38 | AUGUST 1 • 2024 
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ARTS&LIFE
BOOKS

A

s conditions in Warsaw in 
1939 became worse, people 
realized they needed to 
escape, if that was still possible. Rokhl 
Auerbach had begun preparing to 
move back to her native Lvov (now 
Lviv, Ukraine) when the historian 
Emanuel Ringelblum asked to her to 
meet him. Ringelblum challenged her 
to stay. If capable people all leave, he 
argued, who will take care of those 
who cannot? “We could not simply 
abandon these people.” 
He recruited her to manage a soup 
kitchen. Ringelblum had become a 
full-time community organizer, a 
leader of Aleynhilf (Self-Help), which 
operated refugee centers, day care 
centers, libraries, an amazing array 
of cultural institutions and dozens of 
soup kitchens. Ringelblum had judged 
Auerbach’s skills accurately; she soon 
oversaw a staff serving one meal a day 
to more than 2,000 Jews. 
Ringelblum had another project: 
collecting a written record of 
everything about life in the Warsaw 
Ghetto. At their Friday night meetings, 
somewhat ironically named Oyneg 
Shabbes (The Pleasure of Shabbat), the 
writers planned to record everything 
about life in the Ghetto: theater 
troops, musical ensembles, religious 
studies groups, everything had to go 
into the record. Medical professionals 
wrote dispassionately about the effects 
of gradual starvation on the human 
body. 
In 1941, Oyneg Shabbes conducted 
an essay contest. Ringelblum asked 
Auerbach to write about the soup 
kitchen. He had chosen well again. 
Her essay focused on individuals she 
met at the kitchen; she brilliantly 
preserved the specific details in her 
portraits of each one. 
Under normal conditions, when 
a person dies, besides official 
documents that leave an impersonal 
record of a life, the family and friends 
cherish personal memories; physical 
objects also attest to the person’s 
having lived. Under the abnormal 
conditions of the Warsaw Ghetto, the 

 Honoring 
Their Memories

Hidden manuscripts become Warsaw 
Testament, a book that spotlights 
individuals from the Warsaw Ghetto. 

LOUIS FINKELMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER

