Writing Out of Annihilation

On September 18, 1946, ten tin boxes were discovered underneath the rubble of what had been the Warsaw Ghetto. They contained an extraordinary artifact of the Holocaust: a major portion of a grassroots archive documenting the persecution of Warsaw’s Jews. Led by the historian Emanuel Ringelblum, a group of sixty archivists and chroniclers in the ghetto—many of them amateurs—had preserved evidence of the Nazi occupation: reports on the activities of the Jewish police, minutes of meetings held by community groups, song lyrics, tickets for the ghetto trolley, armbands and badges showing the Star of David, and many other items. They had also made their own notes, composing accounts and testimonies as the atrocities unfolded.

Ringelblum, who began to keep a diary on the day the Nazis invaded Poland, understood that the Jews of Warsaw had to write their own history. Before the war he had been a history teacher and an organizer for the Joint Distribution Committee, a Jewish relief organization. After the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, he became one of the leaders of the Aleynhilf, a Jewish mutual aid organization that established soup kitchens, hospitals, shelters, and other community service centers. He used this network to organize a team of “collectors” who met on Friday evenings or Saturdays, using the code name Oyneg Shabes, a Yiddish-inflected Hebrew phrase meaning “Joy of the Sabbath.”

The group buried their first batch of documents—stored in those ten tin boxes—in July 1942, as the Nazis began deporting Warsaw’s Jews to Treblinka, the closest extermination camp. In April 1943 Jewish insurgent groups in the ghetto staged the resistance now known as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, during which around 7,000 Jews were killed, as many as 20,000 went into hiding, and those who remained in the ghetto—around 50,000—were deported to extermination camps. Ringelblum survived the massacre and went underground, hiding in a bunker with more than thirty others. There he continued to chronicle the destruction, writing a book about Polish–Jewish relations during the war. The Nazis discovered the hideout in March 1944 and murdered everyone inside, including Ringelblum, his wife, and their twelve-year-old son.

Only three members of Oyneg Shabes survived the war. One of them was a journalist and translator named Rokhl (also known as Rachel) Auerbach, whom Ringelblum recruited in 1941 to document her work at a ghetto soup kitchen. After the ghetto was liquidated, Ringelblum arranged for her to live on the Aryan side of the city under a false Polish identity, where she could continue her work for Oyneg Shabes. During the day she worked for a paper-bag manufacturer. At night she continued to write in secret, recording her memories of people she had known in the ghetto: the original draft of her Warsaw Testament, first published in a revised version in Yiddish in 1974 and now translated into English in its entirety for the first time by the historian Samuel Kassow. In 1944, as the Soviets approached, she entrusted her papers to Polish friends, who buried them at the Warsaw Zoo.

Auerbach was able to dig up her manuscript, undamaged, as soon as the war ended. But the fate of the Oyneg Shabes archive obsessed her. All that remained of her beloved community of Yiddish writers was in the archive, as well as her own contributions, which included a lengthy document compiling interviews in which people who had escaped from Treblinka testified to what had happened there. Auerbach made it her mission to get the archive unearthed, personally accosting Warsaw’s Jewish leaders to insist that they do everything necessary to find it. At a ceremony in April 1946 to commemorate the third anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Auerbach delivered an emotional plea. “There is a national treasure under the ruins,” she told those assembled. “Even if there are five stories of ruins, we must find the archive.” The following September she watched as the first box was finally opened. “I had better luck saving documents than saving people,” she later remarked mordantly.

Kassow, the author of a magisterial account of the Oyneg Shabes archive titled Who Will Write Our History? (2007), argues that the group was unusual not only because of its emphasis on gathering contemporaneous testimony but also because of its focus on ordinary people rather than on the Nazis or the ghetto leadership. Auerbach’s approach in Warsaw Testament, though atypical for a Holocaust memoir, is emblematic of the group’s philosophy. Throughout these “testaments”—many of them vignettes devoted to a person or a place—Auerbach foregrounds the fates of others rather than her own experience. Though she surely starved alongside those she served at the soup kitchen, she doesn’t mention her own suffering. Nor does she discuss her personal life, though the war forced her longtime partner, the Yiddish poet Itsik Manger, to return to his native Romania in 1938. They did not meet again until 1946.

Auerbach edited her chronicle before publication, but the book is discursive and occasionally repetitive, with a somewhat undefined structure. The English volume also incorporates selections from The Last Journey, another manuscript of Auerbach’s published posthumously, “adding to the hybridity and collage-like nature of the text,” as an editor’s note puts it. Because Auerbach gives relatively few details about the Nazi persecution, readers will need to already have a sense of what happened to Warsaw’s Jews: first their confinement to the ghetto, where they were systematically starved, then their extermination en masse at Treblinka in the “Great Deportation” of July and August 1942. But by writing about the people she knew—primarily other members of Jewish Warsaw’s intellectual community—Auerbach memorializes an entire lost world.

Auerbach was born in 1899 in the borderland region that now straddles eastern Poland and western Ukraine, which was then known as Galicia. She studied at Lwów (now Lviv) University and became active in Jewish cultural and political organizations. Galician Jews were likely to speak Polish or Ukrainian as well as Yiddish. The question of which language Jewish intellectuals chose to write in was at once practical, political, and existential, but “never neutral,” the scholar David Roskies writes in a discussion of the Oyneg Shabes archive in his book Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (1984). Polish Jews might write in Yiddish, Hebrew, or Polish, “depending on the future envisaged.”

Auerbach identified strongly with a movement called Yiddishism, the supporters of which placed Yiddish language and culture at the center of contemporary Jewish identity. Many Yiddishists looked down on those who chose Polish as their literary language, arguing that Jewish writers who wrote in non-Jewish languages were necessarily limited to certain topics and images and that “only in a Jewish language could the artist be truly free,” the scholar Karolina Szymaniak writes in a biographical essay about Auerbach.^* At one point Auerbach tried unsuccessfully to persuade Bruno Schulz, who later became internationally known for his short stories, to write in Yiddish rather than Polish. She also cofounded a literary journal that promoted Yiddish culture, including the writings of women, to counter assimilation.

As the Nazis besieged Warsaw in the fall of 1939, Ringelblum, acting in his capacity as a manager of the Aleynhilf, resolved to find work for as many members of Warsaw’s intelligentsia as he could, trying to “rescue the human resources,” as Auerbach later wrote. She had moved to the capital in 1932, taking classes in psychology at Warsaw University and working as a translator and journalist in both Yiddish and Polish. After the invasion she planned to flee east, back to Galicia. Ringelblum asked her to stay and organize a soup kitchen. In an effort to appeal to her as someone deeply invested in Jewish culture and community, he told her, “Not everybody has the right to run away.”

Starting out with just a box of prunes, a sack of rice, and some dried fish, Auerbach managed to operate the kitchen until the ghetto was liquidated. In her essay “The Story of a Kitchen,” she observed that her role in the kitchen positioned her “at the epicenter of Jewish troubles, in the front lines of the battle against hunger, as close as one could get to the suffering of the Jewish masses.” Through her careful selection of details, a story emerges: the destruction of a community by starvation.

Auerbach’s method is to record facts but not to interpret them. Though at one point she calls for “a new Goya to come and draw the worst sufferings of this new ‘Jewish War’ that the Crazy Man is waging against the Jewish children of the sealed city,” she indulges only rarely in metaphor or other literary devices. But her dispassionate, utilitarian reports of debates over how to maximize the food provided by the Nazis—“of the worst quality and often half rotten”—offer a glimpse of the progress of the war from a crucial angle.

The anecdotes Auerbach chooses to recount are quietly illuminating. Just before Passover 1940, the manager of a kitchen serving religious Jews, a man with a blond beard and blue eyes, tries to persuade her not to cook and serve legumes, which are forbidden to observant Ashkenazi Jews during the holiday; whatever nutritional value the legumes might provide would be outweighed by the harm done to the Jews’ health by the “inner turmoil” of violating the law. A year later, Auerbach writes, “there were no longer any discussions about legumes. Nor was there any sign of the man with the blond beard.” On another occasion she notices a group of children, “strangely quiet,” hiding in a corner of the kitchen where there had been a basket of cabbage leaves: “Like a bunch of young rabbits…they packed their little bellies with a little bit of wormy, filthy vitamins.”

At first Auerbach is nearly paralyzed by the futility of her efforts. Paradoxically, as she quickly realizes, the only people who truly benefit from the food she serves are those who have access to food elsewhere and whose bodies are thus still healthy enough to digest it. But for many of the clientele, what she gives them is their only meal of the day, and it is not enough to keep them alive. Once they have begun to show symptoms of starvation, they cannot be saved.

Later, however, Auerbach recognizes that even if the food it provides is insufficient, the soup kitchen performs a second function as a community center. During the interwar period Warsaw had been a hub of Yiddish culture, with six Yiddish newspapers as well as other journals, two full-time Yiddish theaters, and artists and musicians of all kinds. What the Nazis perpetrated there was not just a genocide of the Jewish people but also a “cultural genocide,” as Kassow puts it, exterminating the artistic life and language of the community. In Warsaw Testament Auerbach memorializes the soup kitchen’s clientele, many of whom had been known to her for years as members of Warsaw’s Yiddish cultural community: the poets Kalman Lis and Yosef Kirman, the novelist Yoshue Perle, the actress Miriam Orleska, the Plato translator Shiye Broyde, the choir director Yankev Glatshteyn—once-famous figures who are now obscure.

Auerbach can sketch a character in just a few words, so those whose names go unrecorded are nonetheless memorable. One client of the soup kitchen invariably introduces himself as “Adolf as in Hitler.” A pair of sons can’t mention their father without adding, “May he live to 120.” A family of three sisters is notable for the shining aluminum pot, rescued from their former home, in which they collect the daily soup. First one sister comes to get soup for all three, until she becomes too sick. The second sister then replaces her, and finally the third replaces the second, carrying the same pot, still scrubbed and shining. “That pot,” Auerbach writes, “told volumes about a way of life, about a tidy home, about the dignified decline of yet one more Jewish family.”

The staff of the kitchen are not forgotten either. Halina finds aprons that Auerbach likes so much she refuses to take them off. The cook Gutsche, who names her favorite pot “Maciusz,” talks to the soup: “Nu, start cooking, come to a boil, you rascal!” Later Auerbach reproaches herself for once having reprimanded Gutsche for stealing a little bag of beans and vegetables and wishes she had been more forgiving: “How blind we were then, how stupid—as we stood on the brink of death.”

“No one/bears witness for the/witness,” the poet Paul Celan wrote. Perhaps Auerbach’s most unusual contribution is the memorials she wrote for the zamlers—those, like her, who collected information. Among them is the folklorist Shmuel Lehman, who died of cancer in the ghetto in 1941. Before World War I, Lehman collected stories and songs in different regions of Poland, interviewing hundreds of people in fifty towns; after the war he published a study of Jewish wartime folklore. At the outbreak of World War II, he immediately set out to record puns, jokes, and other expressions demonstrating the Jewish reaction to Hitler as well as the Polish response to the fate of the Jews. Learning of Lehman’s illness, Ringelblum sent a secretary to help him type up his writings, but to Auerbach’s “deep pain and bereavement,” his archive was nonetheless lost.

This uncharacteristic moment of emotion in Auerbach’s text speaks to the powerful legacy of the Oyneg Shabes archive—and to her passionate drive to see that archive unearthed. Nearly three million Polish Jews were murdered by the Nazis, some 350,000 from Warsaw alone. The archive cannot compensate for the loss of their lives. But how much more tragic it would have been to lose both the people and the record of their existence. The archive allows their names and stories to live on in their absence.

The archive also provided a daily reason to live for those who might otherwise have lost their motivation. Auerbach remarks that she had tried to write about the Nazi persecution in September 1939 but stopped: “I couldn’t write just for myself.” (She also speaks for writers everywhere in confessing the difficulty of following through: “It’s easy to get excited about an assignment. Finishing it is harder.”) By charging her and others to write what they saw, Ringelblum created a movement that was not only literary but existential. “In a time of dreariness, bloodshed, and hunger, the writer suddenly realized that his talents were needed; that somebody was eager to read what he wrote; that he had the chance to analyze and describe the tragic events that tormented his soul,” Auerbach writes. “He saw that he could reach out to a future that he might never live to see.” The male pronoun notwithstanding, Auerbach is undoubtedly speaking of herself.

Of her own survival, Auerbach comments that she had “more luck than brains.” On the Aryan side of the city, she shared an apartment with Germans and Poles and worked in “nightly writing séances” from midnight to 5:00 AM, hiding her pages underneath food in a drawer. At one point the landlady’s German maid, spying on Auerbach through the keyhole, discovered that she was writing, but another tenant alerted her in time for her to hide her manuscripts. “Books have their own fates,” she writes.

Auerbach’s working title for her manuscript was “Together with the People: A Tragic Chronicle of the Murder of Jewish Writers and Artists in Warsaw.” She initially felt a “sacred obligation” to recount the fates of the members of the intellectual community she had loved:

Who died earlier and who later; who was killed by a bullet and who was struck down in an epidemic; who perished in the flames of the burning ghetto; who died in Treblinka, Chełmno, or simply on the familiar streets of his native city.

Underscoring the tone of lament, Auerbach’s cadences in these lines mimic the rhythm of an important prayer recited by Jews on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the High Holidays.

But as she continued to write, Auerbach realized that what was important about these figures was not their tragic deaths but the passion with which they embraced their work up to the end. Their “cultural activism,” she argued, was an equal partner to the armed resistance movement that staged the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: “an affirmation of life in the face of death and a part of our struggle for human dignity, beauty, wisdom, strength, and spirit.”

After the war Auerbach saw the “sole reason” for her survival as “bearing witness to the crime” of the Holocaust. Manger hoped to resume their relationship, but she told him that she no longer had room for anything in her life other than her mission to carry on Ringelblum’s legacy. She butted heads with some in the community of survivors in Warsaw, accusing the more assimilated among them (such as Władysław Szpilman, whose 1946 memoir The Pianist was later made into a film by Roman Polanski) of what Kassow calls the “othering” of Yiddish-speaking Polish Jews. Regardless of how extraordinary they were, the exploits of the ghetto fighters and other heroes of the war shouldn’t overshadow the memory of the vast majority of ordinary people, she argued.

Auerbach hoped that postwar Poland, nearly free of Jews, would also be free of antisemitism. Alas, this was not the case. As Stalinization progressed, she could no longer carry out the work that she was devoted to. “The only thing we can do is to say goodbye…. Those who are after those poor Jewish people won’t withdraw the hand that holds the murder weapon,” she wrote. Her choice to immigrate in 1950 to Israel, where Yiddish language and culture were largely marginalized in favor of Hebrew, was not an obvious one. Still, she wrote to a friend shortly afterward that “never in my life have I experienced so strongly the feeling of being in the right place.”

Auerbach was appointed to head the witness testimony department at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum and research institute, in 1954. She brought Ringelblum’s methodology with her, emphasizing the historical value of collecting and recording survivors’ testimony at a time when academic historians were inclined to discount it as an unreliable source. Interviewing survivors, she used a technique she learned from the folklorist Lehman to awaken passive memories. Instead of questioning subjects immediately, he would loosen them up by reminding them of funny and creative regional expressions. When the sources heard these idioms, “they began to recall similar terms from their pasts, terms that had been long buried in their subconscious minds,” she explained. Her background in psychology was also clearly valuable in helping fellow survivors process traumatic memories:

Sometimes, all of a sudden, there’s a moment when a spark of shared feeling or interest brings two people together. And that’s when the memories of events suffered long ago spring to the surface.

Auerbach fought tenaciously against those who did not support her philosophy of honoring the survivors. In 1958 she published an attack on the Yad Vashem leadership for taking a more academic approach to the study of the Holocaust and cutting off ties with survivors. In response, Ben-Zion Dinur, then the president of Yad Vashem, tried and failed to remove her from her position, then resigned from the institute himself.

She also emphasized the importance of including survivor testimony in the trial of Adolf Eichmann. During the war years, as she collected testimony from Treblinka survivors, she had already begun to envision the ultimate indictment of Nazi perpetrators and realized how important documentation of their crimes would be in a tribunal. In 1960, as Israeli prosecutors prepared to bring Eichmann to trial in Jerusalem, they initially planned to focus only on events or actions to which he could directly be linked. Auerbach personally pressed the chief prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, to paint a picture of Eichmann’s crimes that would focus on the system of mass murder as a whole and the human pain it generated, granting him access to Yad Vashem’s huge collection of survivor statements and helping him conceptualize the historical framework for Eichmann’s crimes that ultimately guided the prosecution.

Auerbach was able to complete the manuscript of Warsaw Testament only when she was once again facing death: she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1972. “About thirty-one years have passed since I woke up early one morning, lit a lamp, and after lowering the blackout shades over the one window in the tiny room…began to write about our kitchen,” she writes. She explains that it took her a long time to revise and correct the manuscript, which required her to conduct further research, fact-checking her own reminiscences against the ghetto writings of others and interviewing additional survivors. She also notes, as if it were incidental, a major change she made: she rewrote the original text, nearly all of which was in Polish, in Yiddish.

Why did Auerbach initially compose her Warsaw Testament, a memorial to a community of Yiddish speakers that was disappearing before her eyes, in a language that she believed was incapable of fully expressing the Jewish experience? Kassow simply repeats Auerbach’s explanation: she had started making notes about the ghetto in a diary that she had begun in Polish before the war. Szymaniak, skeptical of this reasoning, argues instead that Auerbach’s writing uses insights from her university studies in psychology, a subject with vocabulary that was more familiar to her in Polish, noting that bilingual writers often find one language more congenial to certain subjects. As Auerbach once wrote, explaining why she refused to denigrate Polish culture, it was “a source from which we [Jewish intellectuals] drew…and you don’t spit in the well from which you drink.”

In her later writing, Auerbach describes herself as “no more than a pale shadow” of the young woman who had first responded to Ringelblum’s call. Still, she was driven by the same imperative: that Jews must write their own history. In Auerbach’s adopted land, the choice of language was just as fraught—politically, culturally, historically—as it had been for Polish Jews before the war. Begun in Polish, rewritten in Yiddish, and initially published in a Hebrew-speaking Jewish nation, her testimony embodies the cultural politics that it describes.

In 1974 the community of Yiddish speakers who embraced Auerbach’s book was already in decline—but the community of Polish speakers devoted to the study of the Holocaust was even smaller. If the choice of language for Polish Jews was dependent on the way they imagined their future, Auerbach’s decision to rewrite her manuscript in Yiddish is profoundly antiassimilationist: it asserts that her legacy rests with her own people, no matter how few they might be. In this light, the appearance of Auerbach’s major work in English—a future that she may not have imagined—is a natural continuation of the Oyneg Shabes project. Having outlived its original readers, her book can now go in search of a new audience.