Rokhl Auerbakh

She wrote prolifically in both Polish and Yiddish, focusing on prewar Jewish cultural life and postwar Holocaust documentation and witness testimonies.

[1] Auerbakh attended the Adam Mickewicz Gymnasium in Lviv and completed her graduate studies at the Jan Kazimierz University in the fields of philosophy and general history.

She overtly worked as the director of a soup kitchen and covertly as a member of the secret Oyneg Shabes group organized by Emanuel Ringelblum, which recruited historians, writers, rabbis, and social workers to chronicle daily life in the ghetto.

[2][3][4] Auerbakh escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto on March 9, 1943, and worked on the Aryan side as a Polish secretary, aided by her "non-Jewish" appearance and fluency in the German language.

[1][5] "Yizkor", the only one of her works to be translated into English, featured themes that would appear frequently in the books she wrote after the war, including "the importance of the culture that was destroyed; the humanity and specific identity of the victims; the responsibility to remember; and the difficulty of finding appropriate words to convey the enormity of the loss".

[2] At one point Auerbakh was spotted writing at night by candlelight and gave her manuscripts for safekeeping to Dr. Jan Żabiński, director of the Warsaw Zoo.

[1] She co-founded the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Łódź and served as literary and history editor for its publication Dos Naye Leben.

[3] On March 1, 1954, Auerbakh was named director of Yad Vashem's new Department for the Collection of Witness Testimony, which was based in Tel Aviv where most Holocaust survivors had settled.

[1][10] While she encouraged survivors to write their memoirs, she was critical of the popular novels being written about the Holocaust in the genre of historical fiction.

[1] She continued to write articles and books about Jewish cultural life before and during the Holocaust in her native Polish and Yiddish, finding it difficult to attain fluency in Hebrew.

P–16) at Yad Vashem contain "personal, published and unpublished manuscripts in Polish and Yiddish, preparatory material concerning her testimony at the Nuremberg and Eichmann Trials, declarations, correspondence, recordings, photographs, film, scripts (in Polish, Yiddish and English), and administrative documents concerning the Department for Collecting Witness Testimony at Yad Vashem".