New book entitled Price of Concord/Memoirs;Portraits of Artists; Interactions of Cultures by prof. Markas Petuchauskas („Versus aureus“ Publishers, 2015; www.versus.lt; info@versus.lt) is available to the readers.

Please find the extracts about prominent Litvak artists from the book.

BETWEEN THE HAMMER AND THE SICKLE

Understandably, there had to emerge on the stage a programme dedicated to the closest friend of Sutzkever. In his early young days, Sutzkever became friends with Szmerl Kaczerginski. The young men took an oath never to betray each other and to remain friends till death. Both knights of conscience had remained true to that oath all through their lives, marked by dramatic fights and by the bitterness of losses. “That union,” Sutzkever remembered later on, “was based on their friendship which had lasted for 15 years and which had been strengthened by blood in the Ghetto.”
Szmerl Kaczerginski is a very peculiar figure representing the Jerusalem of Lithuania.
Having been orphaned during the First World War, when he was still a small boy, later Szmerl was growing up in an orphanage. On finishing the Talmud Tora School opened for orphans in Vilnius, Szmerl continued his education at evening school. Having come to appreciate the printed word and books, he chose the trade of a printer and started working as an apprentice of a lithographer.
Being as poor as a church mouse, he placed all his hopes in socialism as well as in the Soviet Union. He expected the revolution to bring a happier life. Such views were reflected in the creation of his young days and in his social activities as well. He participated in the demonstrations staged by workers he got involved in the underground activities as well. Finally, he was arrested by the police for his ‘destructive activities`.
The way in which historian Lucy Dawidowicz remembered those times, poet Szmerl resembled a teenager even when he was thirty years old. “The eyes, hidden behind the glasses with black frames, were looking asquint. He had a tall forehead and a bent nose. He had worn out clothes on, but the latter fact did not prevent him from expressing his friendly feelings most stormily. He was not merely merry and good-natured, but also a straightforward hooligan, always ready to make use of his fists. He had grown up in a severe and cruel world, which had taught him how he could defend himself. Everybody knew that the impudent anti-Semites could expect to have their blood made run cold by Szmerl.”
The poet got fascinated with the ideas of the group Yung Vilne. Using his inborn energy, he joined the creative group of young artists. He even became the organizer of that group. Immediately, he started using all his strength for the spreading and publication of the creation of his colleagues from Yung Vilne as well as for group the material support for them.
Similar altruism and rare friendliness, the care about the creation of other people at the expense of his own creative activity had become a kind of a legend, widely spread among the artists and intellectuals of Vilnius. Referring to friendliness of Szmerke’s, as he used to be called, the artist had once said that “such talent happens to be much most rare than the talent of writing books.”
When speaking to the viewers about Kaczerginski’s exceptional sensitivity, his care for other people as well as his rare decency and altruism, I used to think about the similarity existing between him and Ona Šimaitė. Both of them thought less about their own creative activity or material goods than the fates of other people and their misfortunes.
The independent character of Kaczerginski manifested itself at the start of the war as well. His dignity and human pride did not let him obey to be obediently driven to the ghetto. He also tried to protect his beloved wife, Barbara, a beautiful inhabitant of Krakow, who did not possess any Semitic features and who had a Polish passport, to boot, ‘legally’ settled with the family of his old acquaintance Julius Jankauskas.
Using his Polish passport, Kaczerginski pursued various activities in villages in Belarus. Contrary to his wife, he had very distinct Semitic features and also possessed a very peculiar accent. That was why he used to act as if he were a deaf person. He was talented in his acting. Once he even served as a cook in the estate of an old countess.
At the start of 1942 he decided to return to the Ghetto. Headlong did he plunge into a different kind of life. He entered the Farejynikte Partizaner Organizatsye (the United Partisan Organisation). While working in that organization, he made use of his illegal activities before the war as well as of his experience in avoiding the persecutions by the police. He became an irreplaceable hunter for weapons and the savior of cultural treasures.
Kaczerginski remembered how well he had been astounded by the cultural life, thanks to which “the Ghetto seems to have widened its borders”. “We all knew it was the culture of the ward, inhabited by the prisoners sentenced to death. But among them there appeared the group of prisoners who thought not about their own rescue but about the saving of the Jewish cultural heritage for the coming generations.”
The poet had enough energy for the active participation in creating the Ghetto theatre. He wrote the texts of the songs for the performances of that theatre as well as for the events organized by the youth club. Straight from the stage, those songs used to be widely sung in the Ghetto.
Kaczerginski created Yugnt Hymn (Hymn of Youth) dedicated to a youth club which he himself took care of. From the stage of the theatre there rang the song of the young boy Alik Wolkowiski Shtiler, shtiler…. The poet created anew in Yiddish the text written in Polish by the young composer’s father, doctor Noah Wolkowiski. As I had mentioned before, after sixty years the song was again performed in the National Philharmonic Hall of the composer’s native town Vilnius. Alexander Tamir himself accompanied the singing.
The moving lines created by Kaczerginski sounded in the songs Yid du partizaner (Jew, you Partisan), the ballad Yitsik Vitnberg, dedicated to the death of the leader of the underground organization, as well as Dos elnte Kind (The Lonely Child).
Very painfully did the poet mourn the tragedy of the loss of his wife. On the day of her death, the poet’s pain poured out in the song Friling (Spring Time). A young and talented composer Avrom Brudno presented that song dressed in the apparel of a ‘tango’. That was the most wonderful and ever-young melody of the Ghetto. It was a tragic tango which rang as the belief in Spring.
When the Vilnius Ghetto was about to be liquidated, the poet put aside his pen and took hold of the machine-rifle instead of the pen. Alongside a group of underground fighters, he managed to break through and reach partisans in forests. Later he published the books about partisans: Partizaner Geyen (Partisans on the Move) and Ikh Bin a Partizan (I was a Partisan).
While staying among the Soviet partisans, the writer encountered bitter disappointment. Having been fighting against Nazism, he faced open anti-Semitism expressed by the leaders of those partisans. With great bitterness Kaczerginski noted that a great number of Jewish partisans perished thanks to ‘their own’ partisans. Other Jewish partisans also wrote about similar betrayals. Consequently, before entering Vilnius freed from the Nazis the poet’s socialist ideas as well as his hopes to live in a land promoting the brotherhood of nations started to vapor away.
At the beginning, heads of cultural institutions met Kaczerginski with outstretched arms. After all, he was a famous writer and a member of the Writers’ Union of Lithuania. He had also fought in the detachment of Soviet partisans very bravely, and participated in the liberation of Vilnius. He had been well-known for his pro-Soviet views. Nobody else could have suited better to play the part of the official leader of the Jews and of a cultural functionary. However, their aspirations fell flat.
The book of the memoirs of the writer Tsvishn hamer un serp (Between the Hammer and the Sickle) (1949) testified to the events of those times. The book was written as a calendar recording daily occurrences and became an undisputable document.
Alongside other intellectuals, the poet was collecting culturally valuable things, manuscripts and pictures. He was dreaming of establishing a Jewish museum, of reviving the school and publications in the Yiddish language as well as concert activities.
“We encountered great difficulties everywhere,” Kaczerginski remembered. The head of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, the Minister of Education, head of the Art Affairs Committee – all of them kept promising all sorts of support, but they always “were hindered more than helped”.
Kaczerginski never gave in. He prepared an almanac containing the works of Jewish writers. He also addressed the director of Radiofonas suggesting a broadcast in Yiddish. He also organized a choir, with which composer and conductor Abelis Klenickis rehearsed while preparing for a concert. However, the governing body of Radiofonas did not permit the choir to sing on the radio. Singing in Lithuanian, Russian and Polish was permitted, but not in Yiddish.
Following the advice of his friends, Kaczerginski travelled to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in Moscow. The committee was headed by Lozovski A., a person of the Jewish origin, who also was the leading figure of the Soviet Information Bureau. In 1952, Lozovski was shot dead.
While in Moscow, the poet realized that it was not the Jewish but anti-Jewish committee, while the Jewish programmes broadcasts to foreign lands acted as window-dressings covering up the Jewish culture in the Soviet state.
Kaczerginski was not happy even about the establishing of the Jewish museum. He realized that the action was temporary and that “a cherisher of the Jewish culture did not have any place left in Vilnius, which had been so dear to us through centuries.”
That was how earlier illusions of Kaczerginski fell flat.
While in the museum, every day he used to receive guests from the NKVD. Those visitors were very “bothersome and inquisitive”. They wanted to know whether he allowed anybody to bring materials out of the museum and whether all the books kept in the library had been checked by GLAVLIT.
His plans to emigrate finally ripened up. He was silently preparing for emigration. At the same time he kept stealthily sending to foreign countries various accumulated material and the exhibits of the museum.
Already in emigration, the writer was able to evaluate his actions. He learned that the Jewish museum had been closed in Vilnius.
In his book Between the Hammer and the Sickle bearing the subtitle History of the Destruction of the Jewish Culture in the Soviet Union, the writer revealed the essence of the Soviet ideology and politics. Very prophetically did he foresee the ruin of the Jewish culture in that country.
During a memorial evening organized to remember Kaczerginski, from the former Ghetto theatre there sound the songs written not only for the Ghetto stage. We were reading excerpts from his book Churbn Vilne (The Destruction of Jewish Vilna). That book was a long tragic martyrology about the annihilation of Jews. With the precision of a chronicler, the writer enumerated the artists who perished during the genocide. In the author’s words, “the whole world of the Yiddish language, songs and theatre” had been destroyed.
The audience also heard the songs sung earlier by prisoners. During 1946 and 1948, those songs were collected and written down in former ghettos and concentration camps by Kaczerginski. He used to record the songs even when visiting camps for displaced persons where the lonely people lost in the turmoil of the war lived. Those people were afraid to return to their native places.
Kaczerginski selflessly accumulated and took care of the creative works of other people. To be frank, that kind of collection had became his own creative activity which continued throughout his later years and which gave birth to the books: Dos gezang fun Vilner geto (The Song of Vilnius Ghetto) as well as Lider fun di getos un lagern (Songs of the Ghettos and Camps). In that book, the poet collected 250 texts of songs and recreated 100 melodies which used to ring across various concentration camps of Germany and Eastern Europe.
Referring to those painful songs suffered through by the people sentenced to death, the poet wrote: “That was the last granting of meaning to hope, that was the will of the beloved, it was a sacred thing.”
Those were the songs which at that special evening were sung by Marija Krupoves, while actor Rimantas Bagdzevičius read the excerpts from Kaczerginski’s prose as well as from the reminiscences of his friends.
In 1950, the writer arrived in Israel, where he continued meeting his friends and travelling across Israel. He felt, though, that he belonged somewhere else. He belonged to where his beloved Yiddish was spoken and written in. He continued travelling all across North and South America. He tried to explain the situation to the people. He wanted them to understand what had taken place. He kept delivering lectures and publishing articles in the press.
Finally, Kaczerginski got settled in Argentina. He took root in the Yiddish culture prospering in that country. He became one of leaders of the Congress of the Jewish Culture.
Having suffered all through the Ghetto, having gone through the ferocious partisan struggle, having suffered the persecutions of the Soviet regime, and later the attacks of the communists of the Western countries, which especially increased after the appearance of his book Between the Hammer and the Sickle, Kaczerginski unexpectedly perished in a plane accident in 1954. Again he was in a hurry. Fearing that he would be late for a meeting with people, he changed his train ticket for that of the plane.
Knowing Kaczerginski, it is very difficult even to imagine today, just how many of his plans had failed to be put into practice. However, what remains is a difficult-to-embrance treasure house for the Yiddish-speaking world culture. I hope that this treasure house, too, is going to return to Kaczerginski’s motherland.