A Holocaust Memoir from a Woman Who Encouraged Survivors to Speak

Aug. 20 2024

Rachel Auerbach’s Warsaw Testament, recently published in an English translation by the American scholar Samuel Kassow, is a memoir of her time in the Warsaw Ghetto, her efforts to nurture its residents both physically and spiritually, and her involvement in an underground project to create a historical record of what happened there. After the war ended, Auerbach devoted herself to collecting and studying the testimonies of survivors. Matt Lebovic writes:

Leveraging her position in a soup kitchen that fed 2,000 Jews daily, Auerbach was able to interview hundreds of Jews about their experiences before and during the war. She was particularly fond of the ghetto’s artists, many of whom saw their work as a bridge to the future. . . .

“While there was a widespread belief [after the war] that encouraging survivors to speak about the past only deepened their pain, Auerbach believed that the opposite was the case, and that delving into their experiences, especially with an interlocutor who was also a survivor, had therapeutic value,” wrote Kassow.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Holocaust, Holocaust survivors, Warsaw Ghetto

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023