Rachel Auerbach

Rachel Auerbach was born in 1903 in Lanivtsi

Rachel Auerbach was born in 1903 in Lanovtsy, today Lanivtsi in Ukraine, to Khanina and Mania Auerbach. The family moved to Lviv when she was young. Her parents and her only brother died before World War II.

She attended the Adam Mickiewicz Gymnasium in Lviv. She then studied psychology, philosophy and history at Jan Kazimierz University in the same city.

She began working as a journalist in 1925 for the Polish Jewish daily Chwila in Lviv and later edited Yiddish newspapers and journals, including Tsushtayer. In 1933 she settled in Warsaw, where she wrote for Yiddish and Polish publications on literature, psychology, folklore, theater and art. She gave special attention to Jewish and Polish women writers and artists.

In the Warsaw Ghetto she ran a soup kitchen and secretly worked with Emanuel Ringelblum's Oyneg Shabes group, which recorded life in the ghetto. She kept a diary and wrote about the hunger she saw. She escaped the ghetto in 1943, lived on the Aryan side and kept writing, including the essay Yizkor.

She was one of 3 surviving members of the group and started the search that uncovered the Ringelblum Archive. She collected testimonies at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and moved to Israel in 1950. From 1954 to 1968 she directed the witness testimony department at Yad Vashem.