P.18 - Kaczerginski Collection: Documentation regarding the Vilna Ghetto, 1941-1954

P.18 - Kaczerginski Collection: Documentation regarding the Vilna Ghetto, 1941-1954
 
 Shmaryahu Kaczerginski was born in Vilna in 1908. From a very young age, he started to write and publish poetry and stories. Kaczerginski was one of the founders and activists in "Young Vilna", a group of young Yiddish poets in Vilna, and he was also active in the Communist movement. Even when he was a young man, some of his poems were adopted by the Jews of Vilna and Poland, and these poems became the folk songs sung by many of the Jews.
 
 In 1942, after about a year of hiding from the Germans, Kaczerginski returned to the Vilna Ghetto. During this time in the ghetto, he took an active part in the diverse and intensive ghetto cultural life. Together with the poet Abraham Sutzkever and other cultural figures Kaczerginsk was among those who rescued the many Jewish cultural properties in Vilna. In April 1943 the Nazis began to loot the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (YIVO) library as part of "Operation Rosenberg", and they forced Kaczerginski to help them in the collection of documents from the library for transfer to Berlin. The YIVO library was located outside the ghetto and with help from Sutzkever, Kaczerginski and others managed to rescue books, manuscripts and documents.
 
 In September 1943 Kaczerginski escaped from the Vilna Ghetto and joined a Soviet partisan unit in the nearby forests. In the summer of 1944 he was among the first people to return to Vilna and the demolished ghetto. Kaczerginski dedicated himself to the rescue, preservation and collection of Yiddish cultural works, most of which had been destroyed.
 
 In 1948 Kaczerginski published a large anthology of Yiddish songs composed in the ghettos and camps. The music for the songs was attached and this anthology became the cornerstone of the Yiddish works composed during the period of annihilation.
 
 In 1950 Kaczerginski emigrated to Argentina. Shmaryahu Kaczerginski published scores of poetry and prose books in Yiddish. On 28 April 1954 he was killed in an airplane accident in Argentina. 
 
 Kaczerginski's collection was submitted to Yad Vashem in 1976. The collection includes personal documentation, letters, research, stories and poems which he wrote and collected as well as testimonies he gathered from Vilna Ghetto survivors and partisans who fought in the forests.