HERSH GLIKSBERG

HERSH GLIKSBERG (1916-1944)

            He was born in Zduńska Wola, near Lodz, Poland, into a poor family of laborers.  He studied in religious elementary school and in a Polish public school.  In his youth he worked in a textile factory, and in 1938 he was active in his hometown in the professional and political labor movement on the left.  In 1939, due to police persecution, he left his home and settled in Lodz, where he worked until WWII in a factory and wrote lyrical and revolutionary poetry.  He was a member of the youngest writers’ group in Lodz, which gathered around the journal Tsvaygn (Branches).  He was in the Lodz ghetto where he organized a revolutionary writers’ group—which also included among its members the prose writer Alter Hofman and the poet Fayvl Gorfinkel.  They arranged literary events in workers’ apartments.  In August 1944, when the Nazis were liquidating the Lodz ghetto, he was deported to Auschwitz and murdered there.

Sources: B. Mark, Umgekumene shrayber fun di getos un lagern (Murdered writers from the ghettos and camps) (Warsaw, 1954); Kh. L. Fuks, in Fun noentn over 3 (New York, 1957).