„Baczność! Przeczytać i zwrócić dla zniszczenia”. Porządki archiwum a korespondencja intymna Racheli Auerbach z czasu wojny i getta – pytania i problemy
„Attention! Read and return to be destroyed.” The order of the archive and intimate correspondence of Rachel Auerbach from the times of war and the ghetto. Questions and problems

Summary/Abstract: The article is an attempt to answer the challenges posed to the author’s own academic writing by the intimate correspondence in Polish written by Rachel Auerbach (1899–1974) during the period of the Nazi occupation and the Warsaw Ghetto. Auerbach, a bilingual Yiddish-Polish writer and survivor historian, was one of the three surviving members of the Warsaw Ghetto underground archive. By analyzing the history of Auerbach’s personal archive and the institutional framework within which her personal documents were made available to the public—in spite of the fact that many of them were labelled: “to be destroyed,” the author asks questions about the blurred boundaries between the public and the private and about the ethics of interpretation and publication. She tries to capture the tension present in the text between the desire to destroy and erase and the need to document and salvage traces of an individual existence that gains importance with the changing conditions of the occupation and of Auerbach’s situation as a Jewish woman. These changes are also connected to changes in the model of communication inscribed in the texts, which led a series of letters to transform into an autobiographical collection, a sort of diary, and finally into a part of a public archival collection.

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