Recommended Reading

“The incredible vitality of Warsaw’s Jews is in vain. They cry out and defend themselves to the end, to the last hour and minute, but this hour and minute will come.” The author of those lines was Rokhl Auerbach, who had spent 2 ½ years in the ghetto but managed to escape it a month before the doomed April 1943 uprising. Her memoirs, among the most searing documents of the period, are now, for the first time, available in English. “Warsaw Testament,” translated from the Yiddish by Samuel Kassow, presents wartime observations with reflections recorded at a remove of three decades. The result is documentary lucidity with literary flair; a historian’s fidelity with a survivor’s vigilance.