Isaiah Spiegel (1906–1990)

Isaiah Spiegel was born to a Jewish family in in Balut, a poor suburb of Łódź, Poland. He was one of a group of young Yiddish poets active in Łódź in the 1920s. From 1926 to 1933, he taught in Yiddish schools and wrote for Yiddish journals in Poland and abroad. After Nazi Germany invaded Poland in World War II, he lived for almost five years in the Łódź Ghetto. After it was liquidated in the fall of 1944, he was deported to the death camp at Auschwitz and later to a slave labor camp in Germany. He returned to Łódź after the war ended, and retrieved the manuscript he had hidden in a cellar. From 1946 to 1948, he taught in a Jewish school; in 1951, he emigrated to Israel. His short stories about the Holocaust were published in several volumes, including In the Ghetto Kingdom (Malkhes Geto, 1947). He also published two volumes of poetry and an autobiographical novel, Flames from the Earth (1966).