HISTORY: Who Will Write Our History? Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto By Samuel D KassowAllen Lane/Penguin, 523pp. £10.99
WHAT WAS IT like to live in the Warsaw Ghetto, among almost half a million starving, frightened people crowded into an area of 1.3 square miles? How did people survive? How did they spend their days? How did they respond to their situation? This book tells the story of a man, Emanuel Ringelblum, and the extraordinary archive he and his associates painstakingly gathered and buried in tin boxes and milk churns, so that the memory of the Polish Jews and their culture would not be entirely obliterated with their extermination.
The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest among hundreds established in eastern Europe and absorbed many refugees from elsewhere, its inhabitants including a critical mass of journalists, artists, intellectuals, social workers and other leaders. Ringelblum was already well known before the war as a political activist and journalist of the Jewish left, a historian and teacher. He was also a vigorous defender of the Yiddish language in the face of an increasing tendency among middle-class Jews to speak Polish. His politics and his historical methodology came together in his belief in the value of ordinary people’s experiences and from the mid-1920s to the outbreak of the war he was closely involved in the Warsaw Commission’s attempt to compile chronicles recording the lives, culture and history of individuals and communities of Polish Jews.
Ringelblum was also a relief worker and community organiser in the Aleynhilf, Warsaws leading Jewish relief organisation. Through this organisation and the contacts it provided with all sections of Jewish society, he was able to recruit a body of trusted co-workers in a new organisation, Oyneg Shabes, to undertake the task of collecting material in the ghetto for what was to become the largest secret archive in Nazi-occupied Poland. This body of material, comprising some 35,000 documents and artefacts, ranges from the underground press, to drawings, tram tickets, ration cards, theatre posters, restaurant menus, as well as essays, diaries, reports, notes, postcards and photographs. Gathering it may have served to provide a sense of purpose and identity in an environment where people’s dignity and self-respect was assailed on all sides. It is, nevertheless, impressive that people facing such extreme circumstances should have had such a strong sense of their own history to undertake the task.
These testimonies play a valuable role in shifting our comprehension of the impact of the Holocaust from one of undifferentiated masses to the individual, struggling, arguing, reflecting and suffering. One example to which Kassow refers is Rachel Auerbach’s account of a soup kitchen she ran for Aleynhilf, its various “customers” and of her gradual realisation that one bowl of soup a day and the bread they could get on their ration cards was insufficient to save lives but only prolonged death.
IN AUTUMN 1941, the leaders of Oyneg Shabes decided to undertake an ambitious and systematic study of Jewish life under the Nazi occupation, employing questionnaires, interviews and essay competitions. However, the commencement of the project coincided with escalating reports of mass murders of Jewish communities in the provinces and it was never completed. Then, early the following year, news of the death camps began filtering into the ghetto, brought by a handful of escapees. Realising that they were almost certainly doomed, Oyneg Shabes attempted to gather information about the extermination programme, to provide material for the Jewish and Polish underground press and send that information abroad, in the hope of foreign intervention. On June 26th, 1942, news of the mass murder of Jews in camps was broadcast by the BBC but the following month vast deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto began.
Under this imminent threat, the Oyneg Shabes leaders buried their archive in tin boxes on the night of August 2nd to 3rd, 1942, but when the deportations ceased in September, they resumed gathering material, burying a second cache in February 1943. Three years later, Auerbach, one of just three survivors of the Oyneg Shabes project, was to see the first collection uncovered from the rubble of post-war Warsaw. Ringelblum, his wife and son had been executed following discovery of their hiding place in March 1944. Auerbach’s campaign among disbelieving and traumatised survivors for a search to be undertaken for the archive finally paid off and in 1950 the second batch was retrieved. A third cache was never found.
Samuel D Kassow is the Charles Northam Professor of History at Trinity College Hartford, specialising in Russian and Jewish history. His scholarly and fascinating study combines an account of Ringelblum's life, ideas and achievement, and analyses the mosaic of organisations and debates in pre-war Poland and the Warsaw Ghetto. It complements other publications on the topic, notably Michal Grynberg's Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto, published in English translation in 2003, though providing far more detailed analysis of the cultural and political context than Grynberg's book.
These are not ivory-tower perspectives. It is important at a time when many of us feel outraged by the Israeli government’s behaviour in Gaza and its sometimes cynical appropriation of the Holocaust to silence its critics, that this terrible event is important in its own right, for European history, for all of us.
Carla King is a lecturer in modern history at St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra