40 | AUGUST 1 • 2024 

on her shoulders.” Henie liked to take a little 
extra from the warehouse, but “I didn’t want to 
fire her because she was an efficient and fast 
worker, as well as a likeable and happy soul.” 
She liked jokes and pranks. Blond Henie “could 
have easily saved herself by going to a village 
and passing as a peasant girl. But they grabbed 
her at the very start.” 

A MUSICIAN AND 
A LIBRARIAN
Josima Feldshuh, Auerbach’s cousin, was a 
musical prodigy. Josima played Mozart’s “Piano 
Concerto in C Major,” her debut concert as a 
soloist, in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941, at the 
age of 11. Auerbach observed that Josima had 
all the gifts necessary to transform mere talent 
into art. “The only thing she lacked was time.” 
Basia Berman used to work as a librarian 
in the Warsaw Public Library. In the Ghetto, 
Berman operated a library for children. When 
the Germans deported a huge swath of the 
Ghetto in July 1942, Berman and her husband 
prepared to escape to the Aryan side. There, 
she became one of the most dynamic leaders 
of a network of Poles, Jews and Jews pretend-
ing to be Poles, who found places for those 
escaping from the Ghetto. 
Auerbach notes that many of the Poles in this 
network themselves had “more than a drop of 
Jewish blood.” Others included liberal mem-
bers of the Polish intelligentsia and even right-
wing Catholics who had believed in excluding 
Jews from Polish life, but not in murder. 
Basia Berman did survive and eventually 
found work as a children’s librarian in Israel. 
When she met Auerbach, after the war, she 
recalled the helpers she had trained in the chil-
dren’s library in the Warsaw Ghetto, including 
Tobche Keitel, Royzele Szwartsberg and Pola 
Blazer. “One was 13; the other two were 15.” 
Auerbach reported that “when Basia would 
mention their names after the war, her face 
would light up with a sad and somewhat cryptic 
smile. Even after their murder, she could not 
say their names without that smile, that’s how 
sweet and charming they were.” 
The standard Hebrew phrase for referring 
to the deceased, “May remembering them be 
a blessing,” applies with special force to some 
of the many unfortunate people described in 
this book because only this book gives us the 
opportunity of remembering them. 
Reading this book and remembering Rokhl 
Auerbach will bring you a blessing. 
This book will also break your heart. 

Entire families “passed through our 
kitchens and expired in front of our 
eyes,” she wrote.
Every day as manager of the kitchen, 
Auerbach could not avoid making 
impossible life-or-death decisions; 
or maybe not life-or-death because 
even the favored customers seemed 
doomed. Auerbach asked herself, 
“What is the use of all of our work if 
we can’t save even 
one person from 
hunger?” 
The Germans 
repeatedly 
reorganized the 
Ghetto, deporting 
tens of thousands 
of Jews, murdering 
others in the Ghetto, 
and weakening 
the Jewish leadership. Her friends 
were eventually unable to protect 
her position in the kitchen. In July 
of 1942, the kitchen fell under the 
control of a German industrial group, 
and Auerbach had to find other 
employment and other lodging. A 
sympathetic member of the Judenrat 
got her a post making candy and 
artificial honey. 

FIGHT FOR SURVIVAL
In March of 1943, Auerbach escaped 
to the Aryan side. Helped by a secret 
network of sympathetic Poles and Jews 
who could pass for Poles, Auerbach 

continued 
writing for 
Oyneg Shabbes. 
A typist, Elisha Landau, also working 
in secrecy, produced a copy of her 
manuscripts. Auerbach sealed the 
manuscripts in a glass jar, which the 
head zookeeper, Jan Zabinski, buried 
on the grounds of the Warsaw Zoo. 
Another of her manuscripts wound up 
buried in a field outside 
Warsaw. 
Of the more than 60 
writers who contributed 
to Oyneg Shabbes, three 
survived. Auerbach 
survived. In 1945, after 
the war, the zookeeper 
dug up her manuscripts, 
and returned them to 
her. Auerbach wrote: 
“Unfortunately, I had better luck 
saving documents than saving people.”
She brought the texts saved under 
the Warsaw Zoo to Israel, where, 
in 1974, she published a Yiddish 
compilation of her wartime writing, 
titled Varshever tsavoes (Warsaw 
Testaments), including her later 
reflections. She had not finished 
editing another Yiddish book, Baym 
letstn veg (The Last Journey), when she 
died in 1976; the book came out after 
her death. Samuel Kassow’s translation 
of Warsaw Testament includes the full 
text of the first book, with extensive 
quotations from the second. 

ARTS&LIFE
BOOKS
continued from page 39

continued from page 39

Rokhl 
Auerbach

YAD VASHEM

Rokhl Oyerbakh 
(Auerbach) speaking 
at Yad Vashem

YAD VASHEM

Details
Warsaw Testament 
by Rokhl Auerbach, 
translated by 
Samuel Kassow 
(White Goat 
Press) 

