KHANE KHAYTIN (HANNAH ḤAITIN)

KHANE KHAYTIN (HANNAH ḤAITIN) (b. 1925)

            She was born in Shavel (Šiauliai), Lithuania.  Until WWII she was a student in a Hebrew high school, thereafter confined to the Shavel ghetto where she worked in a brush factory, and was later deported to several German concentration camps.  In May 1945 she was liberated and moved to Lodz, from there traveling through Germany, she made aliya to Israel.  In the ghetto she wrote songs that were sung—such as “A yidish kind” (A Jewish child), “Vi es kumt der frimorgn” (How morning comes), and the like—by the camp internees in Lithuania and other sites.  A number of them were published in Sh. Katsherginski’s Lider fun getos and lagern (Songs of the ghettos and camps); her songs were also published in Dos naye ;lebn (The new life) in Lodz and other Yiddish publications in Germany in the years 1945-1949, as well as in Israel in the Hebrew translations of Sh. Meltsar.  “Her songs,” wrote H. Leivick, “although written in a primitive folk tone, rise to an artistic height and permeate us with their meaningful expressions, with their acuity, and mainly with their ceaseless pain.”

Sources: H. Leivick, and Sh. Katsherginski, foreword, Lider fun getos and lagern (Songs of the ghettos and camps) (New York, 1948); E. Yerushalmi, Yoman shaveli (Diary of Shavel) (Tel Aviv, 1968), pp. 404-6.