מיר ווילן לעבן

Memoirs of Rassen, a Lithuanian agronomist and writer from Kovno, based on his diary and including poems that he wrote during the Holocaust, some of which were sung by prisoners in Nazi camps and by partisans. Describes the German occupation in 1941, after which he and his family fled from Kovno and were interned in the Dvinsk ghetto in Latvia. In November 1941 his wife and two children were deported and killed. In October 1943, with the liquidation of the Dvinsk ghetto, Rassen was sent to the Riga ghetto, then to the Kaiserwald concentration camp and the Popervaln labor camp (near Popvale, Latvia). Rassen and four others escaped from Popervaln twice and were caught; the second time only he managed to get away and flee to the forest, where he joined a Soviet partisan group. After the war he emigrated to Eretz Israel. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)