Last week, at JW3 in central London, I was invited to the launch of The Jewish Revolt, Rachel Auerbach’s searing eyewitness account of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, available in English for the first time.  

It includes rare photographs, the photo essay Yellow Star, and Auerbach’s haunting reflections “Yisker” and “A Grave Marker”. New technology has helped identify faces in these images, restoring names to history.

Holocaust survivor, writer, and historian, Rachel studied philosophy and psychology in Lviv in the 1920s, and then moved to Warsaw where she worked as a journalist.

Following the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, Auerbach was imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto. Here, she ran a soup kitchen and worked for Emanuel Ringelblum’s Ghetto underground archive Oyneg Shabes. Auerbach managed to escape from the ghetto in 1943 and survived the war in hiding.

After the war, she continued the work of Oneg Shabes at the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland by ensuring that parts of the archive were retrieved from its hiding places. In 1947, she published a comprehensive account of the extermination camp at Treblinka entitled In the Fields of Treblinka.

In 1950, Auerbach emigrated to Israel, where she headed the Yad Vashem Eyewitness Accounts Department. She fought tirelessly to secure a place for victims’ survival experiences in the history of the Holocaust. In 1960-61, she also supported the preparations for the trial against Adolf Eichmann and testified in court.

She died in Tel Aviv on May 31, 1976