Shmerke Kaczerginsky (1908–1954)

Shmerke Kaczerginsky was born to a Jewish family in Vilnius, Lithuania. His parents died early in World War I, and Shmerke and his brother Yankl were raised by their grandfather and in an orphanage. Kaczerginski was educated at a Jewish school at which Yiddish was the primary language. In his teens, he was apprenticed to a printer-lithographer and went to high school classes at night. He began to publish poems and articles in local newspapers and write political songs. He joined the Modernist Yiddish writers' and artists' group Yung-Vilne, where he met Chaim Grade and Abraham Sutzkever. He was active in the underground Communist movement, for which he was frequently beaten and arrested. During Nazi Germany's occupation in World War II, he was confined to the Vilna Ghetto in 1942. He was one of several Yiddish intellectuals who hid cultural treasures and smuggled weapons. With Sutzkever and his wife, Kaczerginsky escaped the liquidation of the Ghetto in September 1943 through the sewers and joined the partisans in the forest. At the end of the war, he returned to Vilna, where he helped locate and salvage the hidden Jewish books and artworks, and ship them to the new YIVO headquarters in New York. He moved to Poland and then to Paris. In 1950, he settled with his new family in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and became a leading figure in Yiddish cultural life. While returning from a lecture tour in 1954, he was killed in an airplane crash. His legacy included poetry, prose, and drama chronicling Jewish life, the Vilna Ghetto, and the Jewish partisan movement. These included the books Khurbn Vilne (The Destruction of Vilna, 1947) and Ikh Bin Geven a Partizan (I Was a Partisan, 1952). In his frequent travels after the war, Kaczerginski compiled the collection Lider fun di Getos un Lagern (Songs of the Ghettos and Concentration Camps, 1948), an indispensable reference for research in Jewish folk and popular music of the Holocaust period.