Rikle Glezer
Rikle (Ruth) Glezer (December 17, 1924 - January 12, 2006) was a World War II partisan who composed popular songs about The Holocaust during the war. Early life Glezer was born to a Jewish family in the city of Vilna, Poland, now Vilnius, Lithuania, on December 17, 1924. The daughter of a jeweler, she studied in the Yiddish Sh. Frug School of the Central Education Committee and then in a Polish School. Glezer started writing poems at the age of 12, was active in school circles, and belonged to the SKIF, the Socialist Children's Association - a Bundist Children's organization. In 1941, when she was 16-years-old, Nazi Germany occupied the city, and deported Glezer and all other Jews to the Vilna Ghetto. The Nazis took Glezer's father at the very beginning of the occupation. Glezer, her mother, and her younger sister lived until the liquidation of the ghetto in September 1943, and they were deported from the ghetto together. However, Glezer jumped out of the train when it was 15 kilometers from Vilna and reached the forest where she became a partisan. Music Glezer wrote several songs during her years of imprisonment in the ghetto. Most of her compositions were