Who Will Write Our History?: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive

7. Traces of Life and Death Tex ts from the Archive

225 Determined to document the Jewish experience in the war, the Oyneg Shabes collected artifacts, texts, and testimonies that reflect an ongoing tension between prewar ideals and escalating chaos; between a yearning for collective solidarity and rampant social fragmentation; between idealism and debasement ; between continuity and rupture—material as disparate and varied as the experiences of the Jews who gathered and wrote them. There were outlines of studies that were never completed, sketches of projects cut short by the Great Deportation; fragments and pieces remain the only traces of individuals who vanished forever. Taken together, these materials tell a collective story of steady decline and unending humiliation, interspersed with many stories of quiet heroism and self-sacrifice. The postwar reader sees Polish Jewry disappearing in an ordeal where the todays were worse than the yesterdays but still better than the tomorrows: from the siege of Warsaw to the early days of the occupation; from the imposition of the ghetto to the Great Deportation; from the Great Deportation to the final months of the ghetto. It is a collective story composed of hundreds of smaller narratives, accounts of everyday horrors from different individual perspectives, yet illuminated by moments of reprieve, of dignity and courage. As the situation became increasingly desperate many individuals broke, collapsing into depression, anger, rage, shame, and fear. The members of the archive were not immune. Yet somehow, no matter how bad things became, the collective enterprise of the Oyneg Shabes went on, flexible, inventive, and determined to make sure that nothing escaped its attention. Traces of Life and Death chapter 7 texts from the archive 226 Who Will Write Our History? Studying the Ghetto: “The Two and a Half Years” Project During the first year of its activities, as the archive collected material, the Oyneg Shabes debated priorities and guidelines. Ringelblum at first wanted the Oyneg Shabes to amass as much as possible without reference to particular agendas or preconceived hypotheses. The war was changing Jewish society so fast and events were so unpredictable, Ringelblum believed, that it would be foolish to try to skew the collection of material to fit one’s own view of what was important or to try to anticipate what would be pertinent. He also felt that to write monographs or conduct studies would waste time and leave little of lasting value; such work would become quickly outdated when the war was over. More important was for the archive to create a resource and database for future historians.1 By mid-1941, however, so much material had flowed into the archive that the Oyneg Shabes staff began to rethink this reluctance to study and prioritize . The executive committee decided to begin a new project—a massive study of the wartime experience. They borrowed YIVO methodology, with the limits imposed by the need for secrecy: comprehensive questionnaires, interviews , and essay contests. Ringelblum called the project “Two and a Half Years”: The Project was divided into three [sic] parts: a general section, an economic section, a cultural-scientific-literary-artistic section, and a section devoted to mutual aid. This project, which was started at the begin­ning of 1942, was directed by me, Menakhem Linder, and Lipe Bloch. I directed the first and the third sections, Linder the economics section and Bloch the section on mutual aid. [We involved new people . . .] The project was slated for over 1,600 printed pages, and it would have been one of the most important documents of the war. At meetings of the Oyneg Shabes staff, which would last for many hours, we worked out [theses and guidelines] to direct [the study of the topics].2 In late 1942 or 1943 Ringelblum wrote a brief note that was included in the second part of the archive: “Two and a Half Years . . . which goals? [velkhe tsvekn] A photograph of life. Not literature but science [visnshaft].”3 The scope of “Two and a Half Years” was enormous. A partial outline in Eliyahu Gutkowski’s handwriting, concerned mainly with the Warsaw Ghetto itself, contained eighty-one separate subheadings dealing with the Warsaw Ghetto alone (see appendix B). A partial list of the theses and guidelines worked out by the Oyneg Shabes staff included studies of women, youth, Traces of Life and Death 227 children, corruption, Jews in the Soviet-occupied zone, religious life, the life of writers and intellectuals, Polish-Jewish relations, German-Jewish relations , economic life, the social...