f the enemy. Meantime, in Krakow, Asmodeus was rampant. Gebirtig was sitting at his home, crying bitterly and working in pain on his new songs, songs of loneliness and death.
It was the eve of Yom Kippur. For some time he had the habit on this night to go for a walk with his close friend Moyshe Leib Shternfeld and visit synagogues in Krakow to hear the old prayer of “Kol Nidrei." Usually on this holy evening there was “in the Jewish streets a noise, movement in all directions” – Jews going to worship. Even gentiles felt a tremor along with the Jews on the Day of Judgment.
But on the eve of the Yom Kippur of 1939, Gebirtig did not go for a walk. He just wrote a song under a title “Eve of Yom-Kippur” and added a warm dedication: “A gift to my dear friend Moyshe Leib Shternfeld and his lovely wife Sorele. The synagogues were empty, shameful and flawed, and the locks on their gates look like chains on human hands. Instead of the prayers was heard the stamping of the soldier’s boots."
For a while Mordechai Gebirtig did not realize the horror that the new situation will bring and that the terrible beginning is just the tip of the iceberg.
He could not part with the old traditional Jewish weapon - confidence. So, in his song “Shifrele’s Portrait," he argued with his daughter, whose portrait hang over his bed. In the middle of the night, thinking about his daughter, he could hear her voice from the portrait…
He was indignant with the way the Poles treated their fellow citizen Jews, and in his song “It Pains…” asks with perplexity:
“Sons and daughters of Poland,
Whose land one day
Will be ashamed of them,
Are laughing loudly,
When seeing in the street
How our common enemy
Is mistreating the Jews”.
In his song “Moments of Confidence” he goes on saying with optimism:
Rejoice! Do not worry,
Do not walk gloomy around.
Be confident and patient,
Take everything in stride…
The situation has soon changed and there was no more room for illusions. He had to leave his home along with all the rest of the Krakow Jews, and move to “Lagiewniki," a village in that area. There he wrote a tearful good-bye song, “Farewell, Krakow”:
Farewell to you.
The wagon is waiting for me at the door.
The wild enemy chases me,
Like one would chase a dog,
And forces me to leave you”.
All the songs that Gebirtig wrote between November of 1939 and November 1940 were written with deep breath. He collected all his inner strength to restrain himself and hide his own bitterness. He did not want to show signs of despair, but in Lagiewniki he sounded a different tune. The strange roof over his head, the cold and hardship, the spreading rumors about death sentences for hundreds of Jews, the mood of (Tisha B’Av) Ninth of Av that filled the Jewish hearts – all this changed his violin completely. The major scale disappeared and replaced were by the sad and gloomy tones of lamentation.
The first song written in Lagiewniki was “I Have Already For A While…” He wrote it in January of 1941 and dedicated to his daughter Hawa’le.
I have not heard already for a while,
For a long while,
The voice of a violin, -
This is how he began the song and he continued it describing what he actually heard instead:
I did hear and keep hearing today
How everything around laments, bemoans and cries.
Mourning her only child
A mother cries her eyes blind from tears.
In grief and sorrow
A woman cries, young, but aged and grey.
The fields are crying, the forest cries,
The whole world laments
Every fallen person,
Only the devil laughs with pleasure…
During that same Lagiewniki period he bemoans: “Once I Used to Have a Home” in songs “Sunbeams," “My Dream," “Mourning Cries” and “ The Day Of Vengeance." The last song, dated from January 5, 1942, expresses the grief and sorrow which depressed his gentle soul. It seems he could not keep the accumulated feelings to himself and burst out screaming:
Revenge for our sufferings and pain,
For the blood spilled by our enemies;
Revenge for those, whose remains
May not be ever found.
Revenge for the deeds not heard in Sodom
Against widows, mothers and orphans.
The 