Rokhl Auerbach’s Warsaw Testament
The Annual Abram Matlofsky Memorial Program, funded by the Karma Foundation
Cosponsored by the Yiddish Book Center
Please join us for a dessert reception following the lecture.
Until recently, very few people knew about Rokhl Auerbach, a remarkable woman who survived the Holocaust and then dedicated her life to preserving the memories of its victims. Join us for a discussion with renowned scholar Samuel D. Kassow (Trinity College) about Auerbach’s memoir Warsaw Testament, which paints a vivid portrait of the city’s prewar Yiddish literary and artistic community and of its destruction at the hands of the Nazis. Professor Kassow’s new translation of the work received a National Jewish Book Award in the category of Holocaust Memoir.
Born in 1899 in a small village in rural Podolia (in present-day Ukraine), Rokhl Auerbach was a journalist, literary critic, memoirist, and member of the Warsaw Yiddish literary community in the interwar years in independent Poland. 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.
Samuel D. Kassow, the Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, is a leading historian of Polish Jewry and the Holocaust. He was on the team of scholars that planned the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and was also among a select group of historians chosen by Yad Vashem to write a one-volume history of the Holocaust in Poland. Kassow’s publications include a translation of Rokhl Auerbach’s Warsaw Testament (White Goat Press, 2024), winner of a National Jewish Book Award for Holocaust Memoir, and Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Indiana University Press, 2007), which was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award and translated into eight languages. Along with David G. Roskies, Kassow edited volume 9 of the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization Series, Catastrophe and Rebirth, 1939–1973 (Yale University Press, 2020). A child of Holocaust survivors, Kassow spent his earliest years in a displaced-persons camp in Germany.