JULY 25 • 2024 | 39

 

THE FOLKLORIST
The folklorist Shmuel 
Lehman traveled around 
Eastern Europe collecting 
enormous amounts of infor-
mation about everyday life 
in different Jewish commu-
nities. He learned about 
recipes and jokes, songs 
and religious observances, 
relations with non-Jews and 
their relations with Jews, the 
religious leaders and the 
apostates, the slang of the 
Jewish underworld and the 
gangsters’ system of justice. 
Lehman had a method 
for getting informants to 
“retrieve the passive knowl-
edge lodged somewhere 
deep in their memories.” 
He would tell them the 
funny words that people in 
some other area used. That 
brought people “to recall 
similar terms from their pasts, 
terms that had been long 
buried in their subconscious 
minds.” 
Years later, in Israel, 
Auerbach worked at Yad 
Vashem, training staff mem-
bers to interview Holocaust 
survivors. Auerbach advocat-
ed for using similar methods. 
She resisted the plan to use 
scripted questionnaires, 
rather she encouraged inter-
viewers to let survivors talk 
in whatever direction they 
chose. 
Auerbach called Lehman 
one of the lucky ones. As 
he was dying peacefully in 
his own bed, Lehman sum-
moned Auerbach to visit 
him. He had a surprise for 
her: His student read from 
index cards a long series of 
observations that Auerbach 
had made about what the 
Jews from Lvov had to say 
about dumplings (kreplach 
or blintzes). In this gesture, 
Auerbach understood, 

Lehman wanted to “show me 
how valuable I had been as 
an informant.” 
After Lehman died, his 
family held on to his archive 
of index cards about Jewish 
life in all the communities of 
Eastern Europe. That invalu-
able collection did not make 
it into Ringelblum’s archives, 
and so, like Lehman’s wife 
and son, did not survive. 

A HATMAKER AND 
SOME YOUNG GIRLS
As Auerbach’s soup kitch-
en grew, Halina Gelblum 
an older woman who had 
worked as a hatmaker, orga-
nized the office and became 
the hostess. She organized 
an office space and con-
jured up aprons for the 
kitchen workers. Auerbach 
recalls that Miss Halina 
“was unpretentious, with-
out guile, unflappable and 
blessed with a real empathy 
for human suffering. It was 
largely because of her that I, 
along with my co-workers in 
the kitchen, found the inner 
strength to bear the unre-
lenting burden of a difficult 
job and a desperate struggle 
against a frightful reality … no 
end of human tragedies … 
and our inadequate ability to 
really help.”
Dora, Stella, Dina, Khava, 
Genya and Henie were the 
young girls who helped in 
the kitchen. “In the morn-
ings and after meals, they 
peeled potatoes, cleaned up, 
scraped vegetables, swept 
the floor and washed dish-
es. At lunch time, they put 
on white aprons, triangular 
white kerchiefs and served 
bowls of soup.” 
Henie, the youngest, only 
16, “would take on the tough-
est jobs. She could scrub the 
floor and hoist large sacks 

person would die, and so would everyone who knew the person 
or cared about the person. Writings would not survive. Nothing 
would testify that the person had ever lived. Auerbach, with a 
short story writer’s focus, counteracts that total extermination. 
She takes on the holy task of honoring the memory of each 
person. 

PRESERVING HER LITTLE WORLD
Ignacy Schiper, one of Ringelblum’s teachers, observed, “What 
we know about murdered peoples is usually what their killers 
choose to say about them.” 
Auerbach devoted her efforts to preserving what she could 
about each destroyed “little world.” She wanted to “add a few rays 
of light shining on a few faces from the anonymous multitudes of 
the murdered.” 
Running a soup kitchen presented difficult administrative 
problems. In the Ghetto, the kitchen never had enough food 
to preserve the lives of its “customers.” By design, the German 
rulers did not make enough food available, as they wanted the 
Jews to die. Food smuggled in from other sources helped, but 
the problem remained. A strictly equal distribution of the food 
would seem fair but would not save lives for long. Auerbach 
wrote that people who could not get another meal each day were 
“swelling up from hunger and perishing.” 
Exceptions, extra provisions, had to become possible for the 
kitchen workers because “we couldn’t expect the people who 
ladled out the food to go hungry themselves.” Could extra 
provisions be provided for artists, writers, scholars? Could any 
food be provided for the “customers” who did not technically 
qualify? People who could eat another meal, in addition to what 
the soup kitchen provided, could survive for some time. 

Characters You’ll Meet
In Auerbach’s Book

continued on page 40
continued on page 40

WIKIMEDIA

Jewish refugees waiting 
in a soup line at a 
shelter at 33 Nalewki St.

RIGHT: Three 
of the nine 
metal boxes 
and two milk 
cans that 
contained the 
Ringelblum 
Archive

YAD VASHEM