News at Eleven: In July 1942, the ghetto was thrown

into panic as the Germans began shoving Jews by the tens of thousands on trains bound for Treblinka, 60 miles to the northeast. For a time, until it became morally unacceptable to him, [Wladyslaw] Szlengel had belonged to the ghetto's Jewish police force. Then, assigned to work in a brush factory, he continued to be spared the fate of so many of the others. But it took time to liquidate the ghetto, and for thousands of others, life went on. Szlengel kept writing his poems, first by hand, then typing them on carbon paper, so that they could circulate more easily. Often, he read them aloud to groups of Jewish factory workers. Others would copy and then recopy them: The grammatically incorrect Polish on some versions, Kassow notes, indicates that for some of those circulating them, Polish was not their native tongue. As conditions became more desperate, the impact of the poems grew. Emanuel Ringelblum, the historian who led the massive effort to chronicle ghetto life by stashing away documents in cans he hoped would be unearthed after the war, called Szlengel "the poet of the Ghetto."

from Tablet: Lost Words

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