A writer in the Warsaw ghetto. Listen to the podcast about Rachela Auerbach

Written by: Przemysław Batorski
We invite you to listen to the third episode of the Oneg Szabat Podcast. Dr. Karolina Szymaniak (Jewish Historical Institute/University of Wrocław) tells about Rachela Auerbach, writer, journalist and social activist, associate of Emanuel Ringelblum.
auerbach_szymaniak.jpg

Rachela Auerbach. Dr. Karolina Szymaniak

 

Rachela Auerbach was one of three people from the Oneg Shabbat group who managed to survive the war. During the difficult period of the reconstruction Warsaw, when the importance of the hidden documentation of the Oneg Shabbat group was not yet realized, Auerbach contributed to the discovery of the Ringelblum Archive in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Dr. Karolina Szymaniak is a literary scholar, Yiddish scholar, and translator. Winner of the 2016 “Polityka” Historical Award for editing the writings of Rachela Auerbach from the Warsaw ghetto. Among the subjects of her research is modern Yiddish literature and the history of Polish-Jewish cultural contacts.

zupa_arg_zw.jpg [438.67 KB]
“Giving out soup”. Warsaw Ghetto, photo from the Ringelblum Archive, Central Judaic Library

Ringelblum didn’t actually want professional writers as contributors. Auerbach was a professional writer, a journalist and this was her job. (…) Auerbach was asked to write a diary. This was also a genre used by the group, the group commissioned several diaries (…) and Auerbach’s diary certainly belongs to the most powerful documents of the kind.

The monograph of the soup kitchen is a monograph of people, clients who visited the kitchen, people who she tried to save and was unable to. And she was very disappointed during the war with her achievements. She had the sense that this work helps nobody. After the war she looked at it differently.

 

Listen to the podcast on:

Spotify https://spoti.fi/3sVnEiu

Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/3dQvd5Z

Google Podcasts https://bit.ly/3u0nIiE

 

 

OS_belka.jpg [57.58 KB]

 

koret_logo.jpg [20.68 KB]

Przemysław Batorski   JHI Web Editor
< Back to list of articles

More articles from this category

gutkowski_1.jpg
31.03.2020
Eliasz Gutkowski, Oneg Shabbat's second secretary
Teacher, social and political activist, second secretary of the Ringelblum Archive, member of the Oneg Shabbat leadership. In the Warsaw Ghetto, he helped fellow Jews, despite difficulties with supporting his own wife and son. Co-edited accounts by defectors from the Chełmno nad Nerem and Sobibór extermination camps.
wide_Zrzut_ekranu_2013-08-27_o_3.46.04_PM.png
06.09.2013
Press in the ghettos
With the beginning of the German occupation in Poland, all editorial offices operating till the outbreak of the war were shut down.
Lewin_Ora_GFH_fb_2.jpg
22.07.2021
“Unprecedented in the history of mankind.” The great deportation from the Warsaw ghetto through the eyes of Abraham Lewin
79 years ago, the Germans began the great deportation of the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka II extermination camp. 300,000 Jews were led to their deaths. Abraham Lewin, teacher, writer and member of the Oneg Shabbat group, described these terrible events in his diary.
More articles >