About the Book:
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. The English translation was published in 2024 by White Goat Press, the Yiddish Book Center’s imprint, and won a 2024 National Jewish Book award.
About Author:
Samuel Kassow is Charles H. Northam Professor of History, Emeritus at Trinity College and holds a PhD from Princeton University. He has been a visiting professor at many institutions and was on the team of scholars that planned the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Among his various publications is Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Indiana, 2007), which was translated into eight languages. A child of Holocaust survivors, he spent his earliest years in a displaced-persons camp in Germany.