Ringelblum Archive
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The underground archive in the Warsaw Ghetto
People:
Historian Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum
„We have to hurry because we don’t know how much time we have left. … We weren’t afraid to take a risk. We were aware that we were making history. And that was more important than our lives.“
Until 1939, Warsaw was one of the most important cultural, religious, and political centers of European Jewry. With the German occupation, everything changed. In 1940, part of the city was turned into a ghetto, where the Jewish population was forced to live under catastrophic conditions. Overcrowded streets, hunger, and disease characterized everyday life; despair spread. Emanuel Ringelblum In the midst of this chaos, the historian founded a secret archive in November 1940. Under his leadership, a group of about 60 people began collecting testimonies of suffering, resilience, and resistance in the Warsaw ghetto. Their code name was Oneg Shabbat – „Joy in the Sabbath“. But their meetings on Saturdays were not meant for celebration, but for documenting the ghetto. Their activities are still considered exemplary for civil resistance against the German occupation in Poland.
The group included educators, students, writers, intellectuals, a rabbi, and politically and socially engaged men and women. They collected everything that reflected life in the ghetto: posters, newspaper reports, documents, statistics, food rations, etc. But personal testimonies also found their place – diaries, school essays, poems, family photos, letters, and postcards. Alongside the horrors, they also documented the daily life of theater performances, corruption, and the collaboration of individuals with the German occupiers.
If the group’s work had been discovered, it would have meant its immediate death. But they continued, and the archive grew into a chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto and occupied Poland. From 1942 onwards, they also documented the systematic extermination of the Jewish population and smuggled reports of the mass murders to the Polish exile government in London – a desperate attempt to move the world to action. On July 22, 1942, deportations also began in the Warsaw Ghetto. Within two months, around 280,000 men, women, and children were transported to Treblinka and murdered there. It was high time to save the archive. The members of „Oneg Schabbat“ hid their previous records in metal boxes and milk cans, buried them in various places in the Ghetto – in the hope that someone would find them one day.
In 1946, miraculously, parts of the archive were discovered under the ruins of the destroyed ghetto. Almost 30,000 pages survived the destruction. With the „Oneg Schabbat“ archive Emanuel Ringelblum, their co-organizers left a unique and invaluable testimony about life and resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto. The collection not only preserves the memory of the Jewish community, but also shows that the people in the ghetto were not only victims – they resisted, documented their fate, supported each other, and despite inhumane conditions, maintained their culture and identity. The voices of the ghetto residents have not been silenced. They continue to resonate, preserved in the Ringelblum Archive.
Sources: Yad Vashem, online.
Sonja Ernst: The Ringelblum Archive. Federal Central Agency for Political Education, 08.05.2013, online.
„We have to hurry because we don’t know how much time we have left. … We weren’t afraid to take a risk. We were aware that we were making history. And that was more important than our lives.“
Ardi Goldman Kunst-
und Kulturstiftung gGmbH
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