Rokhl Auerbach (1899–1976) was a journalist, literary critic, and one of only three surviving members of the Oyneg Shabes, historian Emanuel Ringelblum’s top-secret archive of the Warsaw Ghetto. Born in Lanowitz, a small village in rural Podolia, Auerbach studied psychology and philosophy at Lwow University and co-founded Tsushtayer, a literary journal meant to encourage the use of Yiddish among the Galician Jewish intelligentsia.
In 1933 Auerbach moved to Warsaw, where she began writing for the Yiddish and Polish-Jewish press, made her way into the city’s literary and journalistic circles, and became the partner of Yiddish poet Itzik Manger. Upon the German invasion and occupation of Poland in 1939, she was tasked by historian and social activist Emanuel Ringelblum to run a soup kitchen for the starving inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto. Ringelblum later asked her to join his secret ghetto archive, the Oyneg Shabes. Auerbach’s wartime and postwar writings became an important source of information for historians of both prewar Jewish Warsaw and the Warsaw Ghetto. After the war she played a crucial part in recovering the archive from the ghetto ruins before immigrating to Israel in 1950, where she founded the witness testimony division Yad Vashem and played a foundational role in the development of Holocaust memory.
Warsaw Testament, originally published in Yiddish in 1974, is a memoir based on her wartime writings in the ghetto and on the Aryan side of the occupied city, and it provides an unmatched portrait of the last days of Warsaw’s Yiddish literary and cultural community. In it she describes her experiences running a soup kitchen and provides sketches of the writers and artists—some famous, many obscure—whom she knew both before and during the war. This translation also includes selections from her posthumously published book, The Last Journey, which includes an account of her life working as a smuggler for the Jewish underground outside the ghetto and of her own struggle to survive.
Four Questions
- There are many famous Holocaust memoirs, but few of them are based on contemporaneous writings, as Auerbach’s is. Does Warsaw Testament meet your expectations for the genre or does it differ from them? If so, how?
- One of the most controversial parts of Holocaust historiography is the role Jewish authorities played in the operation of the ghettos, and Auerbach occasionally refers to the actions of the Judenrat, Jewish criminal gangs, or the Jewish police. Did this information surprise you? How would you characterize her approach to the subject?
- Auerbach’s book often focuses on prewar Yiddish cultural life in Warsaw in order to describe its eventual fate. What did you learn about that world that you might not have previously known?
- In the latter part of the book Auerbach describes the role of gentile resistance figures like the Zabinskis. How would you characterize Auerbach’s approach to her Polish counterparts during the war?
Explore the sections below to learn more about Rokhl Auerbach and Warsaw Testament.
Q&A with Translator Samuel Kassow
Auerbach’s Life and Work
Auerbach’s Writing in Yiddish and English
Reviews of Warsaw Testament
Yiddish Book Center: This new translation includes excerpts from Auerbach’s The Last Journey, which was published in 1977, one year after her death. How did you decide which sections to include in this translation? Were you trying to weave those sections in where they aligned chronologically or thematically?
Sam Kassow: Mainly thematically. I was looking for parts of The Last Journey that integrated well with the previous book.
Much has been written about the Holocaust and the Warsaw Ghetto. For those who are familiar with Auerbach and her writings, what will they discover that didn’t know before? And for those readers not familiar with Auerbach or the Warsaw Ghetto, what do you hope they will take away from this translation?
There is still very little in English on the cultural life of the Warsaw Ghetto and the far-flung effort to fight back against hunger and disease; the book also contains descriptions of writers, poets, composers, and musicians who today are totally forgotten. So this book fills an important gap.
This translation was ten years in the making. What is the significance of this volume?
The book reminds us that the half million Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto were not faceless, anonymous victims. They were people. They were still part of a community. In the ghetto there were poets, writers, and composers who kept working despite everything. The book is particularly good at providing gripping, personal vignettes of individuals who are totally forgotten today: Josima, the piano prodigy; Yosef Kirman, the poet; Menakehm Linder, the economist and Yiddishist; Roza Simchowicz, the devoted and selfless teacher; Basha Berman, who worked so hard to provide books for children in the ghetto to read; and many more.
You were born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany in 1946 before emigrating to the United States at three years old. You have dedicated your life’s work to the Holocaust and Polish Jewry. There seems to be a deep connection between your early childhood and your scholarship. Can you say more about that?
For the first part of my career I tried to avoid dealing with the Holocaust. I wrote about Russian history, and most of what I wrote had little connection to Jews. I thought then that I should not deal with the Holocaust because the subject was too close and too raw. However, after my parents died, I realized that I needed to write about the subject. What bothered me was that so much of the writing about the Holocaust focused on the perpetrators. Most scholars outside of Israel did not have Yiddish or Hebrew, so they could only write about the Jewish victims as an undifferentiated mass rather than as individuals. There was also very little about political and cultural life in the ghettos. So in the 1990s I began to gravitate toward this subject and started to do research on Emanuel Ringelblum.
In 2007, you published Who Will Write Our History?, about the clandestine group Oyneg Shabbes (Joy of the Sabbath) and its leader Emmanuel Ringleblum, whose mission was to document the fate of Polish Jewry for posterity. The book was made into a film in 2018. Rokhl Auerbach is featured in both. How is Warsaw Testament different from these earlier works?
A major difference is that Auerbach survived the war. She had information that Ringelblum did not have. She also wrote extensively about individuals and topics that were only marginally discussed by Ringelblum.
As a historian of Polish Jewry and the Holocaust, much of your work has revolved around the secret documents that were buried in 1942 and uncovered after the war. How do you see the art of preservation today in light of social media and other technological advances? Has the gravity of wartime writings changed? Do you see media such as live streaming as a form of documentation that can tell victims’ stories?
Unfortunately I am a technological Neanderthal and do very little with social media. That said, I understand that now and in the future it will have a much bigger role to play than books. Handled in the right way, technology has a lot of potential.
In 1961, Rokhl Auerbach was invited to testify at the Eichmann trial. She did so by using victims’ testimony from Jewish historical sources rather than Polish or German archival sources. Why did her contributions go largely unnoticed at the time? Are they better appreciated today?
Her testimony went unnoticed for a few reasons. First, she testified immediately after two major heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Auerbach’s stories about soup kitchens and schools seemed dull in comparison. Second, Auerbach insisted on testifying in Hebrew, a language that she had not mastered. Third, the judge gave her much less time than she thought she would have. It’s a sad commentary that the video of her testimony went missing and no one has been able to find it.
While no full-length biography of Auerbach yet exists, you can read more about her life in the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe and in the Jewish Women’s Archive.
One of the best background sources on Auerbach is the introduction to Warsaw Testament, by translator Samuel Kassow. We encourage you to read that, and you can also watch Kassow’s 2024 Melinda Rosenblatt lecture at the Yiddish Book Center for more of that material.
Auerbach wrote a number of books in Yiddish in addition to Warsaw Testament. They are available from our Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library.
Read Auerbach’s work in our Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library
One of those books, Oyf di felder fun treblinke (On the Fields of Treblinka), pictured above and left, is also available as an audiobook, which you can listen to here.
Aside from Warsaw Testament, relatively little of Auerbach’s writing has been translated into English. One exception is her short work Yizkor, 1943. Here you can access a teaching resource kit, which includes a link to a translation.
Learn more about “Yizkor, 1943”
Although we encourage you to purchase and read Warsaw Testament in its entirety, one chapter of the book was previously translated and published in our 2017 Pakn Treger translation issue, which you can read online.
Read “The Librarians,” by Rokhl Auerbach, translated by Seymour Levitan
Since publication, Warsaw Testament has received a number of insightful reviews in prominent media outlets, which you can access below.
“Writing Out of Annihilation,” by Ruth Franklin for the New York Review of Books
“Warsaw Testament Review: Memoirs of a Survivor,” by Benjamin Balint for the Wall Street Journal
“Transmitting the facts,” by Mark Glanville for the Times Literary Supplement
Join us for this Book Talk
Join us on Thursday, January 23 at 7:00 p.m. ET for a virtual book talk with translator Samuel Kassow.