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

9. A Historian’s Final Mission

333 By late 1942 Ringelblum’s worst fears were coming true. As he watched the destruction all around him, he probably realized that his chances of saving the archive, small as they were, were still better than the odds of saving Polish Jewry. Jewish survivors, especially returnees from the Soviet Union, might rebuild a postwar community but the rich, vibrant Polish Jewry of prewar days was gone forever. After the war there would be no more Historiker Krayz seminars in Warsaw, no more graduate students in the Vilna YIVO to discuss and study the treasures of the Oyneg Shabes. The tense and depressing meeting of the executive committee on July 26, 1942, when it was resolved to send the archive to the YIVO in New York after the war—marked a stark contradiction to earlier hopes that the archive would be a vital resource for postwar Polish Jewry. When the committee authorized Lichtenstein to bury the archive right after that July meeting, it signaled its doubts about the community’s survival. Facing constant danger, shaken by the murder of his closest friends, torn between his work in the archive and his obligations to his family, Ringelblum summoned up great reserves of inner strength to continue his work. He did so because he knew that even if Polish Jewry did not survive the archive was still necessary. Without it, posterity would read the records of the killers but forget the voices of the victims. But what had been possible in the predeportation ghetto was now infinitely harder. Ringelblum worked under growing pressure and tension, his anguish manifest in the writings he left behind after the end of the Great Deportation. After the deportations ceased for a time in September 1942 Ringelblum A Historian’s Final Mission chapter 9 334 Who Will Write Our History? found a new focus. Instead of daily, weekly, and monthly notations that had recorded impressions and events, Ringelblum tried to analyze Jewish behavior in extremis, especially the reasons for the shift from stunned terror during the summer months to a grim determination to resist. The fighting organizations prepared for battle, and the remaining Jews built bunkers and hideouts. By 1943 few Jews were prepared to listen to German promises. In his last months, from his return from the Trawniki camp in August 1943 until his death in March 1944, Ringelblum began his final mission as a historian. The ghetto lay in rubble, and his closest friends and mentors were either dead or out of reach. The old Oyneg Shabes no longer functioned—although it had a reincarnation of sorts in the archive of the Jewish National Committee that Hersh Wasser, Adolf Berman, and others continued on the Aryan side.1 Ringelblum, a consistent proponent of history as a collective enterprise , now became a lonely chronicler. He sat in a corner of a crowded underground bunker and wrote nonstop. It was under these agonizing conditions that Ringelblum the historian wrote one of his best works, Polish-Jewish Relations during the Second World War. Ringelblum, the passionate Yiddishist , wrote this in Polish, perhaps subconsciously reaching out to a Polish readership , the same readership that had ignored him and his fellow Jewish historians before the war. Whatever happened to him personally, he hoped that postwar Poland would be a different country. And, besides, after the war, how many people would be left to read Yiddish? In Extremis During the summer of 1942 Ringelblum had neither the time nor the heart to make his regular journal entries. Instead, he scribbled cryptic phrases, random notes, whose very lack of coherence paralleled the fragmentation and destruction of the world around him. One goes before 5 o’clock, before the sentries. In order to be shot. The reason for Czerniakow’s death . . . Hostages. 10,000 a day. The story about orphanages for 10,000 children. The behavior of the police. Threw the sick on the carts. People report [for deportation] because of hunger . . . 70 zl [zlotys] for bread. Judenrat employees as voluntary kidnappers . July 26 120 shot at the Umschlagplatz—sick and weak. Terrible conditions there.2 Disjointed notes such as these betrayed Ringelblum’s own anxiety and confusion as his world disintegrated, and as his comrades and friends disappeared, one by one, into the boxcars. A Historian’s Final Mission 335 The notes were also a reminder that he was human: in that terrible time he could be inconsistent in his...