Who Will Write Our History?

Who Will Write Our History? (2007), a history book by American academic Samuel D. Kassow, tells the story of Emanuel Ringelblum, a Polish-Jewish historian who, while trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto established by the Nazis, led the community’s efforts to create a historical archive documenting their experiences. This archive, known as the Oyneg Shabes Archive, was buried during the War and recovered by one of just three survivors from the team who conceived it. It is one of the most important sources for the history of Nazi-occupied Poland.

Kassow begins his story in 1946. Teams of searchers digging through the rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto finally uncover what they are looking for: 10 tin boxes sealed in clay, the first of three caches of archival documentation buried by Jewish inhabitants of the Ghetto before they were transported to their deaths. Unfortunately, the cache was not properly sealed: water has ruined much of its contents. One of the caches would never be discovered, and the second cache is not uncovered until 1950. This one, however, is intact. The cache contains thousands of interviews, testimonies, photographs, and other material relating to Jewish life in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation.

From here, Kassow moves back in time to the 1930s to explain how the caches came to be assembled and buried. The key architect was Polish-Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum. Between 1939 and 1942, Ringelblum assembled a team of intellectuals and other idealistic members of the Jewish community, pushing them to collect as much material as they could on life in Nazi-occupied Warsaw.



Ringelblum was an arch-idealist. Despite the warnings of colleagues and family, he refused to flee the Nazis. He wanted to play a role in his community’s defense.

An academic historian, Ringelblum had long believed in the importance of Jewish communities writing their own histories. He argued that allowing gentile historians to tell the Jewish story only invited anti-Semitism. At the same time, he was concerned that Jewish historians tended to focus on religious matters or the activities of the most successful Jewish figures. Long before the outbreak of the war, Ringelblum had advocated a collective form of history, in which ordinary people would gather material about their lives, learning to recognize in the process that their lives mattered.

Trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto, Ringelblum felt that to tell his community’s story in this way was more urgent than ever. He clandestinely organized a group of fellow intellectuals—including teachers, writers, and rabbis—under the codename “Oyneg Shabes,” meaning “the joy of Sabbath” and referring to the fact that the group met on Saturdays. He pushed the group to collect as wide a range of materials as possible.



At a time when many in the Ghetto were starving or succumbing to infectious disease, it took courage and stoicism to pursue this task. Furthermore, the members of the group risked execution, should they be caught by the occupying forces or their Polish and Jewish collaborators.

The Oyneg Shabes team collected stories about the difficult moral choices made by the inhabitants of the Ghetto, including stories about Jewish policemen who worked for the Nazis and the members of the Judenrat council which interceded for the Jews with the Nazi forces. As well as stories and interviews, they collected everything from ration cards to street chants to party invitations to restaurant menus. They collected Nazi propaganda and posters put up by the Jewish Resistance. The group was instrumental in recording the testimony of Szlama Ber Winer, an escapee from the Chelmno extermination camps. This testimony helped to galvanize Polish resistance and is an important source for historians of the camps.

As well as encouraging his team to find ever more material, Ringelblum kept a detailed diary, strategizing the size and scope of the archive. After the Ghetto was closed, he escaped and went into hiding in the Polish part of Warsaw, but repeatedly returned to the Ghetto to keep working on the archive.



He also wrote a paper on the nature of Polish-Jewish relations. He had twice been saved from death by Poles, and he wrote of the courage of the many Poles who resisted Nazi rule. He also documented instances of fear and moral apathy on the part of Polish collaborators. He wrote the treatise—his last work—in Polish, hoping that one day it would help Jews and Poles to untangle their shared and tragic history.

As Nazi activity in the Ghetto increased, and larger numbers of Jews were deported to Treblinka, Ringelblum and his team began to fear that the archive would be discovered by the Nazis and destroyed. They buried the documents in three separate caches, with members of the burial team each contributing a final testament, hoping that the archive would preserve the memory of a murdered community.

Shortly afterward, Ringelblum and his family were arrested by the Gestapo. They were executed in prison. Of the team he had assembled to work on the archive, only three survived the Holocaust. One of these, Rokhl Auerbach, lead the search for the buried caches.



Kassow closes his narrative by seeking out the surviving descendants of the team who worked on the archive, to honor their memories and their achievement in creating a lasting history of the Jewish experience of the Holocaust.