Rachel Auerbach's Literary Ghetto Journal

Abstract

This article examines Rachel Auerbach's journal which was commissioned by Emanuel Ringelblum as part of his project to document the daily life of the Jewish people in the Warsaw Ghetto. Auerbach, who ran a communal soup kitchen in the ghetto, was one of few survivors of the Oyneg Shabes group. After World War II, she was committed to unearth the Ringelblum archive and continued his mission of bearing witness to the Shoah by publishing her memoirs and working for Yad Vashem. Because her work is relatively little known in the United States, this paper first presents the author, her literary career, and her journal. Next, it situates the journal within the broader context of existing research on Holocaust diaries. The final section focuses on the textual aspects of the journal in order to demonstrate that the way Auerbach constructs her narrative—by means of literary devices, intertextual references, intimate details from her private life, and incisiveness of both her style and observation—contributes to an extremely powerful portrait of the atrocities of World War II, in all their horror. I argue not only that her journal should be available in English, but also that it deserves a place in the “canon” of classic diaries from the Warsaw Ghetto, such as Chaim A. Kaplan's or Abraham Lewin's.