Warsaw Testament

By Rokhl Auerbach

Born in Lanowitz, a small village in rural Podolia, Rokhl Auerbach was a journalist, literary critic, memoirist, and a member of the Warsaw Yiddish literary community before the Holocaust. Upon the German invasion and occupation of Poland in 1939, she was tasked by historian and social activist Emanuel Ringelblum to run a soup kitchen for the starving inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto and later to join his top-secret ghetto archive, the Oyneg Shabes. One of only three surviving members of the archive project, Auerbach's wartime and postwar writings became a crucial source of information for historians of both prewar Jewish Warsaw and the Warsaw Ghetto. After immigrating to Israel in 1950, she founded the witness testimony division at Yad Vashem and played a key role in the development of Holocaust remembrance. Her memoir Warsaw Testament, based on her wartime writings, paints a vivid portrait of the city's prewar Yiddish literary and artistic community and of its destruction at the hands of the Nazis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 7, 2024
• ISBN: 9798989452408

Rokhl Auerbach

Samuel Kassow is the Northam Professor of History at Trinity College and holds a Ph.D from Princeton University. He has been a visiting professor at many institutions and was on the team of scholars that planned the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Among his various publications are Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia (University of California Press, 1989) and Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Indiana University Press, 2007), which was translated into eight languages. Along with David Roskies he edited volume 9 of the Posen Anthology of Jewish Culture. Kassow was on the team of scholars chosen by Yad Vashem to write a one-volume history of the Holocaust in Poland. A child of Holocaust survivors, Professor Kassow spent his earliest years in a displaced-persons camp in Germany.

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Part 1: Warsaw Fought

1. BLADES IN THE SKY

In the summer of 1939 I was unemployed. Like many other journalists just starting out in the Jewish press, I had to support myself from the honoraria I received for occasional articles in the Yiddish- and Polish-language Jewish newspapers. Only during vacation time, when the regular employees were gone, was I able to land a temporary job on this or that newspaper. During the last two weeks of August I worked the night shift in the printing shop of Nasz Przegląd,¹ making final corrections for the next day’s edition. Stanislaw Filozof was the night editor.

Until late into the night the Polish Press Agency was transmitting alarming bulletins about incidents on the Polish-German border. So both of us, along with the printers, had to endure the excruciating tension on the eve of the war, literally until the last minute.

On the night of August 31 we left our jobs at the print shop after twelve. It wasn’t far from Nowolipki 7 to my apartment at Przejazd 1. But the city was blacked out, and Filozof decided to walk me as far as the gate of my building.

As we passed the Mostowski Palace, in the wide triangle formed by Przejazd, Nowolipie, and Mylna Streets, we saw just one soldier, a rifle on his shoulder, standing guard in front of that building, the headquarters of the mobilization department of the north Warsaw military region. Having just printed such alarming news in tomorrow’s newspaper, we were taken aback by the idyllic tranquillity we saw in front of this important military installation.

I already reported here with my military identification papers, Filozof responded to a remark of mine in a tone of bitter irony. They told me to wait for a call-up letter. There was no hurry. Many people who had reported in response to the order for general mobilization were still waiting to be sent to their units.

I saw them, I exclaimed, happy that I could add something. There are thousands of called-up men. They’re crowding the trains together with the vacationers returning from summer holidays. The trains are full of refugees from Poznan and Silesia. Men, women, children—crowds of civilians are lying on the train platforms with their baggage. Children are crying, the trains are jam-packed, you can’t find a connection in any direction. As you go down the stairs in the stations you crash into crowds of people coming up from the lower platforms. The two groups collide, and nobody can move. There are cries, screams. People come to blows. I saw men with cudgels, the police are helpless, everything is jammed, blocked.

Jammed, blocked. Filozof repeated my words. Men? What kind of men? Where were they going? In his tone I detected a note of anger, suspicion, innuendo …

I told him why I was at the train station. I had gone there to accompany a brother-in-law of my late brother. He was one of the Polish citizens who spent nearly a year in Zbąszyn because Poland did not want to let them enter the country.² It was only now that they stamped their papers and admitted them, even without train tickets.

Until 1933 this Emil Geles had a shoe factory in Essen in the Ruhr. Now he wanted to get to Lwow but couldn’t find a place on a train. I waited with him for three hours but finally had to go to work. I still hadn’t absorbed everything that he told me.

This state has no right to exist, he told me in German. This Jew from Essen, whom they robbed of everything and expelled, also learned from refugees who arrived later about the Night of Broken Glass.³ But in his eyes, the guilty state was not Germany but, amazingly, Poland. This humiliated, spat on, injured Jew still thought in terms of Nazi propaganda.

And what do you expect, my kind lady? Filozof answered. The psychological techniques of German propaganda are more developed than ours. Even in this they are better equipped. And as far as military technique goes, what is there to say?

So that means … I asked, and I had a terrible feeling inside.

Unfortunately there’s no use fooling ourselves, he answered. It’s a matter of days, perhaps hours."

We had almost reached the gate of my building. In the sky one could see the searchlights of the Polish air force. Were they really looking for German planes over Warsaw?

We walked by the Fama cinema. On the side street that connected Przejazd and Nalewki we could see the old building of the Arsenal Museum of Antique Weapons. The clock on some church tower chimed one. The first hour of the first of September, 1939.

A light autumn rain began to fall and the lightly moistened dust on the street smelled of earth, of upturned earth in the middle of the city.

I felt very tired and rang for the janitor to let me in.

Four hours later people suddenly awoke to the noise coming from above the city. Strange whistles echoed from the sky, and from a distance one could hear the sound of explosions. Soon after the wailings of the Polish air raid sirens filled the air.

Some of the early risers, who had to get up to go to work, tried to convince their wives that this was just an air raid drill of the Polish civil defense—the OPL.⁴

The first bombs of the Second World War fell on a Jewish institution for children with special needs in Otwock. A few dozen people were killed or wounded. Among the wounded was the director, Yiddish poet Kalman Lis.

Later, in the early days of the occupation, I ran into Filozof in the Jewish writers’ kitchen, where he was working as a director. It was located in a courtyard of Tlomackie 13, the former home of the Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists.⁵ I remember that particular meeting well and described it in the notebooks that I wrote on the Aryan side. Did I speak to him after that? Maybe. I can’t remember. Maybe I met him at the funeral of some writer? I think I ran into him for a few moments during the first week of the Great Deportation. That must have been very early in the morning, before the daily manhunts began, when we were both running along Leszno Street in opposite directions. We nodded to each other and kept running. This was a devil’s game in which we were all chasing a mirage, the lure of work papers that would supposedly save us and our colleagues from deportation. That was the last time I saw the colleague with whom I worked those last two weeks before the war. I heard nothing more about him, although I made many inquiries. Why didn’t he join his colleagues Szwalbe and Wagman and cross the Bug River to the Soviet zone of occupation?⁶ Did Stach—the Polish speakers at the paper called him that—try to hide on the Aryan side? Or if he didn’t, why not? To this day I haven’t found anybody who can explain what happened to him.

As for Emil, the refugee from Essen an der Ruhr, I heard from his sister (my sister-in-law Lonia) in a letter I received from Soviet-occupied Lwow that the Soviets deported him to an unknown place.

That much we know. Perhaps that was the fate of the majority of the Zbąszyn refugees who had the luck to reach the territories occupied by the Soviets after September 17, 1939. After all, many Polish Jews who fled the Germans were arrested and murdered by the Soviets as German spies as soon as they reached Soviet territory.

I kept getting postcards from my sister-in-law for about a year after the Germans occupied Lwow.⁷ Toward the end of our correspondence in the summer of 1942, the phrase an unknown place began to appear when she mentioned friends and neighbors we had both known. Then in November I got a postcard that informed me that Lonia and the 15-year-old Lusia, Lonia’s and my late brother’s daughter, were also sent to an unknown destination.

That postcard was sent by my late brother’s 19-year-old son Mundek, a graduate of the Abraham Karkis vocational school in Lwow. The postcard was dated August 13, 1942, but since I had already moved to a new place, and because the Germans in Warsaw were also busy in those summer months sending people to an unknown destination, the postcard gathered dust for a few months until by some miracle it finally reached me.

After that there were no more miracles. Nor did I hear any more from Mundek. During the war and for thirty years after I inquired and searched and wrote, but I still know nothing about what happened to my dearest and only nephew. I don’t know whether they sent him to Belzec or murdered him in the Janowska camp after they exploited every ounce of strength his young body could give for the needs of the German war machine.

Light beams in the Warsaw skies on the night of August 31-September 1, 1939.

A new era had begun, a hallmark of the Second World War: the murder and total extirpation of civilian populations. The Jews were the first targets and proportionally the greatest victims.

2. CANDLES AT TWILIGHT

It seemed as if we, the last prewar generation of Jewish writers in Poland, came onto the scene just when it was all going downhill.

The heady intellectual Sturm und Drang that had convulsed Yiddish literature in the 1920s with new names, new genres, and new themes, and which had pulled it out of its old nineteenth-century provincialism, was now just a memory. The most prominent figures of that pleiad—Perets Markish, Moyshe Kulbak, I. J. Singer, Uri Tsevi Grinberg, Melech Ravitch, Isaac Bashevis, and others—had already left Poland. Some went to Russia, some to America, some to Palestine. Those who stayed suffered from inner and external conflicts; they were dissatisfied with everything and everybody. At every turn people complained about the decline. The newspapers were controlled by insiders—party or family cliques—and we newcomers who arrived in the capital from all over Poland had to fight hard to find our way, for a small foot in the door, for a tiny salary.

Warsaw, Moscow, or New York? In those days the Yiddish press debated the true center of Yiddish literature. We newcomers were least likely to believe that it was Warsaw. We were too close to it and we lacked perspective. And all of us, young and old, were full of resentment against the Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists at Tlomackie 13.

Yet we were in the middle of a powerful, dynamic, and large Jewish folk community. A great cadre of political, economic, and social activists worked nonstop. The Jewish masses were going through a spontaneous process of emancipation and acculturation.¹ But those same masses were too numerous and too concentrated to lose the essential core of their national identity. The religious strata, the enormous black forest of Jewish Orthodoxy, comprised such an enormous reservoir of spiritual energy and human resources that they more than compensated for all we lost through assimilation.

We writers thought that we had come too late and all that remained was a wilted garden. We did not realize that the garden was about to offer a rich new harvest of fruit—had the cataclysm not engulfed us all.

Even though many writers left Warsaw to settle in places both Jewish and non-Jewish, and even though many of the more assimilated writers moved over to the Polish press and the Polish cultural orbit, Yiddish culture nonetheless benefited from a large influx of new talent.

Some writers had more talent than others. Some were blessed with originality and creativity. There were mediocrities who made a living by writing to suit popular tastes. There were unhappy specimens with frustrated ambitions who simply hung around. But there were also dazzling writers endowed with genius who basked in the adoration and devotion of the Yiddish reading public.

There were five—and just before the war, six—Yiddish dailies along with two afternoon editions, as well as weekly and professional journals and photographic supplements. There were two Jewish dailies in Polish. Each of these newspapers had a circulation in the tens of thousands on weekdays—and the weekend and holiday editions had double that. The Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists had over four hundred members and the Jewish section of the Polish Journalists Association two hundred.

In Warsaw there were two full-time Yiddish theaters and several traveling troupes. There was an actors union at Leszno 2, at the corner of Przejazd, almost directly across from Tlomackie 13.

There was an association of Jewish sculptors with dozens of members, several music organizations, and many choirs and orchestras, some of which were connected with various political, trade, and youth organizations. There were publishing houses, libraries, and all sorts of circles, clubs, and theatrical studios.

This is not the place to describe the varied and vibrant network of Jewish schools, or the many local and national communal organizations and institutions, banks, and free loan societies, or the Jewish public health apparatus. And what about the political parties, the sport clubs, the Jewish Landkentenish Society?² Or the many synagogues, prayer houses, study halls, and Hasidic shtibls, many of them hundreds of years old?

Polish antisemites would gnash their teeth and fulminate about a separate Jewish state within Poland. Well, they were not entirely wrong, especially in the cultural sphere.

To be sure, that Jewish state limped along. It got little support from the central government or from town councils. It depended on voluntary taxes offered by Polish Jews, on the help of Jewish organizations from abroad, and on the donations and moral support of ordinary Jews who, poor as they were, had a strong Jewish consciousness.

Yes, that Jewish state struggled to get by—but it was still a real presence in Jewish life. This was Jewish autonomy in a modern, secular sense. As long as the Jewish masses survived, it functioned, and it made an impact. It accompanied those masses until the last step on the road to destruction.

Outside of Warsaw there were smaller centers with their own newspapers, periodicals, theaters, and literary groups: Lodz, Krakow, Lwow; larger provincial towns like Radom, Lublin, Częstochowa; and above all, Vilna.

Vilna, long a center of rabbinic learning, showed that in the new era of modern Jewish culture she still fully deserved her traditional title of The Jerusalem of Lithuania. Thanks to her firm determination to ground Jewish life in Yiddish and in a Jewish cultural context, Vilna became home to the YIVO³ and the citadel of Jewish secular schools, where gymnasia and special seminars prepared cadres of teachers. Vilna became the breeding ground for a new kind of Jewish intellectual.

After Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, Jewish Vilna became one of the first victims of the German murder campaign. Those writers who had not emigrated or who had not managed to flee into the Soviet interior shared the fate of Vilna Jewry and were murdered in the Ponary forest.⁴

While I’m at it, what should I say about Lemberg, my Lemberg, the Jewish capital of old Austrian Galicia?⁵ Recently I read through some old issues of Chwiła.⁶ Lwow was acculturated and it was Zionist. But what really mattered was that this provincial center, with its many different movements and intellectual currents, was Jewish to the marrow. Names changed, but the essence of these different movements in Galicia—the inner fire, the essential vitality—did not.

There was the Baal Shem Tov, and—no comparison intended—Shabetai Tsevi, and, to add another thousand degrees of separation, Jacob Frank. Hasidism and the Enlightenment, Zionism and assimilation, Communism and modern Yiddish poetry, Moyshe-Leyb Sassover⁷ and Moyshe-Leyb Halpern.

Not a stone has remained of the old Jewish Lemberg. Not even the graves or the tombstones, which they used to pave the streets.

When I turned the pages of Chwiła, I felt as if blood was dripping from my fingers. This rich creative milieu disappeared into the abyss, along with the names and books. Who will inscribe them in the memory of our people? Who will rescue their works from oblivion?

Lemberg—my Lemberg!

And what has happened to Jewish Krakow, a city where I did not live? Or Przemysl, Stanislawow, Tarnopol, Kolomej, Buczacz?

But that is not what this book is about. It’s not a historical discussion about this or that Jewish center. I am writing what I remember about personal encounters, conversations, observations, and ordeals; only what I saw myself, with my own eyes, what I experienced on my own and sealed with my own fate.

3. MY LAST TIME AT TLOMACKIE 13

September 5, 1939. I was living at Przejazd 1; the poet Nokhum Bomze and the painter Mendel Reif were living in the same apartment. It was now the fifth day of the air raid sirens and the bombing of the city. It just so happened that on Tuesday, the fifth of September, there were fewer alarms than on the days before. That evening Bomze ran in with the still top-secret, terrible news that Warsaw was being evacuated; the army was going to withdraw to new lines of defense and the government was going to leave the capital. Hitler would march in tomorrow, maybe the day after tomorrow.

It was a terrible blow.

Despite the optimistic headlines in the newspaper, we knew that the military situation was bad. Evidently the Germans were using a new kind of technique. They drove deep wedges behind the lines and then used a hurricane of fire and steel to destroy even the most heroic defensive efforts. We knew about the work of the fifth column, which hampered the mobilization and military movement. But still, none of us thought that things were as bad as they were.

We still nursed the fear that Poland—and the other European nations—would seek a new compromise with Hitler.

For years Hitler had blamed the Jews for inciting war, and he warned that they would pay the price. Today we realize that his threats were horribly real. There was a certain truth in his charge that the Jews wanted war. More than anything we were against making peace and giving him concessions. When we saw that war was unavoidable and that there would be no new peace agreement, we all felt a great sense of relief. But we believed too much in the power of the just war; we exaggerated its strength.

Jewish soldiers responded to the call of the Polish government and went off to fight with conviction and enthusiasm. We were ready to make the greatest sacrifices. We did not reckon with the danger of a Polish rout and of a German invasion and occupation.

Such a shock could well have broken us, but we did not break. They say that imminent danger sparks the release of a hormone that dulls sensitivity and sharpens the instinct for self-defense.

Someone once remarked that one can think about the Second World War in terms of massive population movements. The immediate reaction to danger is to flee! I saw this during the war, both with the Poles and the Jews. The Germans made it a factor in their military tactics, since a mass flight of refugees blocked major roads and paralyzed the movements of the defending