Kirman, Yosef: 1896-1943

Kirman was a productive writer in Warsaw, who, in the 1942 roundup was taken to the Umshlag Platz. He was saved from transport to Treblinka by a note to Yitzkhok Giterman pleading for rescue and saying that he wished to see his wife and small children in the countryside. He was taken out of the Umshlag Platz, according to Ber Mark ( in the Di Umgekumene Shreiber in di Getos, (“Murdered Writers from the Ghetto p. 135”). But in 1943 he was killed in the Poniatow Concentration Camp. His two eye-witness poems, preserved in the Ringelblum Archive, describing the worst times toward the end of the Warsaw Ghetto are all that remain of this prolific writer and these poems are among the most frank and moving that we have from those dark days.