At 7 p.m., Tuesday, April 14, at the Atlantis Hotel Casino, the voices of people who lived in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II—and were among the more than 3 million Polish Jews murdered in the Holocaust—will testify from the grave.
Samuel Kassow, author of Who Will Write Our History? Rediscovering a Hidden Archive From the Warsaw Ghetto (a book which is the basis of a documentary that can be viewed free on YouTube) is the featured speaker at the event. Kassow, who recently retired as a professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., will talk about the Ringelblum Archive, a collection of documents and materials secretly created in the Warsaw Ghetto and buried just prior to the ghetto uprising of 1943. The caches collected by the Oyneg Shabes, a group under the direction of historian Emanuel Ringelblum from 1940 to 1943, contain journals, essays, photos, artwork and items from everyday life, which were gathered as the horrors of the Holocaust unfolded in real time. Two of the three portions of the archive were discovered in 1946 and 1950; the third has never been found.
The event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited. Attendees may RSVP on the Day of Remembrance website. An artwork exhibition from the archive will be open from 6 to 9 p.m. in the Atlantis ballroom lobby.
Who were the members of Oyneg Shabes, and what sort of things did they collect?
There were about 60 people, of whom only three survived the war. They were a diverse group, including writers, teachers, activists and people from other walks of life. They were people from different political parties who set aside their differences to create this archive. They collected everything from diaries, underground newspapers, letters, photos and artwork to objects from everyday life, including government notices, theater programs and even candy wrappers. … In 1941 (as thousands of residents were deported to a death camp), they began to focus on 80 different topics about life under the German occupation—including the war’s effects on young people, the elderly, women and other groups. They began to see this collection as vital to understanding what was happening.
Histories of the Holocaust would have been written based on documents and survivors’ testimony, so why is the existence of the Ringelblum Archive important?
If the archive had never been found, historians could not have really written about the half-million Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto except as a statistic, a mass of anonymous victims, people without names, undifferentiated. We would not have been able to write about cultural life in the ghetto or their social life. We would also not have had that sense of how people experienced what was happening to them in real time.
The perspective of somebody writing in real time is different from the perspective of someone who survived the war, writing after they know what happened. These people didn’t know what was going to happen tomorrow. Their documents, their writings, their emotions, and their reactions give us an insight into what people really felt. We couldn’t have had that if we just relied on the testimony of survivors. People who survived look back on it, and they focus on the murders and on how they survived. What happened in the ghetto is less important in their memories. … (Without the archive), we would not have a record of life as it was lived at the time. Without this archive, we would have been much more dependent on the German documents. Without the archive, what could we have written about the people in the ghetto? One example is, in the archive, you have a total of about 3,500 pages of the underground newspapers of different political parties, newspapers that appeared week by week, and so we know what people knew at the time, their sense of where the war was going, their reaction to the various battles taking place, and all the information that they were getting. All this would have vanished if we had not had the archive.
Ringelblum began the archive when the ghetto was created in 1940. At what point do you think he realized that the Nazis’ goal was genocide as well as the obliteration of the memory of the Jews in Poland and all of Europe?
Until about early 1942, he thought that most of the Jews would survive, and the goal of the archive was to help the Jews rebuild their lives after the war, that the knowledge gained would help them rebuild their institutions. But by early 1942, he began to realize that the Germans’ goal was mass murder, and that they wanted to obliterate not just the lives of the victims, but all memory of them.
Isaac Shipper, one of Ringelblum’ s teachers, said just before he was murdered that what we know about murdered people is usually just what their killers say about them. Entire tribes and groups of people have been murdered in the past, and what do we know about them? Only what the people who killed them chose to say about them. So Ringelblum was determined that if he didn’t survive—and most Jews didn’t survive—that he would bury time capsules so that future historians would be able to write based on Jewish documents and not just German accounts. … By December 1941, they were getting reports of mass shootings in Lithuania, and then in February 1942, the first escapee (from a death camp) came into the Warsaw Ghetto, and then you have the deportations (of 30,000 people) from the Lublin Ghetto. So between December 1941 and February 1942, the members of the Oyneg Shabes were beginning to put two and two together.
In 1942, the group was able to smuggle to the Allies accounts of mass murders. The news was reported by the BBC in London, even as the greatest crime in world history was ongoing. What effect did that have on the war effort and world opinion?
The broadcast in June 1942 had more effect on Ringelblum than on the world. The report used figures supplied by the Oyneg Shabes, and Ringelblum thought, “Oh my God, this will be a game-changer, and now the Allies are going to pressure the Germans to stop this.” But, of course, that didn’t happen. The news had very little effect. He had high hopes at first, but those hopes led to nothing.
Eventually, there was armed resistance against the Germans in the Warsaw Uprising and in a few other places. Was assembling the Warsaw archive also a form of resistance?
It was an important form of resistance. Keep in mind that most people could not participate in armed resistance; it was the exception rather than the rule, for very good reasons. You had millions of Soviet (prisoners of war), young men who were trained soldiers, but most of them died in captivity, and we don’t have much evidence of armed resistance there. But there is the resistance that consists of foiling German aims. The Germans wanted to not only kill the Jews, but determine how they would be remembered, if at all. But this archive foiled that intent.
Once it became obvious what the Final Solution was, and it seemed there was no hope, Ringelblum kept the work going. Why?
He felt that he had an obligation to write as much as possible and hoped that people would find these documents and act on what was there. He also felt that he was the only Jewish historian left in Poland, and if he didn’t do this, then nobody else would.
The two surviving archives were unearthed in 1946 and 1950. Is there any hope of locating the third cache of documents that we know were buried?
I would say the third part is lost forever. It was buried on the site that is now occupied by the Chinese Embassy in Warsaw. The only thing found before it was built was a charred piece of a diary. It’s my guess that after the war, when many Poles went digging in the rubble of the ghetto looking for hidden valuables—gold and so on—I think somebody must have found it, and when they saw it was paper, they simply trashed it.
The Nazis tried to replace historical facts with their own version of history based on their warped ideology. Do you see any parallels today in terms of the current efforts in the U.S. to whitewash the history of slavery and the accomplishments of minorities?
I’m not comparing the present administration to the Nazis, but there’s an absolute parallel. It’s not just in America that there’s an effort to whitewash history; there’s a real effort to skew history in the direction that people want to take it. The same thing happened in Poland, in the Soviet Union, and is happening in Russia today. History is a very vital weapon.
The Nazis murdered Ringelblum and his family near the end of the war, but if you could say something to him today about the archive, what would you tell him?
I would tell him that he did a great thing, and that he had no idea how important it would be for future generations.
Some of the artwork and writings were created by children in the ghetto schools who were asked to describe the effect of the war on their lives. What kind of things did they write about?
The Oyneg Shabes got dozens of essays from children, and it was amazing material. They wrote about losing a father, losing a mother, about becoming a smuggler at the age of 8, going across to the Aryan side of the city and coming back with food, eluding the Germans in order to help feed their parents. This is all stuff recorded by kids.
Why should all people, and not only Jews, care about what happened in Poland so long ago?
Because these people were human beings who were murdered, not because of anything they did, but because of who they were. It happened once and it could happen again. We have a moral responsibility to remember these people and what happened to them.