups out of the ghetto to the partisan bases in the Rudniki forest.

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Life in the Kovno Ghetto Chaim Yelin lived in

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Life in the Kovno Ghetto Chaim Yelin lived in