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

5. A Band of Comrades

145 The Oyneg Shabes was not just a clandestine archive; it was also a tightly knit collective, a secret but vital component of the larger alternate community that had developed out of the house committees and the Aleynhilf. Using the Aleynhilf as a base, Ringelblum slowly and methodically assembled a group of collaborators that ranged from the most prominent leaders of prewar Polish Jewry to impoverished refugees. Of all the Jewish historians in prewar Poland, it was Ringelblum who most regarded history as a collective enterprise . Now, in the middle of a national disaster, it was this collective effort that shaped the archive and imbued it with a sense of purpose. As Ringelblum wrote, probably in late 1942: The members of the Oyneg Shabes constituted, and continue to constitute , a united body, imbued with a common spirit. The Oyneg Shabes is not a group of researchers who compete with one another but a united group, a brotherhood where all help one another . . . Each member of the Oyneg Shabes knew that his effort and pain, his hard work and toil, his taking constant risks with the dangerous work of moving material from one place to another—that this was done in the name of a high ideal. . . . The Oyneg Shabes was a brotherhood, an order of brothers who wrote on their flag: readiness to sacrifice, mutual loyalty, and service to [Jewish society].1 Over time, the Oyneg Shabes brought together men and women from a wide spectrum of prewar Polish Jewry: wealthy businessmen and poor artisans, rabbis and Communists, Yiddishists and Polish-speaking intellectuals, teachA Band of Comrades chapter 5 146 Who Will Write Our History? ers and journalists, economists and leaders of youth groups. Some were part of a small executive committee, an inner circle that raised money, made policy , and decided what to study and what to collect. A larger group contributed essays and reports commissioned by the archive. This group ranged from frequent contributors to those who only submitted one or two essays or testimonies . Some members only copied, typing or writing out duplicate and triplicate copies of incoming material; isolated from everyone else except Ringelblum and his closest secretaries, were Israel Lichtenstein and his two teenaged helpers, David Graber and Nahum Grzywacz. They concealed the documents in the Borochov School on Nowolipki 68 and waited for the order to bury them under the school basement. Although exact numbers are difficult to establish, approximately fifty to sixty people (including copiers and transcribers ) were involved in some way with the archive, from its beginning in 1940 until the ghetto uprising in 1943. The Oyneg Shabes had more luck in saving documents than in saving people. Although thousands of pages survived in the tin boxes and in the milk cans (a significant part of the archive was most certainly lost), little more than random traces remain of the men and women who wrote the documents , gathered them, copied them, and hid them. As most of the Oyneg Shabes collaborators died with their entire families, few survivors could provide more than the barest biographical details of those who perished. The fate of the Oyneg Shabes collective reflected the fate of interwar Polish Jewry: the destruction was so complete and so calamitous that all too often only disconnected scraps of information remained. The few biographies of those who contributed to the archive, published largely in Yiddish books and journals, are short and sketchy, some little more than a paragraph, and often they are little more than hagiographies. Some members of the Oyneg Shabes did not even have the luck to find some small memorial in an article or biographical dictionary. Those who wrote in Polish fell between the cracks: they did not merit entries in the standard Yiddish literary lexicons, nor were they famous enough for inclusion in the biographical dictionaries of Polish literature. There are scant details on the young student Salomea Ostrowska, a productive worker in the archive. Stanisław Różycki, an important essayist has left no traces beyond his penetrating essays on the ghetto streets and on his experiences in Soviet-occupied Lwów. Many members of the archive left little more than a name. Hardly any had a grave. Only three survived: Hersh Wasser, his wife Bluma, and Rachel Auerbach. Only a small inner circle—the so-called executive committee—knew the entire scope of the archive’s agendas and membership. Most Oyneg Shabes A...