Dr. Samuel Kassow

Rokhl Auerbach’s many careers as a writer, philosopher, historian, Yiddish language advocate, and survivor are eclipsed by the outsized role she played in preserving the record of the Holocaust. In the Warsaw Ghetto, Emmanuel Ringelblum conceived and organized over sixty people for his Oneg Shabbat archive. Auerbach worked the Ghetto’s soup kitchen and chronicled the struggle to maintain life. Auerbach was one of three people that knew of the buried archive, She remained in Poland to work on those materials when they were discovered and to collect other testimonies.

Dr. Samuel Kossow’s Who Will Write Our History is now augmented with the translation of Auerbach’s Warsaw Testament including Kassow’s annotations. Auerbach devoted her life to documenting the Warsaw Ghetto struggle through her work at Yad VaShem, initially in Yiddish and eventually in Hebrew. Roberta Grossman’s documentary, Who Will Write Our History featured the character of Auerbach.

Professor Kassow was the Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, and was recently celebrated for over 50 years of teaching. He is the author of the seminal study Who Will Write Our History?: Rediscovering a Hidden Archive From the Warsaw Ghetto and Rokhl Auerbach’s Warsaw Testament. Kossow’s many languages brought him in contact with scholars in English, Russian, Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew.