Among a welcome cascade of Yiddish books newly translated into English, Warsaw Testament calls out to be read now. Writer Rokhl Auerbach compiled and structured the bulk of the book’s narrative in Tel Aviv in 1973, drawing on her earlier eyewitness notes on Jewish suffering and resistance under Nazi occupation two decades earlier. In Tel Aviv, she wrote:
“Driven by an uncontrollable impulse, I wrote in secrecy and solitude. . . . In the autumn of 1943 and during the winter of 1943-44, working between midnight and 5 a.m., I wrote two works: They Called it Resettlement, on the Great Deportation of 1942, and what became, as I kept adding more material, an early draft of this book. In the daytime I would hide my notebooks at the bottom of a drawer and cover them with the apples, pears, dark flour, and barley cereal bought with the ration cards. (p. xlii).”
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