MENDL MOLTSHANTSKI

MENDL MOLTSHANTSKI (1921-September 1944)

            He was born in Bałuty (Y., Balut), just outside Lodz city limits, into a working-class family.  He studied in religious primary school and in a Polish public school, and later he became a laborer.  In the Lodz ghetto he was active among the working youth.  He also began to compose poetry at that time, some of which (with and without his name) was found in the archives of the Lodz ghetto.  They are now located in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.  Some of them written in Lodz and some in Auschwitz were published in the anthology Dos lid in geto, zamlung (The poem in the ghetto, a collection) (Warsaw, 1962).  His longer poem (pp. 43-46) Hunger (Hunger) is replete with protestations against the murderers and with certainty of their defeat.  In his poems, according to Shloyme Lastik, Moltshanski “was fixated on the daily events, but also on the burning desire that future generations should know how people were tormented under the homicidal German rule.”  During the liquidation of the Lodz ghetto in September 1944, he was deported to Auschwitz and murdered there.

Sources: Shloyme Lastik, Mitn ponem tsum morgn (Facing the morning), with a foreword (Warsaw, 1952), p. 148; Rute Pups, forward to Dos lid in geto, zamlung (The poem in the ghetto, a collection) (Warsaw, 1962), p. 13; Sh. Shtern, in Frayhayt (New York) (January 6, 1962); A. Golomb, in Der veg (Mexico City) (August 25, 1962).

Khayim Leyb Fuks