Rachel Auerbach, Yad Vashem, and Israeli Holocaust Memory

RACHEL AUERBACH (1903–76), an author and publicist of articles and reviews published in a wide range of Yiddish and Polish newspapers, was a central figure in Jewish literary circles in inter-war Poland. After the German invasion of Poland, Auerbach directed one of several soup kitchens in the Warsaw ghetto under the auspices of the Aleynhilf (Self-Help), the large network of Jewish relief organizations, and became a member of the Oneg Shabes archive established and directed by the historian Emanuel Ringelblum. Her writings for Oneg Shabes included an essay about her soup kitchen and some of its regular patrons. At the end of 1942, Ringelblum asked Auerbach to transcribe the testimony of Abraham Krzepicki, who had escaped from Treblinka, which she edited into the most extensive description of the death camp to date. She fled the ghetto in March 1943, a few weeks before the uprising, and hid on the ‘Aryan’ side for the duration of the war. She dedicated herself to aiding Jews in hiding and to writing; her essays and her famous poem ‘Yizkor, 1943’ describe both Jewish life in the ghetto and its destruction....