Professor Antony Polonsky, Tracy-Ann Oberman and Mark Burman discuss Rachel Auerbach’s account of the Warsaw ghetto.

From 1940 historian Emanuel Ringelblum led a team of dedicated writers secretly recording Jewish life in the Warsaw ghetto for what became known as the Oyneg Shabes archive.

Among them, Rachel Auerbach was an eyewitness of 1943’s ghetto uprising. Her account has now been translated into English for the first time alongside her renowned essay Yizker, 1943. Brandeis emeritus Professor of Holocaust Studies Antony Polonsky provides the introduction and here joins Tracy-Ann Oberman, who played Auerbach in the recent BBC series The Warsaw Ghetto: History as Survival, and Simon Bentley, Chair of Yad Vashem UK in conversation with that series’ writer, award-winning BBC documentarian Mark Burman.

In Association with The Jewish Brand.

This event will last approximately 1 hour, without an interval. 

About the speakers:

Antony Polonsky is Professor Emeritus at Brandeis University and Chief Historian of Global Education Outreach Project of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw. His most recent work is The Jews in Poland and Russia volume 1, 1350 to 1881; volume 2 1881 to 1914; volume 3, 1914 to 2008 (Oxford, 2010, 2012), published in 2013 in an abridged version The Jews in Poland and Russia. A Short History (2014), which has been translated into French, Polish and Lithuanian. In 1999, he was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland and the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of Independent Lithuania. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Warsaw (2010), the Jagiellonian University (2014) and the Polish University Abroad (Polski Uniwersytet na obczynie, 2022).

Simon Bentley is involved in charitable and educational organisations including; The Leadership Trust, Kisharon, JABE (Jewish Association for Business Ethics), Gingerbread, Yad Vashem UK Foundation, Magen Avot, Saving Faces, and many others.

Tracy-Ann Oberman is an English television, theatre and radio actress. Having trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama, Oberman spent four years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, before joining the National Theatre. She was recently seen performing as the lead in Fiddler On The Roof at the Chichester Festival Theatre. Tracy has just been seen as a lead in Ridley Road. She is well known for her performances in Friday Night Dinner and It’s A Sin.

Tracy is also a column contributor for The Guardian and was a regular contributor to the Jewish Chronicle and Red Magazine. As a playwright she has written a number of well received Radio 4 plays, including Bette and Joan, Baby Jane and most recently That Dinner of 67.

Mark Burman is an audio story teller with a deep interest in Jewish history. For the past 30 years he was an award winning documentarian at the BBC. His first ever radio documentary was an oral history of the Battle of Cable Street marking its 50th anniversary in 1986. His last major series for Radio 4 was The Warsaw Ghetto-History as Survival in 2023.