Witnessing & Witnesses (Women’s History Day Five)

Carrying the weight of cultural remnants from the time before and during the Shoah, Rokhl Oyerbakh was one of three members of the oyneg shabes who survived the horrors of the Holocaust. Before the terrors of war, Rokhl was a journalist in Lviv, Poland – the place she had lived the longest at that point. She wrote first for a Zionist daily (Chwila), then for a Yiddish daily (Morgen). After beginning her career, she also began to edit and write for Yiddish cultural journals. Promoting woman Yiddish writers was important to Rokhl.

In Rokhl Kafrissen’s Tablet column

In 1933, Rokhl had moved to Warsaw, and lived in the ghetto there once Germany occupied Poland. She became involved with the oyneg shabes, luckily, and was officially director of a soup kitchen. (After the war, Rokhl initiated the search for the documents that were hidden in the Warsaw Ghetto, leading to a vast and irreplaceable contribution to history and learning about this devastating period of history.) Personally, she kept a diary and wrote “Two Years in the Ghetto,” an account describing in detail the conditions of hunger she saw every day. Alongside her own accounts, she translated those of other sufferers.

A picture from Yad Vashem

Rokhl was fortunate to escape in 1943 and find work as a secretary, hidden by her ambiguous looks and German linguistic fluency. She never stropped writing, though, and Yizkor was completed at the request of an underground Jewish committee, describing the Warsaw Ghetto summer 1942 deportation. However, she never forgot about or tried to escape the memory of the Shoah, committing her life to collecting testimonies both in Poland, and later in Israel when she made aliyah in 1950. Four years later, she became Yad Vashem’s Director of the Department for the Collection of Witness Testimony in Tel Aviv.

Here’s some resources to learn more about Rokhl: her bio on Wikipedia & YIVO, a video about her soup kitchen work, Yizkor, and a translated piece of hers in Pakn Treger.