GITE SUDENSKI

GITE SUDENSKI (b. 1898)

            She was born in Vilna.  In Shmerke Katsherginski’s Lider fun di getos un lagern (Songs from the ghettos and camps) (New York, 1948), it is noted that the author, a fifty-year-old woman, wrote these poems in a hiding place in the Vilna ghetto.  She survived the Holocaust and then went to join her son in the state of Israel.  In the three poems included in the collection, she paints the “portraits”—“and after a portrait drawn by my pen, we need portraits of the sad, well-known ‘leaders’”—of the leaders of the Jewish police who imposed great pain on the ghetto Jews and were themselves then sent off to Ponar where they were murdered together with other Jews from the Vilna ghetto.

Source: Shmerke Katsherginski, Lider fun di getos un lagern (Songs from the ghettos and camps) (New York, 1948), pp. 30, 31, 44, 45.

Yankev Birnboym