“REVENGE REVENGE remem­ber.” —Rokhl Auerbach

These words, writ­ten in haste on July 26th, 1942, voice one writer’s des­per­ate plea to future gen­er­a­tions of Jews. Trapped inside the War­saw Ghet­to, and fac­ing trans­port to Tre­blin­ka, Rokhl Auer­bach and oth­er mem­bers of a secret writer’s group called Oyneg Shabes buried their writ­ten records of the ghet­to. War­saw Tes­ta­ment, avail­able in Eng­lish for the first time thanks to Samuel Kassow’s trans­la­tion, is a col­lec­tion of Auerbach’s con­tri­bu­tions to this group. 

Auer­bach was an active mem­ber of the thriv­ing Yid­dish arts scene in War­saw before the war. When Ger­many invad­ed and trapped the city’s Jews inside the ghet­to, Auer­bach was recruit­ed to join Oyneg Shabes, an under­ground group of ad hoc archivists who raced to record every aspect of ghet­to life. Led by Emanuel Ringel­blum, the col­lec­tive rec­og­nized that their own chances of sur­vival were slim, but that they had an oppor­tu­ni­ty to make sure their sto­ries did not die with them. “[I]n a time of drea­ri­ness, blood­shed, and hunger, the writer sud­den­ly real­ized that his tal­ents are need­ed,” Auer­bach writes. ​“He saw that he could reach out to a future he might nev­er live to see.”

In addi­tion to their own con­tri­bu­tions, this group solicit­ed writ­ten tes­ti­monies and art from a wide cross-sec­tion of the ghetto’s Jews, which were even­tu­al­ly sealed in milk tins and buried. Two of three caches have been found to date that, togeth­er, house over thir­ty-five thou­sand pages of material. 

War­saw Tes­ta­ment con­tains many of Auerbach’s writ­ings from this peri­od, as well as a few post­war essays. Read­ers will be moved by her on-the-ground report­ing of dai­ly life in the War­saw Ghet­to and by her ​“uncon­trol­lable impulse,” as Auer­bach put it, to record as much as pos­si­ble for pos­ter­i­ty. One of the most fas­ci­nat­ing — and impor­tant — aspects of Auerbach’s writ­ing is her ten­den­cy to describe the peo­ple she met in the ghet­to, espe­cial­ly through her job man­ag­ing a soup kitchen. Auer­bach knew that she was writ­ing their eulo­gies, even though some were still alive at the time of writing. 

Kassow’s trans­la­tion retains the punch­i­ness of Auerbach’s prose. Even when she’s writ­ing about some­thing as seem­ing­ly mun­dane as soup, her words allow read­ers to under­stand both the life-and-death nature of every­thing that hap­pened with­in the ghet­to walls and the deep angst she felt about the anni­hi­la­tion of the Yid­dish arts. War­saw Tes­ta­ment also includes an excel­lent intro­duc­tion by Kas­sow that con­tex­tu­al­izes Auerbach’s writ­ings and Oyneg Shabes​’s mis­sion. Through this vol­ume, Auer­bach — who was one of only three Oyneg Shabes mem­bers to sur­vive the Shoah — final­ly gets her due as a wartime writer and activist, for pre­serv­ing the per­son­al nar­ra­tives of the Jews who lived and died dur­ing the Holocaust. 

War­saw Tes­ta­ment is a wel­come addi­tion to both per­son­al and aca­d­e­m­ic libraries — not just as a his­tor­i­cal rel­ic of the War­saw Ghet­to, but as an ele­gy to the Yid­dish arts scene that was so impor­tant to Auer­bach. For her and the oth­er mem­bers of Oyneg Shabes, the way to revenge was through record­ing the voic­es that Nazis tried to silence. For them, and in War­saw Tes­ta­ment, remem­ber­ing is revenge.