Fritz Cohen · Public domain

A Yiddish poet who wrote from inside the Vilna ghetto and later fought with Soviet partisans in the forests of Lithuania, surviving the Holocaust that killed most of the language's readers and turning that experience directly into verse. The New York Times called him the greatest poet of the Holocaust. He went on to found and edit Di Goldene Keyt, the leading postwar journal of Yiddish literature, sustaining a literary culture that might otherwise have gone silent.