They wrote to us.
They wrote to us.
In the Warsaw Ghetto, historian Emanuel Ringelblum assembled a secret group of about sixty, Oyneg Shabes. From late 1940 they collected everything: diaries, poems, ration cards, tram tickets, postcards from people being deported.
They knew they likely wouldn't survive. Ringelblum told his secretary: “Collect as much as possible. They can sort it out after the war.”
When the deportations came, they buried it. Ten tin boxes under a basement at 68 Nowolipki Street, August 1942. Two milk cans in the same spot, February 1943. A third cache, hidden the night before the Uprising, was never found.
The survivors who dug it up in 1946 and 1950 were among the few left who knew. Ringelblum wasn't. Almost no one who wrote it was.
Every record I've written about was kept by accident, or by a keeper who couldn't help it. This one was addressed. They wrote to a reader they would never meet, and paid the whole price anyway.
The reader came. The archive is at the Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw, on UNESCO's Memory of the World register. Most of those 35,000 pages are still being read for the first time.
They said sort it out after the war. We're still sorting.
Sources: Ringelblum Archive, Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw (jhi.pl); USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia; National WWII Museum; Yad Vashem; UNESCO Memory of the World.