On the sun-kissed afternoon of November 7, 1945, a clear but frigid autumn day, the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw — the first such organization founded in the rubble of the destruction — dispatched a convoy of seven men and one woman, all of them Polish-Jewish survivors, to the destroyed extermination camp at Treblinka. Bundled in fur collars and wool coats, their mission was to gather whatever evidence they could of a catastrophe whose memory they devoutly wished to preserve, to piece together the extant fragments of destruction into a narrative whose enormity they hoped, somehow, to define. Their journey to Treblinka that day was a journey to the precipice of oblivion. They would do everything in their power to stop the catastrophe from disappearing into the abyss, where it already seemed destined to disappear.
The Lonely Passion of Rachel Auerbach
