“Silence, and a Starry Night”

Hirsh Glik was born in Vilna into an impoverished family and began writing poems at age thirteen, first in Hebrew and later in Yiddish. He became a protégé of two leading Vilna poets, Leyzer Volf and Shmerke Kaczerginski, and helped lead a young poets group called Yungvald. Glik was sent to labor camps in 1941, and in 1943 to the Vilna ghetto. There he wrote songs to raise the morale of his fellow Jews, including the famous “Zog nit keyn mol,” which spread throughout the camps and ghettos and continues today to be an anthem at memorial gatherings. This song is often mistakenly associated with the battle of the Warsaw ghetto. Glik joined the main FPO, the major resistance organization in the ghetto, and in September 1943 was sent to a German labor camp in Estonia. He escaped shortly before the liberation of the camp and was killed by German forces in September 1944.