Rachel (Rokhl) Auerbach believed writing about the Warsaw Ghetto’s Jews was a debt she owed to the dead. Eighty years after the Nazis “liquidated” most the city’s Jews in the Holocaust, Auerbach’s harrowing memoir has been translated into English by historian Samuel Kassow.
Published on July 2, “Warsaw Testament” documents Auerbach’s struggle to survive — and keep her fellow Jews alive — during the ghetto’s two and a half years of existence. Having grown up among Poles to develop what she called a “Slavic temperament,” Auerbach was uniquely suited to document the unfolding Holocaust from multiple viewpoints.
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“She lived to make sure that people remembered,” Kassow told The Times of Israel. A professor at Trinity College, Kassow previously published on the Warsaw Ghetto’s clandestine “Oneg Shabbat” archive, a project in which Auerbach played a key role.
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. After fleeing to the Aryan part of Warsaw before the historic ghetto revolt in 1943, Auerbach continued to document the fate of what was Europe’s largest Jewish community.
“Now I realize that armed resistance and cultural activism were not distinct from one another, but two sides of the same coin: an affirmation of life in the face of death and a part of our struggle for human dignity, beauty, wisdom, strength, and spirit,” Auerbach wrote.
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From musical prodigies to celebrated Yiddish poets, Auerbach documented a poignant “flowering of Jewish genius, a bright flame just before the destruction.”
A writer by trade, Auerbach moved to Warsaw on the eve of the war and was poised to flee the city following Germany’s invasion. However, she was approached by the young historian Emanuel Ringelblum to be part of the “Jewish self-help” network in the ghetto, seen as a necessary counterweight to the German-controlled Jewish Council.
After the ghetto’s creation, Auerbach began working with Ringelblum on his secret “Oneg Shabbat” archive. Leveraging her position in a soup kitchen that fed 2,000 Jews daily, Auerbach was able to interview hundreds of Jews about their experiences before and during the war. She was particularly fond of the ghetto’s artists, many of whom saw their work as a bridge to the future.
“In a time of dreariness, bloodshed, and hunger, the writer suddenly realized that his talents were needed; that somebody was eager to read what he wrote; that he had the chance to analyze and describe the tragic events that tormented his soul. He saw that he could reach out to a future that he might never live to see,” wrote Auerbach.
According to Kassow, Jewish smugglers — most of them children — were responsible for 90% of food that entered the ghetto. But even with intense smuggling and soup kitchens like the one Auerbach ran, only a small fraction of the ghetto population received enough calories to survive for more than a few months.
“I see many things in our kitchen,” wrote Auerbach in 1941. “It’s here that you first see all the suffering of the ghetto. Even before the ghetto began the kitchen was the first and often the last stop for people who ended up on the ‘trash heap.’ It’s here that one can observe the whole process from beginning to end.”
‘To fulfill a national mission’
The ghetto’s self-help organization offered a facade for Ringelblum’s archive workers — including Auerbach — to carry out their secret task of documentation.
At its peak of activity, “Oneg Shabbat” engaged 60 Jews as researchers and writers. The group included socialists, Zionists, Bundists, and Jews of no political affiliation. Some of the archivists were prominent writers before the war, while others were unknown.
“They put aside political differences in order to fulfill a national mission,” said Kassow.
Auerbach believed her efforts to keep people alive were never enough. She and Ringelblum were determined to sustain several survivors of German concentration camps who’d reached the ghetto and given first-hand accounts. With ghetto conditions always deteriorating, however, Auerbach was typically unable to intervene effectively.
Lamenting her perceived failure to keep people alive through the soup kitchen, Auerbach wrote rhetorically, “What’s the use of all this work if we can’t save even one person from death by hunger?”
Some of “Warsaw Testament’s” most poignant sections are Auerbach’s candid portraits of personalities in the ghetto. In those sections, she offers glimpses into the lives of Jewish artists who continued to create despite imminent annihilation, including child performers she believed would have become famous had they not been murdered.
In writing about the Yiddish poet Yisroel Shtern, for example, Auerbach described the transformation of a formerly aloof intellectual into something quite different when imprisoned inside the ghetto.
“Somebody once remarked that in the ghetto Shtern the recluse, who had spent so many years alone, now revealed himself to be a different person,” wrote Auerbach. “He became more approachable, more active in social affairs. Surrounded by human suffering, by the omnipresent sense of Jewish destiny hanging in the balance, Shtern, now in his natural element, found true inspiration,” Auerbach wrote.
‘Being a woman did not help either’
During the summer of 1942, Auerbach documented the “Great Deportation” of Jews to the death camp Treblinka. The “aktion” began when Jewish Council head Adam Czerniaków was ordered to deliver 7,000 Jews daily for “resettlement.” Instead, Czerniaków took his own life to send a message about German intentions.
“I feel the need to say Yizkor [the mourning prayer] four times a day,” wrote Auerbach. “How do you say Yizkor for over half a million Jews?”
Following the Great Deportation, Auerbach documented the so-called “remnant” ghetto population in the second half of 1943. During this period, young people began to gather weapons and plan a stand against the Nazis, certain that another deportation was imminent.
Having left the ghetto a month before the historic revolt, Auerbach registered as a Pole and rented an apartment with a friend. Despite several close calls, she survived both the revolt and Warsaw’s gallant uprising against the Nazis in 1944.
Following the war, two of the archive’s three buried caches were unearthed based on information from Auerbach and two other survivors of the “Oneg Shabbat” group. Auerbach quickly became the archive’s most ardent publicist and interpreter.
After immigrating to Israel, in 1954, Auerbach was made director of Yad Vashem’s witness testimony department. Within the Holocaust memory institute in Jerusalem, her lack of political affiliation was used against Auerbach by the institution’s leadership, wrote Kassow.
“In a Jewish milieu dominated by political parties and ideological passions, Auerbach was a loner, belonging to no party and therefore lacking protectors and promoters to defend her and publicize her writings. Being a woman did not help either,” wrote Kassow.
One of Auerbach’s main points of contention with Yad Vashem’s leaders was her determination that witness testimony be prioritized over perpetrator-created documents, which were viewed as preferable by Yad Vashem’s historians.
“While there was a widespread belief that encouraging survivors to speak about the past only deepened their pain, Auerbach believed that the opposite was the case, and that delving into their experiences, especially with an interlocutor who was also a survivor, had therapeutic value,” wrote Kassow.
A few years after joining Yad Vashem, Auerbach publicly lambasted the institution for “failing in its mission.” According to Auerbach, Yad Vashem had little contact with Israel’s survivor community and was neglecting to publish their accounts.
Auerbach’s insistence on looking to survivors and their accounts was partly vindicated in 1961, when she successfully lobbied Israel’s chief prosecutor in the Eichmann trial, Gideon Hausner, to “foreground survivor testimony and to tell the wider story,” wrote Kassow. She died of breast cancer in 1976.
“She lived to make sure that people remembered,” said Kassow. “Nobody told the story of the Warsaw Ghetto with as much passion and insight as Auerbach.”
The post Wartime memoir excavates Jewish spiritual resistance in largest Holocaust ghetto appeared first on The Times of Israel.
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