Warsaw Testament

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.

"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."

Literary Nonfiction. History. Jewish Studies.