Yona Radinow wrote: Alone in her small room in the Women’s Ghetto on 16 Luksnas Street she organized a literary evening every Thursday. Here she entertained many ghetto fighters. Her most beloved repertoire was “Yossele the Gypsy”, “Don’t think that the World is a Tavern”, “The Hymn of the Vilna Ghetto’, “A Shepherd”, ”A Lithuanian Shtetl”, and “Belz”. She was accompanied by the guitarist Heifetz and the fiddler Brondt. Chanale would end her beloved folksong presentations with Itzik Manger’s songs. That small ghetto room became, every Thursday, a happy, small Yiddish refuge in a foamy, bloody sea…These get-togethers in Chana Teitsh’s room became a tradition, and no matter how difficult and terrible the conditions became, everyone came back time and time again. Those ghetto evenings made their pain lighter and strengthened their hope for a swift victory. It gave energy and hope to the Jews that they would outlive their enemy—the Nazis. She, who was so enamored with love for Jewish children’s songs, lived long enough to see the Nazi hangman Valdemar Arays, Herbert Tzuker and Dr. Lange throwing Jewish children out of the windows of the tallest buildings, counting out loud as if this was a game. However, witnessing this terrible Jewish tragedy did not frighten her nor did she ever became docile. Instead she became involved with the Jewish underground movement in the ghetto and eventually became a strong combatant in that organization in the Riga Ghetto. She, for the sake of the last remaining children in the ghetto, helped to found a kindergarten, a school and together with the teacher Gershon Glickman (the Latvian personification of Janusz Korczak) gave a concert every Sunday in the ghetto school.

She starved, suffered from poverty, but she never lost her bravery and gave strength to others on her Thursday nights. Here she would also talk about her life in Paris, her meetings with world famous entertainers such as Julius Adler, Rudolph Zaslowsky, the poet Itzik Manger, and others. One could forget that she was in the Riga ghetto, and that at the threshold there waited death. With her artistry and through her songs she insulated other ghetto Jews from the battles. She helped not one but many Ghetto Jews who, through her, kept their faith in an eventual victory. Some of them survived and remained alive. She herself did not survive… when the Germans drove the Jews out of Riga in August 1944, she too died in a concentration camp. At that time she was very weakened and tired. The tragedy of her people who, night and day, were being burned in the ovens of Stutthof, weakened her resolve and she died there of hunger. Her body was burned in Stutthof, and her ashes were mixed with the ashes of six million other Jewish sacrifices.

Her husband, Kelman, a well-known community worker in Riga was killed by the Nazis in Buchenwald.

Sh.E. from Yona Radinow.