There is a photograph at the beginning of the book The Jewish Revolt: A Warsaw Ghetto Exhibition of Henio Zytomirski. At about age four, he is photographed with his mother in Lublin in 1936, wearing a coat, and squinting into the light as she holds his hand. By age seven, Henio was murdered in Majdanek in 1942.
The photograph is part of a project called Yellow Star, one of dozens that open this volume: bar mitzvahs, football teams, families on beaches. Then the photographs shift to book burnings, ghetto walls, and the Umschlagplatz. Most people in the later photographs are listed as “persons currently unknown.” Author Rachel Auerbach spent her life making sure that phrase could never be the last word.
Three texts by Auerbach appear in English here for the first time: “Yizker 1943,” her elegy for Warsaw Jewry written in hiding; “The Jewish Revolt: Warsaw, 1943,” her chronicle of the uprising; and “A Grave Marker,” her memorial to the fighters.
They are published in The Jewish Revolt: A Warsaw Ghetto Exhibition alongside two historical essays by Antony Polonsky and the full Stroop Report, the daily dispatches filed by SS General Jurgen Stroop as he commanded the liquidation of the ghetto. The Nazis would have their version of events. She placed Stroop’s dispatches inside her own account, to make sure theirs was buried inside hers. “The enemy himself became the chronicler,” she writes.
Auerbach arrived in Warsaw in 1933 as a journalist and spent the occupation years feeding 2,000 people a day in a ghetto soup kitchen while contributing to Emanuel Ringelblum’s underground archive, the Oyneg Shabes.
She buried her own manuscripts in the Warsaw zoo grounds and in a field in Mokotow. She was one of three Oyneg Shabes members to survive. After the war, she spent years insisting that the buried archive be found and dug up. It was. She testified at the Eichmann trial.
Everything she did, every name she fought to preserve, flows from a single sentence she wrote in 1943: “And should I forget for even a single day how I saw you, our desperate and forlorn people, consigned to extermination, may my name be forgotten.”
They are all mine
“Yizker” is not an elegy. It is a woman on the Aryan side moving through Warsaw Jewry’s tapestry of residents, unable to stop, because stopping would be its own betrayal: the beggars who went first, the smuggler children, the rabbis in their black capotes, the teamsters who could flatten any hooligan with one fist, and then ran into the fire like oxen.
“There was something eerie about the overabundance of beauty among girls of a generation growing up against the gray backdrop of ghetto poverty and mass hunger. How did we fail to notice so ominous a sign? How did we fail to see this blooming as a portent of our end?”
Then the catalogue breaks. She cannot maintain the distance. “No, no. I can’t stop. I recall another girl, about 14. My own brother’s orphaned daughter from Lviv, whom I used to carry around as if she were my own. Lucia!”
She names her family one by one, then forces herself back: “Absurd! I won’t mention any more names. They are all mine, all my people, everybody who was killed.” She includes Josima Feldschuh, her 13-year-old cousin, a gifted pianist who gave concerts in the Warsaw Ghetto and was murdered in 1943. She includes the cigarette boy from the corner of Leszno and Karmelicka: “Where are you, little boy? What did they do with you?”
As if Rabbi Akiva’s students
While “Yizker” is lyrical, the chronicle that follows is methodical, but it is written by someone who cannot quite believe what she is documenting. Condemned from its very founding to physical defeat, the uprising was supposed to win the highest moral victory. It did. She records April 19, 1943, when Stroop sent tanks to the resistance at Zamenhof and Mila.
Boys who had never held a weapon, most firing arms for the very first time, waited for the armored car to come close enough. Their aim was true. The car caught fire. The Germans ran.
“Who were having their moment, enjoying the delights of victory for a brief forever,” Auerbach writes. Stroop’s own report records it: When Jews running from burning buildings caught sight of the Germans, they turned and ran back into the flames. Better the flames than the Germans. In the bunkers, when the Germans approached and there were no tools left, people dug with their fingernails.
“You can’t tell what is more terrifying at that moment,” she writes, “their courage or their fear.” The Passover Seder in the bunkers that first night, the Haggadah recited while explosions continued above. “The Passover sacrifice would be burned alive this time.”
And then, on May 10, after 28 days: “Dead tired, filthy with sewer-muck, in rags, but with guns in their hands, they came out of the sewer one at a time.”
She records a fireman on the Aryan side of the ghetto wall, forbidden from directing water onto the Jewish side, his only task to stop the fire from spreading to Aryan buildings. He watches a mother on a fourth-floor balcony, the flames at her back, the child screaming and reaching its little hands out toward the street below. She cannot throw it down.
Instead, she raises the child, shows it to the people on the other side of the wall, or maybe, Auerbach writes, she is lifting it up to God in heaven. The fireman raises his hose and aims for what she calls “the wall behind the image of Madonna and child among the flames.” The water does not reach her. A German bullet hits him in the neck. “The water-jet drips downward to the ground like a tear shed in vain. A drop of pity.”
“A Grave Marker,” the third text, is a roll call: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah, then the Yiddish names, then the Polish diminutives the fighters used because they were too young to have grown entirely out of their mothers’ names. Lutek. Edek. Janek. Marek. Kazik. “Somber, heroic, ecstatic, everything. Yet as simple as a piece of black bread in the people’s hand.”
Inside that frame, she places a demand: “Let no one dare take them from the mass of the people. Let no one make a grab for their glory. No family, no party, no country.” The memorial plaques, she writes, are carved in the breasts of all the nation.
Stroop received the Iron Cross and was hanged in Warsaw after the war. His report to SS chief Heinrich Himmler bore the title “There is no Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw anymore.”
Auerbach had already answered him. In the closing pages of The Jewish Revolt, she describes the ruins she walked past in 1944: thin grass over mountains of brick, “like the hair that keeps growing on a corpse.” A quorum of Jews holds services there every night. “El Melech Rachamim” uttered with the wind. “Mordechai [Anielewicz, commander of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising] calling his troops to muster. They come running from all sides, striding in the open air, through ghetto streets no longer there.” ■
THE JEWISH REVOLT:
A WARSAW GHETTO EXHIBITION
By Rachel Auerbach
Translated by Michael Wex
Toby Press/Koren Publishers Jerusalem
280 pages; $16