The Song of the Vilna Ghetto

Poet, songwriter, partisan, popular historian, and ethnomusicologist Shmerke Kaczerginski was born in Vilna and given a religious education. Before World War II, Kaczerginski was active in underground communist activities and was closely involved with Yiddish cultural life in Vilna, becoming a leader of the literary group Yung-Vilne. He was a major cultural figure in the Vilna ghetto, and many of his poems were set to music: “Yugnt Hymn,” “Friling,” “Shtiler, shtiler,” and others. He was also active in the underground resistance, the FPO, and worked to hide Jewish cultural treasures from the Germans. In September 1943, together with the poet Avrom Sutzkever, he left the ghetto for the Narocz forest, where, after many difficulties, he joined the Soviet partisan movement. Later, after failing to revive Yiddish culture in Soviet Lithuania and bitterly disappointed by Soviet antisemitism, he left first for Poland, then for France, and settled in Argentina. He was killed in a plane crash in Argentina in 1954.