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)