"Of the sixty people that historian Emanuel Ringelblum invited to work on his secret Warsaw Ghetto archive, the Oyneg Shabes,1 only three survived. One of them was Hersh Wasser, a historian, secretary of the archive, and one of Ringelblum's closest collaborators. Another was his wife, Bluma Wasser (nâee Kirszenfeld), a teacher who helped catalog the archive's collections and was among the first to document the use of gas vans to murder Jews in the Chelmno death camp. Rokhl Auerbach, a writer and journalist, was the third. "During the war Auerbach kept a secret diary, which she later published along with several other books describing her life in the Warsaw Ghetto and on the Aryan side of the city. Few memoirists told the story of the Warsaw ghetto with as much passion and insight as Auerbach did; few worked more diligently to persuade historians, lawyers, and the wider public to listen-really listen-to the testimony of survivors and to remember not just the famous names but also the ordinary people who went to their deaths. She urged her listeners not to forget their names, their foibles, their hopes and dreams, the little worlds that were destroyed along with them. She asked her readers to remember aspects of the Warsaw Ghetto that tended to fade into obscurity: the soup kitchens, children's libraries, house committee fundraisers, chamber concerts, choir rehearsals, young teenagers flirting at work and finding first love."--