Born to a poor family in Vilna and orphaned at a young age, Kaczerginski was educated at the local Talmud Torah and night school, where he became involved in communist politics and was regularly beaten or imprisoned.

Liliane, known as Liliana Cordova, lives between Paris and Madrid, is a co-founder of The International Jewish Antizionist Network (IJAN, founded in 2008 in San Francisco, USA), and is currently an activist in the Palestine solidarity movement.

Around this time Kaczerginski was drawn into local circles of the outlawed communist party, and published his first writings – articles concerning class struggle and the living conditions of workers.

[12] Participating in the recapture of Vilna, Kaczerginski returned with Sutzkever, Abba Kovner and other FPO survivors to go about rebuilding Jewish culture and digging up the hidden Paper Brigade caches.

Following the end of the war in 1945, it became clear that the volunteers' work was incompatible with the priorities of Soviet authorities, who burnt 30 tons of cache materials and, having demanded that any publicly displayed books be reviewed by a censor, simply refused to return any that were submitted.

[16] After departing Vilna (and experiencing extreme anti-semitism in Moscow), Kaczerginski moved to the largely-intact city of Łódź, where he was employed by the Central Jewish Historical Commission.

Kaczerginski had begun working as a zamler ('collector') of Jewish music in 1944, considering the partisan and ghetto songs to be "the martyrs’ last will and testament to future generations" and worthy of preservation.

[18] Having undergone a political transformation during the war and early Soviet occupation, he shifted from communism to an engagement with Zionism, writing Khalutsim lid ('Pioneers' song') in 1946 and collaborating with the Zionist Gordoniya collective to help Jewish children in Łódź.

From there he toured 17 displaced persons camps in November 1947, lecturing survivors of the Holocaust, gathering new songs, and stopping in Munich to record several pieces for the Jewish Historical Commission.

During this time he also wrote several original works, including Undzer lid ('Our Song') in tribute to Hirsh Glick, and S'vet geshen ('It Will Happen') commemorating the British attack on the SS Exodus.

[21] Having visited Israel in 1950, Kaczerginski was excited by the possibility of moving there – but instead chose to take his family to Buenos Aires, after a job offer from the Jewish Cultural Congress, and they sailed there in May 1950.

Wanting to see his family again, he decided to travel by plane rather than the longer train route, and was on the flight to Buenos Aires from Mendoza on 23 April 1954, when it crashed shortly after takeoff, killing everyone on board (see also Aerolíneas Argentinas accidents and incidents).

[1] Sutzkever, having heard of the accident in Tel Aviv, simply telegrammed the Kaczerginski family mir viln nit gleybn nito kayn werter: "we will not believe, there are no words".

[1][2] Despite this, he is considered to have been tremendously influential: having collected over 250 Holocaust songs during his time as a partisan, poet and writer, his songbooks are the source of the majority of surviving pieces of the genre.