Shmerke Kaczerginski

Shmaryahu "Shmerke" Kaczerginski (שמערקע קאַטשערגינסקי; October 28 1908 – April 23 1954) was a Yiddish-speaking poet, musician, writer and cultural activist.

Born to a poor family in Vilna and orphaned at a young age, Kaczerginski was educated at the local Talmud Torah and night school, where he became involved in communist politics and was regularly beaten or imprisoned.

At the age of 15 he began publishing original songs and poetry, including Tates, mames, kinderlekh ("Fathers, mothers, children"), and soon began organising Yung Vilne, a secular Jewish writing collective whose other members included Abraham Sutzkever and Chaim Grade.

The Nazi invasion of Poland led to Kaczerginski's eventual imprisonment in the Vilna Ghetto, where he helped hide Jewish cultural works with Sutzkever as part of the Paper Brigade and joined the United Partisans Organisation, participating in the failed Vilna Ghetto uprising and then escaping to the forest to fight with both the partisans and the Soviets.

After the expulsion of the Nazis from Vilna by the Soviet Army, Kaczerginski returned home to recover the hidden cultural works and founded the first post-Holocaust Jewish museum in Europe; he quickly became disenchanted with the Soviets and communism and developed into an ardent Zionist.

Kaczerginski was born on 28 October 1908 in Vilna, Russian Empire, to Volf and Alte Kaczerginski.

Both of his parents died in early 1914, leaving Kaczerginski and his younger brother Yankl in the care of their grandfather.

He was sent to the Talmud Torah for his education, where he was "a good scholar and even better comrade".

After graduating he enrolled in night school and supported himself by working for a lithographer named Hirsh Ayzenshtat, whose shop apparently served a mostly proletarian clientele.

Around this time Kaczerginski was drawn into local circles of the outlawed communist party, and published his first writings – articles concerning class struggle and the living conditions of workers.

As a consequence of his political radicalism, Kaczerginski was regularly beaten by police and often imprisoned in Lukiškės Prison, where he organised a drama club for other inmates.

This radicalism also led him to write his earliest known songs, including Tates, mames, kinderlekh ('Fathers, mothers, children'), a renowned Jewish socialist song written when he was 15 years old.

A year later he joined Yung Vilne, a Jewish writing collective whose other members included Abraham Sutzkever and Chaim Grade.

Kaczerginski was responsible for organisational work and editing, along with writing "animated, sometimes incendiary verses" that were extremely popular with the group's audience.

In parallel, he worked for the Yiddish-language newspaper Morgen Freiheit and the Soviet organisation Agroid.

After the Soviet invasion of Poland, Kaczerginski moved to Białystok in order to volunteer for the Red Army, returning to Vilna in June 1940.

Working with various Jewish writers organisations, his initial enthusiasm for the Soviet cause was soured by the shutting or censoring of many newspapers and publishing organisations, along with the arrest of Zalman Reisen and other members of the Yiddish community.

Following Operation Barbarossa Vilna was occupied by Nazi Germany and the local Jewish community shot or rounded up and sent to camps or ghettos.

Kaczerginski managed to avoid capture until 1942 by posing as a deaf and mute beggar.

Finally identified as Jewish, Kaczerginski was sent to the Vilna Ghetto, where he married Barbara Kaufman and returned to writing in order to improve morale for the inmates.

Works produced during this time included Friling ('Springtime'), about his wife's death in April 1943, Shtiler, shtiler ('Quiet, Quiet') and Yugnt himn ('Hymn of Youth').

When representatives of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR)—the Nazi organisation tasked with stealing or destroying Jewish cultural property—dictated that the Jewish literary archives in Vilna be categorised and burnt, Kaczerginski was one of the Ghetto residents forced to help them.

Along with other labourers working on the project, including Zelig Kalmanovich and Abraham Sutzkever, he formed the Paper Brigade, which instead smuggled thousands of works past the Nazi guards and hid them in various caches in and around the Ghetto for retrieval after the war.

Having joined the Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye ('United Partisans Organisation'), Kaczerginski fought in the failed Vilna Ghetto resistance and escaped with the survivors to the surrounding forests.

Working along Sutzkever as the historian of the FPO's Vitnberg Brigade, he translated many Soviet fighting songs into Yiddish and during his service with a Soviet unit wrote the "uncharacteristically grisly-worded" Partizaner-Marsh ('Partisan's March'), Yid, du Partizaner ('The Jewish Partisan') and Varshe (Warsaw) to commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Participating in the recapture of Vilna, Kaczerginski returned with Sutzkever, Abba Kovner and other FPO survivors to go about rebuilding Jewish culture and digging up the hidden Paper Brigade caches.

He founded the Vilna Museum of Jewish Art and Culture, later known as the Vilna Jewish Museum, the first post-Holocaust Jewish museum in Europe, with some of the recovered materials.

Although the museum was theoretically supported by Lithuanian and Soviet authorities, they provided few resources, assigning the organisers no budget and only giving them a burnt out former Ghetto building as a headquarters.

Following the end of the war in 1945, it became clear that the volunteers' work was incompatible with the priorities of Soviet authorities, who burnt 30 tons of cache materials and, having demanded that any publicly displayed books be reviewed by a censor, simply refused to return any that were submitted.

Accordingly, Kaczerginski and others prepared to smuggle the collection yet again—this time to the United States.

Volunteers took the books across the border to Poland, enlisting the help of Bricha contacts to move them into non-Soviet Europe.

From there much of the material went to New York, although some was retained by Sutzkever (who later gave his material to the National Library of Israel).

After some time in Łódź, he moved to Paris with his second wife, Meri Szutan, with whom he had his only child, Liliane (Libele) Kaczerginski borned on march 5, 1947.

In 1950 the family moved to Buenos Aires.

Shmerke Kaczerginski was killed in a plane crash at the age of 45, in 1954.

Renowned during his lifetime as a poet and writer, Kaczerginski dedicated much of his time after the start of the Second World War to collecting pre-war Yiddish songs and songs of the Holocaust in order to save Yiddishkeit from destruction.

The author, editor or publisher of most of the first post-Holocaust songbooks, Kaczerginski was responsible for preserving over 250 Holocaust songs – the majority of those still known.

Despite the enduring popularity of many of his own works, and the importance of his labours to researchers and Yiddish cultural activists, his early death has led to his relative anonymity.

Liliane, known as Liliana Cordova is living between Paris and Madrid and is the cofounder of The International Jewish Antizionist Network (IJAN) in 2008 in San Francisco (USA).

Nowadays is an activist in the palestinian solidarity movement.