Born in Lanowitz, a small vil­lage in rur­al Podolia, Rokhl Auer­bach was a jour­nal­ist, lit­er­ary crit­ic, mem­oirist, and a mem­ber of the War­saw Yid­dish lit­er­ary com­mu­ni­ty before the Holo­caust. Upon the Ger­man inva­sion and occu­pa­tion of Poland in 1939, she was tasked by his­to­ri­an and social activist Emanuel Ringel­blum to run a soup kitchen for the starv­ing inhab­i­tants of the War­saw Ghet­to and lat­er to join his top-secret ghet­to archive, the Oyneg Shabes. One of only three sur­viv­ing mem­bers of the archive project, Auerbach’s wartime and post­war writ­ings became a cru­cial source of infor­ma­tion for his­to­ri­ans of both pre­war Jew­ish War­saw and the War­saw Ghet­to. After immi­grat­ing to Israel in 1950, she found­ed the wit­ness tes­ti­mo­ny divi­sion at Yad Vashem and played a key role in the devel­op­ment of Holo­caust remem­brance. Her mem­oir War­saw Tes­ta­ment, based on her wartime writ­ings, paints a vivid por­trait of the city’s pre­war Yid­dish lit­er­ary and artis­tic com­mu­ni­ty and of its destruc­tion at the hands of the Nazis.