"The record must be hurled like a stone under history’s wheel in order to stop it.”
This morning I was part of a group that visited two sites of deep historical significance in Warsaw that manifested many of the issues this trip has raised. We visited the Okopowa Street Cemetery and the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute. Both raised complicated issues of historical memory, legacy, and justice that resonated in diverse and deeply personal ways for our group. It would truthfully be impossible to adequately capture what we learned and felt for anyone reading this blog. So I will try to practice the axiom of "show...not tell" in two different ways.
For the Okopowa Street Cemetery I am sharing a short description from our agenda and then a few pictures. The pictures can never do justice to the sense of expansiveness, beauty, pride and loss we experienced. However, I hope you can imagine yourself there with us on a beautiful spring morning. Like many sites we visited, dissonance reverberated as we contemplated the history we knew and were learning as birds sang among the green of a lush spring.
For the Ringleblum archive, after sharing the short description from our agenda, I will share a few quotes that I hope stir your desire to learn more about the Oneg Shabbat (or Oyneg Shabbes) group and their monumental work followed by links for you to explore to learn more if you wish.
The Okopowa Street Jewish Cemetery is one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe. It was established in 1806, consists of 82 acres of land, and contains over 200,000 marked graves, as well as mass graves of victims of the Warsaw ghetto. It was designed to serve all Jewish communities of Warsaw, regardless of their affiliation. When the Warsaw ghetto was sealed in November 1940, it was enclosed inside the ghetto. Although the cemetery was closed down during WWII, after the war it was reopened and a small portion of it remains active. Currently, the cemetery has 20 to 30 burials each year.
The Okopowa Street Jewish Cemetery is one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe. It was established in 1806, consists of 82 acres of land, and contains over 200,000 marked graves, as well as mass graves of victims of the Warsaw ghetto. It was designed to serve all Jewish communities of Warsaw, regardless of their affiliation. When the Warsaw ghetto was sealed in November 1940, it was enclosed inside the ghetto. Although the cemetery was closed down during WWII, after the war it was reopened and a small portion of it remains active. Currently, the cemetery has 20 to 30 burials each year.
The Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw was created in 1947 as a continuation of the Central Jewish Historical Commission, founded in 1944. Today, the Jewish Historical Institute is a state cultural institution serving as a research and document repository and a center for academic research, study, and the dissemination of knowledge about the history and culture of Polish Jewry, including the Ringelblum Archives.
From 1940 to 1943, the Warsaw ghetto was cut off from the outside world. During this time, a group of men and women gave themselves the Yiddish name of Oyneg Shabbes or “Joy of the Sabbath” and joined historian Emmanuel Ringelblum in the patient and perilous task of studying and collecting information on the fate of the Jewish community within the ghetto and more generally in the Nazi-occupied territories. Carefully concealed and later partially retrieved in the ruins of the ghetto after the war, this unique testimony has been passed down to posterity under the name of “The Ringelblum Archives" which have been preserved by the Jewish Historical Institute. This archive is considered one of the most precious collections of Jewish life in Poland. The archive contained a multitude of sources including diaries, interviews, art work, poetry, photographs, collected documents, newspapers and more.
Our group was lucky to have the Institute's archivists create a small exhibition just for us that included a small collection of original documents. The power of this archive, its significance to this specific history, its contribution to the general field and its contribution to humanity can not, in my opinion, be understated. I hope these quotes give you a taste and a desire to explore more:
Ringleblum wrote: "To ensure objectivity, to achieve as accurate and comprehensive a picture as possible of the War events in Jewish life, we tried to have the same incident described by as many people as possible. By comparing various accounts, the historian is able to arrive at the historical truth, the actual course of the event."
One of the milk cans contained an essay by the writer Gustawa Jarecka. She wrote: “The desire to write is as strong as the repugnance of words. We hate words because they too often have served as a cover for emptiness or meanness. We despise them for they pale in comparison with the emotion tormenting us. And yet in the past the word meant human dignity and was man’s best possession....The record must be hurled like a stone under history’s wheel in order to stop it.”
On August 3, 1942, with the Germans only a block away from the building at 68 Nowolipki Street, Dawid Graber, age 19 at the time, and his teacher Israel Lichtensztajn, were burying the first part of the Oyneg Shabbes archive and also buried their own last will and testaments. Israel wrote: "I do not ask for any thanks, for any memorial, for any praise. I only wish to be remembered…. I wish my wife to be remembered, Gele Sekstein. She has worked during the war years with children as an educator and teacher, has prepared stage sets, costumes of children’s theatre… both of us get ready to meet and receive death. I wish my little daughter to be remembered. Margalit is 20 months old today. She has fully mastered the Yiddish language and speaks it perfectly… I don’t lament my own life or that of my wife. I pity only this little nice and talented girl. She too deserves to be remembered."
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From 1940 to 1943, the Warsaw ghetto was cut off from the outside world. During this time, a group of men and women gave themselves the Yiddish name of Oyneg Shabbes or “Joy of the Sabbath” and joined historian Emmanuel Ringelblum in the patient and perilous task of studying and collecting information on the fate of the Jewish community within the ghetto and more generally in the Nazi-occupied territories. Carefully concealed and later partially retrieved in the ruins of the ghetto after the war, this unique testimony has been passed down to posterity under the name of “The Ringelblum Archives" which have been preserved by the Jewish Historical Institute. This archive is considered one of the most precious collections of Jewish life in Poland. The archive contained a multitude of sources including diaries, interviews, art work, poetry, photographs, collected documents, newspapers and more.
Our group was lucky to have the Institute's archivists create a small exhibition just for us that included a small collection of original documents. The power of this archive, its significance to this specific history, its contribution to the general field and its contribution to humanity can not, in my opinion, be understated. I hope these quotes give you a taste and a desire to explore more:
Ringleblum wrote: "To ensure objectivity, to achieve as accurate and comprehensive a picture as possible of the War events in Jewish life, we tried to have the same incident described by as many people as possible. By comparing various accounts, the historian is able to arrive at the historical truth, the actual course of the event."
One of the milk cans contained an essay by the writer Gustawa Jarecka. She wrote: “The desire to write is as strong as the repugnance of words. We hate words because they too often have served as a cover for emptiness or meanness. We despise them for they pale in comparison with the emotion tormenting us. And yet in the past the word meant human dignity and was man’s best possession....The record must be hurled like a stone under history’s wheel in order to stop it.”
On August 3, 1942, with the Germans only a block away from the building at 68 Nowolipki Street, Dawid Graber, age 19 at the time, and his teacher Israel Lichtensztajn, were burying the first part of the Oyneg Shabbes archive and also buried their own last will and testaments. Israel wrote: "I do not ask for any thanks, for any memorial, for any praise. I only wish to be remembered…. I wish my wife to be remembered, Gele Sekstein. She has worked during the war years with children as an educator and teacher, has prepared stage sets, costumes of children’s theatre… both of us get ready to meet and receive death. I wish my little daughter to be remembered. Margalit is 20 months old today. She has fully mastered the Yiddish language and speaks it perfectly… I don’t lament my own life or that of my wife. I pity only this little nice and talented girl. She too deserves to be remembered."
Dawid wrote: "What we were unable to cry and scream out to the world, we buried in the ground…I would love to live to see the moment in which the great treasure will be dug up and scream the truth to the world. So the world may know all. So the ones who did not live through it may be glad, and we may feel like veterans with medals on our chests… May the treasure fall into good hands, may it last into better times, may it alarm and alert the world of what was conceived and perpetrated in the 20th century.”
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| A powerful moment as Toronto Board Member Ron Hoffman leads our group in the Mourner's Kaddish. |
I hope these quotes raise questions and your interest in learning more about the Ringleblum Archive. Here are several resources to explore:
The Emmanuel Ringleblum Jewish Historical Institute:
Who Will Write Our History?: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive by Samule Kassow
Review of Kassow's book from the New Republic Magazine by By Peter N. Miller which is a powerful read by itself
An article by Samule Kassow: A Stone Under History’s Wheel - The Story of Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oneg Shabes Archive
Web page on Yad Vashem's website: “Let The World Read And Know”
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