Shmerke Kaczerginski

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Shmerke Kaczerginski (born October 28, 1908 in Vilnius , Russian Empire ; died April 23, 1954 in a plane crash in Argentina ) was a Lithuanian-Jewish writer, poet, and collector of Jewish songs during Nazi persecution in his country from 1941 to 1944 as well a partisan in 1943/44.

Shmerke Kaczerginski

Life

The early years

After the early death of his parents, Shmerke Kaczerginski grew up with his brother with their grandfathers. He attended the Talmud Torah School for Children in Need and continued his education in evening classes after completing elementary school. He earned his living as an employee in a lithography workshop. It was here that Kaczerginski first made contact with the communist youth movement in his then still independent country and became a member of it. In 1929 the 21-year-old joined an avant-garde, literary-artistic circle called “ Jung Wilne ”, which included the writer Abraham Sutzkever . After Lithuania lost its independence in 1940 as a result of the occupation of its country by the Soviet Union, Kaczerginski campaigned against the suppression of Jewish culture by the Soviet authorities.

Under the German occupation

In June 1941 the German Wehrmacht marched on Vilna as part of Operation Barbarossa and immediately began to persecute the Jewish residents of Lithuania. Kaczerginski was deported to the Vilna ghetto in 1942. Unlike the majority of the other prisoners, Kaczerginski quickly decided to resist and joined the Jewish resistance organization FPO under the leadership of Abba Kovner . Together with Sutzkever and other artists, Kaczerginski organized cultural life on site: he put on theater performances as well as literary evenings and educational programs. The lyrics of the songs he wrote or collected were primarily intended to encourage courage and strengthen the Lithuanian Jews' will to persevere and survive. He wrote the song " Friling " after the death of his first wife, the song " Yugnt Himen " became the anthem of the youth club in the ghetto. Kaczerginski dedicated the song “ Itsik Vitnberg ” to the leader of the FPO, Jitzchak Wittenberg , after his death.

Kaczerginski, Sutzkever and other ghetto residents who belonged to the so-called “paper brigade” tried to save as many Jewish books and cultural objects as possible from looting and destruction by the Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) staff . Shortly before the ghetto was liquidated in September 1943, Kaczerginsi managed to escape to the Soviet partisans who were hiding in the Naroczer forests. As a member of a Jewish partisan unit, Kaczerginski was involved in the liberation of Vilnius in July 1944 by Red Army soldiers. Kaczerginski and some FPO colleagues immediately set about salvaging the Jewish documents and cultural assets that had been hidden since autumn 1943 from the ghetto and began building a Jewish museum. Five years later (1949) it was closed again as part of Stalin's anti-Zionist campaign.

After the war

After unsuccessful efforts to publish the songs and testimonies in Lithuania, which had now been annexed by the USSR, Kaczerginski moved to Łódź, Poland, where he was involved in the Jewish Historical Commission for a first anthology of Yiddish songs. In Łódź widower Kaczerginski remarried. When anti-Semitism blossomed in the resurrected Poland, Shmerke Kaczerginski left the country and moved to Paris, where he was able to publish his song collection Dos Gezang Fun Vilner Geto in 1948 . His report Churbn Wilne (“Destruction of Wilnas”) in Yiddish had already appeared in New York the year before . Also in the city on the Hudson, his anthology Lider fun di Getos un Lagern was published in 1948 , which is one of the most famous works of Jewish songs from the Holocaust. As early as November 1947, Shmerke Kaczerginski was traveling through the US zone of occupation in Germany, giving lectures and collecting further culturally and historically valuable material in displaced persons detention centers, which was later given to the Yad Vashem archive for safekeeping.

In 1950 Shmerke Kaczerginski emigrated to Argentina, worked in Buenos Aires as a writer and mediator of Jewish culture and tried to deal with the fate of the Jews in the Holocaust in literature. As a vividly reporting contemporary witness, he traveled through various states in North and Latin America and described his experiences during the Holocaust. On one of these trips on the return flight from Mendoza in western Argentina, Shmerke Kaczerginski was killed in a plane crash in late April 1954.

Anthology of his ghetto songs

recorded from 1941 to 1943, documented for posterity after the liberation in 1944

  • Dos gezang fun vilner geto , Farlang fun di Vilner in Frankraysh, 1947 digitized
  • Lider fun di getos un store , Tsiko, 1948
  • Khurbn vilne, Aroysgegebn fun dem fareyniktn Vilner hilfs-Komitet in Nyu-York by Tsiko bikher-farlag, 1947
  • Partizans geyen! , Tsenṭral farband fun Poylishe Yidn in Argenṭine, 1947
  • Tsvishn hamer un serp , h. mo. l., 1949
  • Ikh bin geven a partizan , aroysgegebn durkh fraynd fonem meḥabel, 1952 digitized

literature

  • Kay Less : Between the stage and the barracks. Lexicon of persecuted theater, film and music artists from 1933 to 1945 . With a foreword by Paul Spiegel . Metropol, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-938690-10-9 , p. 394 f.

Web links
personal data
SURNAME Kaczerginski, Shmerke
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kaczerginski, Schmarjahu (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Lithuanian-Jewish songwriter, poet and song collector
DATE OF BIRTH October 28, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Vilnius , Russia , today Vilnius, Lithuania
DATE OF DEATH April 23, 1954
Place of death Argentina