Warsaw Testament Quotes

“Why do you need wisdom when stupidity works just fine?”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“ghetto, trapped between the jaws of a ferocious beast.”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“People seemed to forget that they were in a”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“beautiful with each passing day. Was it even possible that the thought wouldn’t have crossed her mind: “How can I save my child, how can I get her out of here?”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“There they are, embracing a few more precious hours of love and bittersweet joys. That’s how Gela Sekstajn, in her maternal pride, must have felt as she watched her child play, grow, become smarter and more beautiful”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“that inevitable and final blow that the Germans planned to unleash on the remaining Jews. During this time Jews were building bunkers, buying and smuggling weapons, assembling grenades and bombs. The secret archive was a powerful part of this movement.”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“that hung on the walls of the shrunken ghetto and of the shops. They warned the remaining Jews of the ghetto not to believe German promises, to stay in the ghetto and resist blandishments to move with their shops to the provinces.4 These documents also described the preparations to fight back against”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“part of Nowolipki Street numbered in the 50s and 60s housed the workers attached to the German woodworking firm Hallmann. It was here that the Oyneg Shabes began a new, extremely important stage of its activities. The recovered milk cans of the second cache of the archive contained the proclamations and handwritten warnings”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“In the interlude between the first and second deportations, as well as the one between the second and third, that”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“so that my work will be remembered. Farewell, my comrades and friends! Farewell, Jewish people! Never allow such a disaster to happen again! Gela’s testament was dated August 1, 1942.”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“I will die but I have fulfilled my mission. I am trying to hide away some memento”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“war and before the horrible tragedy of Polish Jewry.”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“I leave my drawings to the future Jewish museum that will revive the Jewish artistic creativity that existed before the”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“to be remembered, that talented little girl Margalit. She’s twenty months old and shows a talent for drawing. She is a Jewish little girl, speaks a nice Yiddish, and is well developed both physically and mentally.”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“fate dozens of oil paintings, portraits of Yiddish writers, sketches, and other works, which will not fit into the box. I am not asking for praise. I only want my name to be remembered. I want my daughter’s name”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“up and started again. I was preparing to exhibit my works, with the title A Portrait of the Jewish Child. Now I am trying to rescue paintings to the extent that present circumstances and available space allow. So, I am forced to abandon to their”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“When I find myself on the boundary between life and death, now that I am convinced that I am more likely to perish than survive, I want to bid farewell to my friends and to my work. For ten years I drew, sorted my paintings, tore some”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“documents that we wrote ourselves and those written by others.”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“Fate decreed that it would be Hersh Wasser and myself—after more than a year of struggles—who would live to see those ten tin boxes dug up from under the ruins of Nowolipki 68, who would be able to touch the writings of those terrible days, both documents”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“1942, the thirteenth day of the Great Deportation in the Warsaw Ghetto.”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“This is what Israel Lichtenstein, the guardian of the secret ghetto archive, wrote in his final testament, which he buried along with all the other documents on August 3,”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“the world. I believe in the survival of our nation. They will not destroy the Jewish people.”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“They told me that I would be the guardian of the treasure. I hid all the materials—I hid them well! May the day come when someone will find them! And then we’ll be the redeemers of all the other Jews in”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“count too much, you lose the blessing that comes with it.” One”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“One shouldn’t count money,” he said. “If you”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“Or maybe it was my mother’s love that protected me like a talisman, when random strokes of sheer luck repeatedly threw me a narrow footbridge over the abyss. It was a bridge that I stepped over as if I were blindfolded, unable to see a step in front of me. Without that blindfold, I would never have dared to take the steps that saved me.”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“The monthly rations that the Germans allocated to the ghetto could not feed someone for more than a week.”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“the 100,000 soups served once a day could not solve the problem of massive hunger and widespread mortality.”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“the most naïve try to convince themselves that you can save a Jew with a bowl of soup.”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament

“It’s very hard to save someone who has already begun to swell. It’s no longer a matter of stilling hunger but of providing fats, fruit, sugar. How will we find that for them and for those we want to keep from becoming bloated? In our own circle only”
― Rokhl Auerbach, Warsaw Testament