Last Testament
Israel Lichtenstein
1942
With zeal and zest I threw myself into the work to help assemble archive materials. I was entrusted to be the custodian, I hid the material. Besides me, no one knew. I confided only in my friend Hersh Wasser, my superior.
It is well hidden. Please God that it be preserved. That will be the finest and best that we achieved in the present gruesome…
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Creator Bio
Israel Lichtenstein
Born in Radzyn, Poland, Israel Lichtenstein was a teacher, activist, and Yiddish-language journalist in interwar Poland. Trained at the Vilna Yiddish Teachers Seminary, he settled in 1932 in Warsaw, where he became active in the Left Po‘ale Tsiyon party organization, wrote for several major Yiddish journals, and directed the city’s Borochov school. In 1938, he married Warsaw native Gele Sekstein (Seckstein), a teacher at the same institution and a budding artist. Both active in the Oyneg Shabes archive in the Warsaw ghetto, they left behind a last testament.