Warsaw Testament - Rokhl Auerbach

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Résumé :
Of the sixty people that historian Emanuel Ringelblum invited to work on his secret Warsaw Ghetto archive, the Oyneg Shabes,1 only three survived. One of them was Hersh Wasser, a historian, secretary of the archive, and one of Ringelblum's closest collaborators. Another was his wife, Bluma Wasser (n?ee Kirszenfeld), a teacher who helped catalog the archive's collections and was among the first to document the use of gas vans to murder Jews in the Chelmno death camp. Rokhl Auerbach, a writer and journalist, was the third. During the war Auerbach kept a secret diary, which she later published along with several other books describing her life in the Warsaw Ghetto and on the Aryan side of the city. Few memoirists told the story of the Warsaw ghetto with as much passion and insight as Auerbach did...

Biographie:
Rokhl Auerbach (1899- 1976) was born in a small Podolian village in the Habsburg Empire and received her higher education in Lwow, where she studied psychology. A fervent supporter of Yiddish culture, Auerbach wrote for the Yiddish- and Polish-language Jewish press in both Lwow and, after 1932, in Warsaw. In the Warsaw Ghetto she ran a soup kitchen and began to write for Emanuel Ringelblum's secret archive. After she left the ghetto in 1943 she survived using forged Polish papers, becoming a courier for the Jewish underground and writing the first installment of her memoirs. One of only three survivors of the Ringelblum archive collective, Auerbach worked as a Holocaust researcher and journalist in postwar Poland until her emigration to Israel in 1950. Auerbach founded the witness testimony department at Yad Vashem and played an important role in the preparation of the Eichmann trial. She died in 1976....

Sommaire:

Rokhl Auerbach (1899-1976) was born in a small Podolian village in the Habsburg Empire and received her higher education in Lwow, where she studied psychology. A fervent supporter of Yiddish culture, Auerbach wrote for the Yiddish- and Polish-language Jewish press in both Lwow and, after 1932, in Warsaw. In the Warsaw Ghetto she ran a soup kitchen and began to write for Emanuel Ringelblum's secret archive. After she left the ghetto in 1943 she survived using forged Polish papers, becoming a courier for the Jewish underground and writing the first installment of her memoirs. One of only three survivors of the Ringelblum archive collective, Auerbach worked as a Holocaust researcher and journalist in postwar Poland until her emigration to Israel in 1950. Auerbach founded the witness testimony department at Yad Vashem and played an important role in the preparation of the Eichmann trial. She died in 1976.