A talk in conjunction with the exhibition “In the First Person.”

Zoom webinar registration: https://bit.ly/3VfEhqr

Sam Kassow was born in 1946, in Wasseralfingen, a displaced persons camp in Stuttgart, Germany, to his parents Celia and Kopl. He grew up in New Haven and is today a leading historian of Polish Jewry and the Holocaust. He has a B.A. from Trinity College, an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics, and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. His mastery of Russian, German, Hebrew, and Polish, in addition to his native Yiddish, has given him access to manifold sources on East European Jewish history, while his family background, painful as it was, has afforded him unique insights into the society’s lived reality. Kassow is the author of Who Will Write Our History? (2007), later adapted into a documentary film of the same name. His English translation of Rokhl Auerbach’s memoir Warsaw Testament was published in 2024.

Born in rural Podolia, Auerbach was a journalist, literary critic, memoirist, and a member of the Warsaw Yiddish literary community before the Holocaust. Upon the German invasion and occupation of Poland in 1939, she was tasked by historian and social activist Emanuel Ringelblum to run a soup kitchen for the starving inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto and later to join his top-secret ghetto archive, the Oyneg Shabes. One of only three surviving members of the archive project, Auerbach’s wartime and postwar writings became a crucial source of information for historians of both prewar Jewish Warsaw and the Warsaw Ghetto. After immigrating to Israel in 1950, she founded the witness testimony division at Yad Vashem and played a key role in the development of Holocaust remembrance. Her memoir paints a vivid portrait of the city’s prewar Yiddish literary and artistic community and of its destruction at the hands of the Nazis.

Mondays at Beinecke online talks include an opening presentation at 4pm followed by conversation and Q & A beginning about 4:30pm until 5pm.