REVIEW: The Jewish Revolt
Rachel Auerbach, The Jewish Revolt: A Warsaw Ghetto Exhibition, translated from Yiddish by Michael Wex (Toby Press), 280 pp.
A formidable figure, Rachel (Rokhl) Auerbach was a writer and journalist who worked for the Polish and Yiddish press in pre-war Poland. Emanuel Ringelblum, the chronicler-martyr of the Warsaw Ghetto, convinced her to remain in Warsaw, where she ran (and wrote about) a soup kitchen in the ghetto. Auerbach then became a member of the Oyneg Shabbos archival group, heroically documenting the Jewish experience under Nazi oppression. Of the 60 members of Oyneg Shabbos, 57 were killed in the Holocaust; only 3 survived the war: Hersh Wasser, his wife Bluma, and Auerbach.
Now, a half-century after her passing, Rachel Auerbach is having another moment in history.
She appeared prominently in Prof. Samuel D. Kassow’s biography of Ringleblum, Who Will Write Our History? (Indiana University Press, 2007), as well as in the documentary of the same title (2019). In the past year alone, her memoir Warsaw Testament (White Goat Press, translated by Kassow) was published, and now The Jewish Revolt: A Warsaw Ghetto Exhibition arrives in a translation from Yiddish.
After the war, Auerbach played a prominent role in the discovery of the now-famous tin boxes and metal milk-cans that housed the tens of thousands of documents that recorded the Jewish experience in the ghetto. These are now prominently displayed at Yad Vashem and at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
In the wake of the Holocaust Auerbach was a member of the Polish State Committee fact-finding mission that investigated the crimes at Treblinka, where most of the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto were murdered. She was a pioneer in creating guidelines for recording survivor testimony in Poland in the aftermath of the war. With the rise of communism in Poland, Auerbach made Aliyah in 1950, establishing the department of survivor testimony at Yad Vashem, which she ran until her retirement in 1968. She was influential in insisting that survivor testimony be the backbone of the prosecution of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem; she herself testified at the trial. Auerbach died in Israel in 1976.
This book stands out for its eloquence and pathos—even for someone who consumes a steady diet of Shoah reading.
I was surprised that only 70 of the volume’s 280 pages contain Auerbach’s essay about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which gives the book its title. It begins with a short foreword by British TV personality and antisemitism activist Rachel Riley—written shortly after October 7th, and reflecting her emotions at that time. It continues with a 50-odd page photographic essay of pre-war Polish (and European) Jewish life which ends with some jarring photos from the ghetto (that explains the book’s subtitle and its description as an “exhibition”). Some of these photographs will be familiar to the readers of TRADITION; others will be new.
In addition to “The Jewish Revolt,” the book also includes two other, shorter essays by Auerbach, “Yizker 1943” and “A Grave Marker,” both of which memorialize the Jews of the Ghetto.
[View the table of contents and an excerpt of The Jewish Revolt.]
There are two excellent, informative chapters by historian Antony Polonsky: one, a general biography of Auerbach, and the other on the Warsaw Ghetto revolt. A minor point: Polonsky repeats the now-debunked story of the burning of the enormous library of Yeshivas Chochmei Lublin (107). He is apparently unaware of the efforts of Piotr Nazaruk and others to collect and digitize many of the volumes that still exist in many places in Poland and around the world.
The book concludes with the disturbing reports to Berlin by S.S. General Jurgen Stroop, who was in charge of suppressing the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
Rachel Auerbach was a heroic figure and a gifted writer. Her words, in the “Jewish Revolt” as well as in her two other essays, are articulate and piercing. (“And should I forget for even a single day how I saw you, our desperate and forlorn people, consigned to extermination, may my name be forgotten.”) They are rich with emotion: a deep, bitter anger against the Germans, and inspired admiration for the ghetto fighters.
Like Emanuel Ringelblum, with whom she was close, Rachel Auerbach came from the lost world of East European Jewry, steeped in religious and Jewish cultural content. Like him and so many others of that generation, she left the religious observance of her parents. But for both of them, their frames of reference remained deeply Jewish. Just as Ringelblum wrote that perhaps he should go to mikveh every morning like a Sofer Stam, lest he make a mistake in one of the letters he is recording for posterity, Auerbach writes that the events of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising should be read each year, “like a Megillah.” She even compares the death of the ghetto fighters to the death of R. Akiva’s students in the Omer period (the revolt began on erev Pesach). She recounts the makeshift Seders held in the ghetto even during the revolt. Chronicling the horrors of life in the sewers, she writes that it included “all the curses of the Torah,” the tokheha.
When I guide groups on Jewish heritage journeys to Poland, I almost always quote her incisive, memorable words. When she first came to Warsaw in the 1920s she saw the hordes of Jews attending the dedication of the ohel marking the grave of the great Yiddish author Y.L. Peretz. After the war, and after 90% of Polish Jews had been murdered, she remarked, “There were more Jews there on that day at the Okipowa cemetery than there are alive today in Poland.”
After reading The Jewish Revolt I know I will now quote this inspiring, mission-driven woman with an even deeper feeling of kinship and admiration.
Dr. David I. Bernstein, Dean Emeritus of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies, is a veteran guide of Jewish heritage tours of Poland and throughout Europe.