Who Will Write Our History?
In October 1940, German occupying officials decreed the establishment of a ghetto in Warsaw. The decree required all Jewish residents of Warsaw to move into a designated area, thereby confining 400,000 people to just 1.3 miles of the city. The German authorities sealed off the ghetto from the city in November 1940 to prevent movement between the ghetto and the rest of Warsaw.
Emanuel Ringelblum was born in the town of Buczacz on November 21, 1900. At the time of his birth, Buczacz was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (during the interwar area it was in Poland; today, Buchach is in Ukraine). He received his doctorate in history at the University of Warsaw in 1927. In Warsaw, he met his wife, Yehudis Herman. They had a son named Uri in 1930.
From a young age, Emanuel Ringelblum belonged to the socialist-Zionist political party, Po’alei Zion Left, and took an active role in Jewish public life. He worked as a high school teacher and as an employee of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in Poland.
Ringelblum also began to develop a reputation as a serious historian of Polish-Jewish life. He formed a historical society with a group of other Polish-Jewish historians. He became one of the group’s leading scholars and an editor of the society’s publications. By 1939, he had published 126 scholarly articles on his own. This scholarly productivity foreshadowed his prolific work in the Warsaw ghetto. Upon the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Ringelblum had just returned to Warsaw from Switzerland, where he had been a Po’alei Zion Left delegate to the 21st Zionist Congress in Geneva. Although many key Jewish leaders fled the Polish capital, Ringelblum refused to leave. During the siege of Warsaw, he participated in civil defense watches under heavy fire and assisted those injured in air raids. He continued his work for the JDC, helping to organize emergency relief and refugee aid.
During the war, Ringelblum’s two major pre-war endeavors—history and social welfare —came together. He became a major leader of Aleynhilf (self-help), the Jewish mutual aid organization in Warsaw. He helped coordinate aid to refugees and soup kitchens. He also helped organize an extensive network of House Committees and tried to make them into the social base of the Aleynhilf.
Ringelblum helped found a society for the advancement of Yiddish culture (Yidishe Kultur Organizatsye; YIKOR) in the ghetto. His most important initiative, however, was the creation of the underground archive of the Warsaw ghetto. The term Oyneg Shabbes or Oneg Shabbat, which refers to the traditional Sabbath gathering by Jews, was the name the organizers gave to their underground archive because they held their regular, secret meetings on the Sabbath. Begun as an individual chronicle by Ringelblum in October 1939, the archive grew into an organized underground operation with several dozen contributors after the sealing of the ghetto in November 1940. Ringelblum decided to establish the clandestine Oyneg Shabbes (“Joy of the Sabbath”) Archive. He assembled a group of documenters of different backgrounds, with the intention of chronicling the events as they transpired at all levels of Jewish society. He had the archive placed in metal boxes and milk cans and buried underground in three separate places in the Warsaw ghetto. After the war, members of the Oneg Shabbat staff helped uncover two caches of the archive in 1946 and 1950; the third cache was never found. The Oneg Shabbat Archive remains the largest collection of Jewish documentation detailing the fate of the Jews under Nazi rule.
Ringelblum and his family escaped from the Warsaw ghetto in March 1943. They went into hiding in the non-Jewish section of Warsaw. He returned to the ghetto during the Warsaw ghetto uprising. The Nazis captured Ringelblum and deported him to the Trawniki camp. After escaping with the help of a Polish man and a Jewish woman, he returned to his family in hiding. The Nazis discovered their hiding place in March 1944. They took the family and the other Jews with whom they had been hiding to the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto and killed them there.
Relevance and Memory
The many documents gathered constitute a vital testimony both to the depth of suffering and the dignity of the Jews of Poland as a whole, and the Jews of Warsaw in particular, who sought to continue life in any way possible under Nazi occupation. Alongside the hunger, crowding, and constant distress, Jews in the Warsaw ghetto managed to live a rich spiritual life. Without the Oneg Shabbat archive, we would know little about this life. At the same time, the archive itself documents the indomitable spirit of its team of collectors and its leader, Emanuel Ringelblum, who devoted themselves to ensuring that future generations would have an accurate picture of Jewish life during the Holocaust.
