Yeshayahu Spiegel lyrics

Yeshayahu Spiegel — who was born in Lodz in 1906 and who survived the Holocaust and was later living in Israel — wrote realistic prose describing the inner world and struggles of the individual in the ghetto against the background of the trials and tribulations endured by the Jewish community of Lodz. The hunger, cold, and death which permeated the ghetto and the alienation of the inhabitants are the central themes in Spiegel's prose, the majority of which was confiscated in Auschwitz. The many poems which he wrote were lost during the Holocaust, After the war, Spiegel succeeded in recovering the manuscripts of 17 of his stories from a pile of garbage outside the house in which he hid part of his writings before he was deported from the ghetto. The stories he recovered describe the years 1939–1941, during which the masses of Jews in the Lodz Ghetto were forced to live under terrible conditions (hunger, cold, and epidemics) as a result of which many of the ghetto inhabitants perished.