Warsaw Testament by Rokhl Auerbach
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Book Talk
Co-sponsored by the Gross Family Center for the Study of Antisemitism and the Holocaust In Person:Admission: Free Zoom Livestream:Admission: Free |
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.
Join us for a lecture by historian Samuel Kassow 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.
Buy Warsaw Testament, translated by Samuel Kassow.
Buy Who Will Write Our History?: Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the Speaker
Samuel Kassow, Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, holds a PhD from Princeton University and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research. From 2006 until 2013, he was the lead historian for two galleries of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, which opened in 2014. Professor Kassow is the author of Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum and the Secret Ghetto Archive (Indiana University Press, 2007), which received the Orbis Prize of the AAASS; was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award; and has been translated into eight languages. A child of Holocaust survivors, Professor Kassow was born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany.