78th Anniversary of Heroic Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
April 19-May 16, 1943

Zog Nit Keynmol, Yiddish Song of the Jewish Partisan Movement

caption: Jewish Partisan unit near Krasnik, Poland, circa 1943.

Hirsh Glick, a young poet and partisan, inmate of the Vilnius Ghetto, composed this song in 1943, inspired by news of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It was written to the music of “Those Aren’t Clouds but Thunderclouds” by Soviet composers Dmitri and Daniel Pokrass. It became an iconic song of the resistance movement.

Never say that you are walking the final road,
Though leaden skies obscure blue days;
The hour we have been longing for will still come,
Our steps will drum — we are here!
From green palm-land to distant land of snow,
We arrive with our pain, with our sorrow,
And where a spurt of our blood has fallen,
There will sprout our strength, our courage.
The morning sun will tinge our today with gold,
And yesterday will vanish with the enemy,
But if the sun and the dawn are delayed —
Like a watchword this song will go from generation to generation.
his song is written with blood and not with lead,
It’s not a song about a bird that is free,
A people, between falling walls,
Sang this song with pistols in their hands.
So never say that you are walking the final road
Though leaden skies obscure blue days.
The hour we have been longing for will still come —
Our steps will drum — we are here!

As sung by Paul Robeson in Yiddish at his 1949 Moscow Concert.