Warsaw Testament – Samuel Kassow
March 12 @ 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Until recently, very few people knew about Rokhl Auerbach, a remarkable woman who survived the Holocaust and then dedicated her life to preserving the memories of its victims. Professor Samuel D. Kassow will discuss Auerbach’s memoir Warsaw Testament, which paints a vivid portrait of that city’s prewar Yiddish literary and artistic community atruction at the hands of the Nazis. This book received a National Jewish Book Award in the category of Holocaust Memoir.
Samuel Kassow, Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University. He has been been a visiting professor at many institutions and was on the team of scholars that planned the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Among his books is Who will Write our History: Emanuel Ringelblum and the Secret Ghetto Archive (Indiana, 2007), which received the Orbis Prize of the AAASS and which was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. It has been translated into eight languages. His translation of Rachel Auerbach’s Warsaw Testament, published by the White Goat Press, received a National Jewish Book Award in March 2025. A child of Holocaust survivors, Professor Kassow spent his earliest years in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany.