Moshe Gutman standing second on right
Moshe Gutman standing second on right

Moshe Gutman

...the poem that was written by the young Hebrew poet Moshe Gutman, of Ostrowiec, in the first days of the war, is interesting. Tens of thousands of people, young and old, fled their towns on the roads that led to Warsaw, and lost their homes and their possessions. Thousands fell on their way, killed by the German aeroplanes – all this cruelty was described in the poem by Moshe Gutman, who was a student at the Hebrew Seminar in Warsaw.

When Moshe Gutman, who was my close friend, returned to Ostrowiec, he read his poem to us, a poem that excelled in its graphic portrayal of the cruel occurrences in those days.

Moshe Gutman was already known then, known as a young Hebrew writer. The only daily Hebrew newspaper in Poland before the war, “B’derech” [“On the Way”], published many of his short stories and poems. He was literally active, particularly in the period of the Ostrowiec ghetto, and together with the task that he undertook to teach the Jewish orphans that gathered in the town, he would also read aloud to us, his poems of those days.

Moshe Gutman was shot [by Nazi criminal Zwiezhina in November 1942] together with other young people, when the Germans conducted a search for money and valuable items. This is how we lost one of the greatest intellectual talents in the Ostrowiec ghetto.

Source: 1971Ostrowiec Yizkor Book , Page 330 1971 Yizkor Book,   THE YOUTH OPEN A CHILDREN’S HOME IN THE GHETTO, article by Yechezkel Mandel translated from Yiddish


Moshe Gutman's murder is mentioned in 2 places in the 1971 Yizkor Book:

Page 464:

...Behind this brick wall, my talented school friend, from the Warsaw government teacher's seminary, was shot – the poet Moshe Gutman, who unquestionably would have become one of the greatest writers of modern Hebrew poetry.

Page 478

Zwiezhina - Nazi criminal

On June 8, 1946, the Ostrowiec unit of the General Committee of the Polish Jews sent the following remarks to the Vienna chief of police, about the activities of the “stabskapitan” [“staff captain”] Zwiezhina in Ostrowiec in the time of the German occupation:

“The person mentioned here, during the time of the Hitler occupation, held the position of chief of security in the Ostrowiec factories ….. Aside from there, there were constant searches of Jews, which ended in killing several of the Jews without reason. In November 1942, Zwiezhina shot the following Jews: 1) Gutman, 25 years old, a Hebrew poet…..

[ This is also mentioned on page 137 of "Hitlerowskie fabryki śmierci na Kielecczyźnie" by Longin Kaczanowski . See page on  blog of Wojtek Mazan : https://zydowskiostrowiec.blogspot.com/search?q=gutman#:~:text=str.137,w%20j%C4%99zyku%20hebrajskim.%22 ]

 

Hebrew story of of Moshe Gutman in Bederech- May 7 1937