Band revives Warsaw Ghetto fighter's poetry

Sixty-five years after the end of World War II, the poems of Wladyslaw Szlengel, killed at 29 during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, will be given new life.

"We wanted to revive Szlengel the poet. We did not want his murder to condemn his poems, which describe what was in the hearts of Jews during the Holocaust," says Boaz Albert, 32, the lead singer of El HaMeshorer.

The members of the band, who also include Hay Shushan, Tal Goldberg and Uri Meiselman, put Szlenger's poems to music, and will perform tomorrow night at the club Levontin7 in Tel Aviv.

Also performing will be Kerach Tesha, with the songs of poet Abramek Koplowicz who died at age 14 in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.

Szlengel was known for his satirical poetry. During the Holocaust he continued to write poetry subtly criticizing the Nazi regime, the Judenrat, the Jewish police and the wealthy Jews who lived in the ghetto, performing for them in underground cafes.

"The photographs and the movies offer us a visual sense of the Holocaust: How the people looked, the structures and the streets. The poems that Szlengel and others wrote show us what the people thought and felt. How they experienced the isolation, the fear and the terrible pain that is called the 'Holocaust.' In his poetry, Wladyslaw Szlengel expresses the cry of the entire ghetto," Albert says.

"By putting [the poems] to music, we want to introduce them to new audiences," he adds.

In many of his poems, written in the underground and at risk to his life, he expresses the absence of justice, human lawlessness, and the hopelessness of the simple person who lost everything, including his Polish friends, his leaders, his culture and his art.

Despite his criticism, the wealthy ghetto residents protected Szlengel and continued to fund his existence as a man of letters.

Several hundred kilometers from Warsaw, the teenager Abramek Koplowicz, son of shoemakers, wrote about the terror, the suffering and the isolation of the Lodz Ghetto Jewry. The cynical and sobering poems by this young manual laborer do not spare his people and the ghetto leadership from criticism, and he aptly describes the public mood in the ghetto.

Koplowicz hid his poems in a notebook, and after his death in 1944 his father, who survived the Holocaust, found it and brought it with him to Israel.