Never Say

Hirsh Glik

1943

Never say, this is the last road for you,
Leaden skies are masking days of blue.
The hour we yearn for is drawing near.
Our step will beat the signal: we are here!
From southern palms, from lands long white with snow,
We come with all our pain and all our woe,
Wherever seeped our blood into the earth,
Our courage and our strength will have…
Please login or register for free access to Posen Library
Register
Already have an account?
Engage with this Source

Hirsh Glik wrote this poem in Yiddish for the Vilna Jewish United Partisan Organization. Put to the music of a preexisting Soviet melody, the poem served as the anthem of the Jewish uprising and spread to become the unofficial hymn of Jewish partisan fighters across Europe. To this day, the song remains an integral part of Holocaust commemoration and serves as a reminder of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. The poem combines a sober acknowledgment of the existential threat facing Jews during the Holocaust with an optimistic affirmation of the efforts to fight back with all available physical or spiritual weapons.

Read more

Related Guide

Holocaust and Post-Holocaust Fiction and Poetry

1939–1973

Jewish literature developed individual rather than collective voices, as postwar Jewish identity was transformed by the forces of modernism and assimilation.

Related Guide

The Holocaust: Years of Catastrophe

1939–1945

Jewish writing in Nazi-occupied areas documented ghetto life, moral questions, and Jewish identity, while writers in free zones grappled with the unfolding tragedy.

Creator Bio

Hirsh Glik

1922–1944

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.

You may also like

Nights

All those things whose names I hushed in secret, I meet in the night’s abyss. I face the dark. Alert, remembering. Silently, again I’ll let you in—my friends, my beloved dead. And here you are as…
View Source

The Month of Rescue

It is for us, for all of us together, To assist, to liberate, to rescue brothers, From capture, from hunger and slaughter— Rescue them from the vile Nazi oppressor. Every man and woman whose soul…
View Source

And in That Drowning Instant

And in that drowning instant as the water heightened over me it suddenly did come to pass my preterite eternity the image of myself intent on several freedoms fading to myself in yellowed Basle…
View Source

My Blue Piano

At home I have a blue piano, I, who cannot play a note. It stands in the gloom of the cellar door, now that the world has grown coarse. The four hands of the stars play there —the moonwife sang…
View Source

The God of Israel

The God of Israel is not rich. I saw the Sistine Chapel, Notre-Dame, the Cathedral of Cologne— You can feast your eyes on them, you can enjoy. The God of Israel is stingy. He won’t fill his museum…
View Source