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

In November of 1940 the historian Emanuel Ringelblum, along with a handful of clandestine collaborators, began to collect the material that eventually would comprise the famous Oyneg Shabes Archive. By 1942 it had become apparent to this group of professional and amateur historians that by assembling this diverse repository of data on Jewish life in the Warsaw Ghetto they “might be writing the last chapter of the eight-hundred-year history of Polish Jewry” (p. 210). Faced with this grim reality, the archivists redoubled their efforts and even added their own last testaments to the collection. As one noted, “What we were unable to cry and shriek out to the world we buried in the ground” (p. 3).

Emanuel Ringelblum and his associates hoped that this collection would become raw material for future historians writing about the Warsaw Ghetto and the fate of Polish Jewry. Samuel Kassow has realized the hopes of these historians and produced a masterful biography of Ringelblum that weaves together the history of Jewry in Poland and the life of a man who preserved its memory and shared its fate. Writing Ringelblum’s biography clearly was a labor of love. Kassow’s is the work of a consummate biographer. Utilizing both materials from the Ringelblum Archive and an extraordinary collection of other testimonies and documents, Kassow paints a portrait of a man dedicated to the Jewish people, one who chose to write a history of a Jewish population and thereby restore its position within the turbulent national history of Poland. He shows us a man who chose to marry his fate to that of the Jewish people by returning from Switzerland in September 1939, one who in the face of Polish Jewry’s greatest threat dedicated the remainder of his life to recording its travail.

The documents Ringelblum and his associates collected provide windows into the Warsaw Ghetto. From the mundane to the extraordinary, the Oyneg Shabes archive sought to preserve the experience of the ghetto’s inhabitants, their living conditions, economy, and desperate efforts at self-preservation. Kassow has illustrated his volume with reproductions of many of the archive’s artifacts: instructions for cooking frozen potatoes, charcoal sketches of street scenes, an invitation to a children’s play at Janusz Korczak’s orphanage. Kassow correctly points out that Jews throughout Nazi-occupied Europe were recording their experiences but that “the secret archives could accomplish much more than solitary individuals” (p. 211). Collections by groups in Warsaw, Łódź, Kovno, Białystok, Vilna, and elsewhere created a corpus that allows historians to write nuanced social histories. For other ghettos where only a handful of diaries survived, the work of the historian is far more difficult. Kassow masterfully reveals the social history of the Warsaw Ghetto, and in particular the lives of the dedicated workers who preserved its legacy. He has created images of both the collective catastrophe and the individuals whom the Germans murdered. In the same way that the archivists captured the multitude of biographies of the Warsaw Ghetto, Kassow captures the work of its chroniclers, especially through his meticulous reconstruction of the gathering of the archive.

In the person of Ringelblum, Kassow reveals a man who recognized his own political biases while trying to remain objective. Ringelblum sought to draw from the broadest cross-sections of Warsaw society. However, Kassow points out that the archival group kept their distance from the official Jewish leadership, the Judenrat. Kassow cites this independence as the reason why theirs was less politically tainted than other ghettos’ collections, which included primarily official records and the voices of the Jewish leadership. Although in retrospect Ringelblum’s decision to exclude the Judenrat may seem regrettable, fortunately a wealth of its official documents survived the war. In tandem with the illicit archive they afford us a view of events and personalities more rounded than for other ghettos. Ultimately...