Behind the song
The song’s story
Sunshine in a terrible year
Rikle Glezer was eighteen when she wrote S'iz geven a zumertog in the Vilna ghetto. She used the familiar melody of Papirosn. Her lyric places sunshine and birdsong beside forced confinement and the killings at Ponar: beauty outside does not cancel human suffering.
Familiar music as a witness
World ORT preserves the song's words and historical setting. Reusing a recognizable prewar tune gave the new testimony a musical form listeners already knew. The bright summer day became an image of the world's unbearable normality.
Olga's mother and child
Olga Anikina's 2017 Russian Summer Day is an independent poetic work in dialogue with that source. Her mother-child lullaby and blue boat belong to her reimagining. The boat offers an imagined refuge; it is not evidence of a historical rescue.
A priority for English adaptation
Elechka sings the Russian version here. Summer Day is one of our five Holocaust-remembrance priorities, with an English draft linked for improvement. The work we want to carry forward is Olga's specific Russian text, with its source and differences openly credited.
About this recording
Summer light falls on a mother's hair. Her words ask a child to sleep, but the quiet becomes unbearable: strangers, cries and weeping stones disturb the lullaby. The imagined escape in a blue boat remains uncertain.
Olga Anikina's 2017 Russian poem is an independent work, not a literal translation. It responds to Rikle Glezer's S'iz geven a zumertog, a Vilna Ghetto song using the melody of Papirosn. Elechka performs it here.