Warsaw Testament

by Rokhl Auerbach, Samuel Kassow (Translator)

Overview

Born in Lanowitz, a small village in rural Podolia, Rokhl Auerbach was a journalist, literary critic, memoirist, and a member of the Warsaw Yiddish literary community before the Holocaust. 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 and later to join his top-secret ghetto archive, the Oyneg Shabes. One of only three surviving members of the archive project, Auerbach's wartime and postwar writings became a crucial source of information for historians of both prewar Jewish Warsaw and the Warsaw Ghetto. After immigrating to Israel in 1950, she founded the witness testimony division at Yad Vashem and played a key role in the development of Holocaust remembrance. Her memoir Warsaw Testament, based on her wartime writings, paints a vivid portrait of the city's prewar Yiddish literary and artistic community and of its destruction at the hands of the Nazis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798989452408
Publisher:	White Goat Press
Publication date:	07/02/2024
Sold by:	INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	423
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Rokhl Auerbach (1899– 1976) was born in a small Podolian village in the Habsburg Empire and received her higher education in Lwow, where she studied psychology. A fervent supporter of Yiddish culture, Auerbach wrote for the Yiddish- and Polish-language Jewish press in both Lwow and, after 1932, in Warsaw. In the Warsaw Ghetto she ran a soup kitchen and began to write for Emanuel Ringelblum's secret archive. After she left the ghetto in 1943 she survived using forged Polish papers, becoming a courier for the Jewish underground and writing the first installment of her memoirs. One of only three survivors of the Ringelblum archive collective, Auerbach worked as a Holocaust researcher and journalist in postwar Poland until her emigration to Israel in 1950. Auerbach founded the witness testimony department at Yad Vashem and played an important role in the preparation of the Eichmann trial. She died in 1976.

Editorial Reviews

2024 National Jewish Book Award Winner

"Throughout these 'testaments'—many of them vignettes devoted to a person or a place—Auerbach foregrounds the fates of others...The anecdotes Auerbach chooses to recount are quietly illuminating."—New York Review of Books

"'Warsaw Testament,' translated from the Yiddish by Samuel Kassow, presents wartime observations with reflections recorded at a remove of three decades. The result is documentary lucidity with literary flair; a historian’s fidelity with a survivor’s vigilance." — The Wall Street Journal
"Fictionalized accounts of the Holocaust…distort its reality. It is imperative that accurate, unadorned descriptions such as those collected in Warsaw Testament are made as widely available as possible." — The Times Literary Supplement Review

"A poignant testament to the endurance and character of the Jewish community during one of history’s darkest times." — Kirkus Reviews

"Divided into chapters that depict personalities and aspects of the ghetto, 'Warsaw Testament' illustrates the community’s remarkable cultural output against the backdrop of widespread starvation and mass violence." — The Times of Israel

"Auerbach, with a short story writer’s focus, counteracts that total extermination [of a person’s life]. She takes on the holy task of honoring the memory of each person." — Detroit Jewish News

"Throughout these 'testaments'—many of them vignettes devoted to a person or a place—Auerbach foregrounds the fates of others...The anecdotes Auerbach chooses to recount are quietly illuminating."—New York Review of Books

From the Publisher