A powerful account of the Warsaw Ghetto has been translated from Yiddish into English for the first time.
The new edition of ‘The Jewish Revolt’, written by Holocaust survivor, writer and historian Rachel Auerbach, was launched last week at a Yom Hashoah event at community centre JW3 commemorating Jewish resistance and the importance of preserving Yiddish language.
With a moving foreword by TV personality and campaigner against anti-Semitism Rachel Riley, it documents the 1943 uprising by Jewish insurgents inside the Polish ghetto against the Nazis.
The book 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 the images, restoring names to history.
Rachel Riley. Pic: Yad Vashem UK
Those stark images were showcased against the backdrop of poetry by Warsaw-born Yiddish poet Binem Heller and live music originally composed within the ghetto by child prodigy Josima Feldschuh, who died on Wednesday, 21 April 1943, on the second day of Pesach and the third day of the uprising.
The Jewish Revolt
It was followed by a panel discussion on the Holocaust with Professor Antony Polonsky and Maor Ashkar, alongside video messages from Sir Stephen Fry & Rabbi Harvey Belovski.
Addressing the assembled guests at JW3, Rachel Riley described the book as “a staggeringly tender portrait of a lost tribe”, adding that Auerbach was “determined to try and remember each of them as they were, as they were marched out of the ghetto into deportations to what she would later discover, the gas chambers, from the beggars to the babies, the musicians to the bakers, the professors to the thieves, she wants to memorialise them.”
JW3 launch of translated ‘The Jewish Revolt’ by Rachel Auerbach, from Yiddish to English. April 2025. Pic: Michelle Rosenberg
She went on to say that “once again, we’ve seen the mass slaughter of Jewish people, and we now understand that, just as people have always wanted to deny the events of the Holocaust, today, even as Hamas recorded their crimes and put them on the internet, there are people who will not believe what happened.
“Suddenly, it’s clear why Rachel (Auerbach) and her colleagues were so intent on documenting everything that happened in the ghetto. They knew they had to tell the story as clearly as they could, so people would believe it.”
Rachel Auerbach studied philosophy and psychology in Lviv in the 1920s, and then moved to Warsaw where she worked as a journalist.
An iconic photo from the Warsaw Ghetto shows Jews being led by Nazis in 1943. (U.S. Holocaust Museum/Wikimedia Commons)
Following the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, she 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.
- To buy the book, click here.
