Warsaw Testament

Overview

Rokhl Auerbach 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. Upon immigrating to Israel in 1950 she founded the witness testimony division at Yad Vashem and played a foundational role in the development of Holocaust memory. Warsaw Testament, a memoir based on her wartime writings both in the ghetto and on the Aryan side of the occupied city, provides an unmatched portrait of the last days of Warsaw’s Yiddish literary and cultural community—and of Auerbach’s own struggle to survive.

Reviews

"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

Author Biography

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.