Dovid Zisman

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Dovid Zisman (1914 – 1960), a Holocaust survivor, was a poet, playwright and performer in Poland. Known for his poetry in the Lodz ghetto, he was sent to a work camp in the German factory Hasag-Pelcery in Czestochowa in 1943 and later sent to the concentration camp Buchenwald. He wrote and performed his writing during his imprisonment and torture in labor and concentration camps. Following liberation, he married Helen Zisman and continued to write poetry and prose. In 1947, he left Europe to pre-state Israel with his family and years later immigrated to Toronto, Canada, where he owned a fur factory, raised his daughters and continued to act and write. Zisman passed away in Toronto on May 5, 1960, after battling cancer.
      Many of Zisman’s creative works focus on the social and political experiences and struggles of the Jewish people and his vision of brighter futures. Most recently, his poem “Rumkowski Litzmannstadt Geto 1943” was published in an anthology of Holocaust poetry entitled Słowa pośród nocy [Words in the Night]. Select poetry is also archived in Yiddish in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, Poland.