IDA GRODZYANOVSKI

IDA GRODZYANOVSKI (1924-January 29, 1945)

            She was born in Vilna, Lithuania, where she studied until 1942.  During the Nazi occupation, she was deported to a concentration camp in Latvia.  She began writing poetry on ghetto motifs in the Vilna ghetto, and she continued to write until her death and under horrific conditions as she moved from camp to camp.  Her Yiddish poems—“Shoyn genug” (Enough already), “Kontsert” (Concert), “Warshever oyfshtand” (Warsaw uprising), and “Katset bayzervald,” among others—were mostly sung as camp songs both under the Nazi rule and after the war.  She also wrote in Polish.  In January 1945 as the Soviet Army was approaching the Krumholtz concentration camp, near Bydgoszcz, she and other Jewish women were driven out on a long death march to the German border.  She became ill with typhus en route and died near the Vistula River.

Source: Sh. Katsherginski, Lider fun di getos and lagern (Poems from the ghettos and camps) (New York, 1948).