Top Photo: Oyneg Shabes creator and historian Emanuel Ringelblum. Courtesy of the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute.

In September 1946, three Holocaust survivors—Rachel Auerbach, Hersh Wasser, and Bluma Wasser—led Polish scholars to a secret archive buried under the rubble of what had been the Warsaw Ghetto. Four years later, the team uncovered a second cache of materials. Collectively, the 10 metal boxes and two aluminum milk cans contained a treasure trove of firsthand accounts, stories, photographs, and diaries from Jews who had perished during the Holocaust, mostly at the Treblinka death camp. Auerbach and the Wassers knew about the hidden archive only because they were among the very few survivors of the group who had collected the materials in the first place. Nearly everyone else who had contributed materials to this extraordinary collection, including the creator behind the operation, Emanuel Ringelblum, had been murdered by the Nazis. Called Oyneg Shabes (Joy of the Sabbath), the archive preserved a vital history of life and death in the Warsaw Ghetto from the Jewish perspective.1

Milk crates and containers containing the Oyneg Shabes Archive after they were dug out of the ground. Courtesy of the Ministry of National Defense Publishing House, Warsaw.

Ghetto Life

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the Nazis rounded up Jews from cities, rural areas, and shtetls and incarcerated them in ghettos. Dirty, overcrowded, and rife with disease, these ghettos occupied tiny sections of larger cities and small villages alike, and though their end goal was not death, they became deadly due to neglect, malnutrition, and lack of medical care. The largest ghetto in the Third Reich was the Warsaw Ghetto, which held 450,000 Jews, equal to more than a third of Warsaw’s entire overall population but sat on less than three percent of the city’s space. The Jews imprisoned in the ghetto had been forced to build the walls that now closed them off from the outside world. Inside, six to seven people lived in a single room on average, and food rations dwindled to less than 200 calories per day—just one-tenth of a person’s recommended minimum daily caloric needs.2

In these dire conditions, Jews began to die of malnutrition, starvation, cold, and communicable diseases like typhus. In fact, by July 1942, historians estimate that 92,000 Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto had perished, or nearly 20% of the entire ghetto population.3  Similar violence, death, and destruction occurred at other ghettoes throughout Nazi-occupied territory during the war years. 

Amidst this assault on humanity, Jews within the Warsaw Ghetto   maintained active daily lives, aiming to establish as much normalcy as possible. An orchestra was established, and a vibrant musical life arose. Schools became a mainstay for children within the ghettos, and, as historian Saul Friedlander writes, “high school and even grade school activity was intense and clandestine libraries in the three languages of the ghetto attracted a vast readership.” Though tragically, as one survivor recalled, “Children confined to the ghetto did not know anything about animals and plants. They didn’t even know what a cow looked like.”4  

Oyneg Shabes 

Overshadowing the highs and lows of ghetto life, however, was an intense anxiety of what would happen to all the Jews imprisoned within the ghetto walls. In 1940, ghettoized Jews were not yet often forced to labor for the Third Reich, and their economic activity had been restricted to a minimum. Seeing the dire circumstances and increasing death toll, historian Emanuel Ringelblum took up the task of creating a record of everything that occurred in the ghetto.   Ringelblum was a member of the history faculty at Warsaw University and was widely published on many aspects of Polish Jewish history. He was also an activist and was involved in many organizations including the YIVO Institute, which became a leader in Yiddish scholarship on history and culture of Eastern European Jews, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), which aimed to provide multifaceted assistance to Jews facing violence and discrimination.5 

Realizing the enormity of the history that he and the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto were living through, Ringelblum was particularly interested in cataloguing a social history of everyday life. As historian Samuel Kassow writes, “Clearly he had his own biases and agendas, but he knew in addition to creating a vital historical record he was ‘facilitating’ the work of future historians.”6  As Wasser later put it, Ringelblum told him, “Collect as much as possible. They can sort it out after the war.”7  

One of the two milk cans in which portions of the Ringelblum Oneg Shabbat archives were hidden and buried in the Warsaw ghetto. The milk cans are currently in the possession of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Zydowski Instytut Historyczny imienia Emanuela Ringelbluma

Ringelblum’s mission in establishing this record evolved over time. Initially, he felt the archive would serve as an important historical source base for future historians, but it soon became a type of active resistance to spread truth about German atrocities. Perhaps even more important for Ringelblum, as the situation deteriorated and the Final Solution emerged as the Germans’ likely end goal, he had to wrestle with a number of questions: “  How does a historian—who sets out to document a living community—register its destruction? If it made sense to capture a ‘total past’ while there was still hope that Polish Jewry would survive, then what was the point of the archive after the grim efficiency of the Final Solution became all too apparent?” It became obvious to him that “certainly Oyneg Shabes could help damn the killers after the war, even if it could do little to save the victims.”   One of the most striking decisions Ringelblum made, then, was to continue building the archive despite the impending doom of everyone involved. In his mind, therefore, “nothing was ‘unimportant.’  The ultimate surrender, the ultimate collapse of despair, was a failure to record what one saw. As everything collapsed all around … Ringelblum the historian did not give up his hope that historians still had something to tell a postwar world, to teach lessons that would prevent another genocide.”8 

In October 1939, the group began to meet on Saturday afternoons, and by May 1940, the organization’s structure emerged, and Hersch Wasser became its secretary.9 Ringelblum and others gathered information and stories during the day and wrote up their notes at night. They wrote about daily life in the ghetto, specific Jewish communities, forced labor, the Judenrat (Jewish Council), social welfare institutions and their work in the ghetto, the fate of Jewish children, and religious life in the ghetto. In addition to documenting the daily existence of Jews, they also wrote about ongoing resistance in all its forms, including the smuggling of food, underground schools, underground press, and even armed resistance (which later helped create the conditions for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising).10 

The archive captures in real time the highs and lows of ghetto life. For instance, the archive reveals the slow degradation of self-help organizations. On March 27, 1940, Ringelblum writes, “The Jewish masses have not given way to despair during the occupation.” However, by mid-1941, Ringelblum observed that soup kitchens and house committees had few resources, and their leaders’ morale was low. As Kassow writes, “Ringelblum’s anger and concern grew. But he was determined to document the defeats as well as the victories.”11

Nowhere was the despair of ghetto life more apparent than when it came to children. Children suffered disproportionately in the ghetto; many became orphans after their parents died or had to survive on the streets because their families could no longer support themselves. Ringelblum wrote often of the horrific scenes he encountered in the ghetto streets, including a November 1941 entry where he writes, “The most terrible thing is to look at the freezing children, children with bare feet, bare knees, and tattered clothes, who stand mutely in the streets and cry. Today in the evening I heard the wailing of a little tot of three or four years. Probably tomorrow morning they will find his little corpse. … Frozen children are a common occurrence.”12 

By mid-1941, Ringelblum expanded his efforts, launching a massive study on the wartime experience. Called “Two and a Half Years,” he sent out questionnaires, conducted targeted interviews, and held essay contests. The goal was to capture the entirety of the Jewish ghetto experience. According to Kassow, the scope of the project was “enormous. A partial outline … contained eighty-one separate subheadings … [including] studies of women, youth, children, corruption, Jews in the Soviet-occupied zone, religious life, the life of writers and intellectuals, Polish-Jewish relations, German-Jewish relations, economic life, the social history of the ghetto, the ghetto street, opinions about the future of the Jewish people, house committees, soup kitchens, prices, the Jewish police, and so on.”13  However, just a year into the project, the Germans began mass deportations of Jews to the Treblinka death camp.14

In Treblinka’s Shadow

The Nazis put up posters (later collected and stored in the archive) explaining that the “Great Deportation” would begin on July 22, 1942, and “that anyone who voluntarily reports for deportation will be given three kilograms of bread and a kilogram of marmalade.”15  The Jews were told they were being resettled in the eastern territories, and even the Judenrat encouraged the ghetto Jews not to hide from the deportations. Incredibly, Judenrat reports collected in the archive not only tracked the deportations, but one chart even showed the decline of Judenrat employees from 9,030 to 2,527 in the first month and a half of deportations alone.16  Tragically aligned with the archive’s very purpose, such evidence shows that ghetto inhabitants tracked their own demise in real time.

In reality, the trains leaving the Umschlagplatz (loading platform) of the Warsaw Ghetto were not being resettled—they going to the Treblinka death camp, where nearly every single Jewish person arriving was murdered immediately in gas chambers. Escapees from the camp soon trickled back to the ghetto to warn Jews that “resettlement” meant death. Abraham Krzepicki, a 25 year old, left a detailed account in the archive that revealed the layout and functionality of Treblinka, and described the train journey, the arrival, the beatings, and Jews being forced into gas chambers. Krzepicki reported that at Treblinka, he helped gather the clothes and shoes from the murdered to be stolen and sent back to Germany, and that he had even worked dragging corpses to be buried and later burned. Kassow summarizes Krzepicki’s report: “His story of terror and brutality dwarfed anything the ghetto inhabitants had seen or heard from the survivors of the labor camps.”17 

Initially, such stories seemed too horrific to be believable—after all, why would the Germans murder people who were perfectly capable of working for the Third Reich? Yet, as additional witnesses returned with similar accounts, the terrible truth became obvious. In September 1942, Gustawa Jarecka, a telephone assistant and typist at the Judenrat who secretly collected documents for the Oyneg Shabes, wrote one of the archive’s more famous documents. Titled “The Last Stage of Resettlement is Death,” the document, written on four different typewriters, ends mid-sentence, suggesting the lengths archive contributors had to go to preserve their stories. In it, she wrote, “These notes are driven by an instinct, a desire to leave a mark, by despair close to crying sometimes, and from a will to justify one’s life, remaining in deadly uncertainty. We have nooses on our necks, and when they loosen a little, we shout out. … We note a proof of guilt which is useless for ourselves. The trace should be thrown like a stone under the wheel of history, in order to stop it. The stone has the weight of our experience which had reached the bottom of human cruelty.”18  

Gustawa Jarecka. Courtesy of the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute

Jarecka and her two sons died during their train journey to Treblinka in January 1943.19 Her heartbreaking words forever remain a testament to the new, more urgent purpose of Oyneg Shabes—recording the last, urgent traces of an entire people being destroyed.

Writing One’s Own Story

Within just the first six weeks of deportations to Treblinka, the Germans sent nearly 256,000 Warsaw Ghetto Jews to their deaths. By November, Oyneg Shabes files recorded the horrific aftermath of the first waves: 99.1 percent of children ages zero to nine had been deported already (a pre-deportation population of 51,458 was now only 498). Younger and older women were especially hard hit; men faired a little better as the Nazis utilized them for forced labor. Males 30 to 39 years old had the lowest initial deportation rate, still staggeringly high at 77 percent.20 

As their fates became clear, Jews in the ghetto began smuggling weapons and planning resistance activities. Ringelblum and his family were smuggled out of the ghetto in March 1943. A month later, on April 19, 1943, the Germans entered the ghetto to liquidate its remaining inhabitants, but they faced immediate resistance. Jews fought back against their oppressors in a battle remembered today as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Mordecai Anielewicz led the revolt and died fighting in his bunker. Ringelblum, who had sneaked back into the ghetto right before the uprising, eulogized his fellow ghetto fighter: “As so died one of the best, one of the noblest, who had from the beginning of his life dedicated himself to the service of the Jewish people, to protect its honor and dignity.”21 

Ringelblum, along with anyone else who survived the uprising, ended up in a camp, where sometimes they helped encourage other revolts, like the one at Treblinka in August 1943. Yet, in July 1943, Ringelblum was smuggled out of the camp dressed as a Polish railway worker and returned to his family in Warsaw. On March 5, 1944, a local Pole turned Ringelblum and his family in to the German authorities. While in prison, Ringelblum faced another “choiceless choice.” As fellow prisoner Julian Hirszhaut described, “We all knew that if we succeeded in taking Ringelblum out of there and bringing him to us as a shoemaker or tailor, his family would still be doomed.” Ringelblum responded, “Then I prefer to go the way of Kiddush Ha-Shem [The Sanctification of God’s Name] together with them.” Ringelblum and his family were executed in Warsaw in March 1944.22

One of Ringelblum’s last acts was to send a letter to YIVO   in New York by way of London on March 1, 1944. In it, he described how 95 percent of Poland’s Jews had already been murdered, and the remaining ones, himself included, did not expect to survive. He also mentions the Oyneg Shabes Archive, which had been buried and now lay under the rubble of the destroyed Warsaw Ghetto. He wanted someone to know it was there, writing: “We alarmed the world with detailed information about the greatest crime in history.”23 

The survival of the archive proved Ringelblum right. Oyneg Shabes allowed Jews to tell their own stories of Nazi violence against them, giving a voice to a group facing total annihilation. Of all the acts of resistance during the Holocaust, therefore, this is perhaps the greatest, because its very existence condemns and forever continues to condemn the guilty. In the poignant and tragic words of Gustawa Jarecka, “I remember from childhood such a novel by Conan Doyle in which the dying victim writes with a faint hand one word on the wall containing the proof of the criminal’s guilt. … One can lose all hopes except the one—that the suffering and destruction of this war will make sense when they are looked at from a distant, historical perspective.”24 

• 1

  Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 1-5, 12.

• 2

  “Warsaw Ghetto,” Yad Vashem, accessed April 23, 2025, https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/about/ghettos/warsaw.html. 

• 3

  “Daily Life in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Imperial War Museums, Accessed April 23, 2025, https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/daily-life-in-the-warsaw-ghetto.

• 4

  Saul Friedlander, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 150-151. 

• 5

  Samuel Kassow, “Emanuel Ringelblum,” The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, accessed April 30, 2025, https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/998.

• 6

  Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 13. 

• 7

  Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? ,13. 

• 8

  Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?,12.

• 9

  Friedlander, 106.

• 10

  United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “The Oneg Shabbat Archive,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, accessed April 25, 2025, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-oneg-shabbat-archive.

• 11

  Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 128-129.

• 12

  Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 261.

• 13

  Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?,  226-227.

• 14

  The most recent book on Treblinka is Jacob Flaws, Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2024). The book is linked in text for this sentence.

• 15

  Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 213.

• 16

  Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 307.

• 17

  Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 309.

• 18

  Anna Majchrowska, “A stone thrown under the wheel of history. Gustawa Jarecka,” Jewish Historical Institute, accessed April 26, 2025, https://www.jhi.pl/en/articles/a-stone-thrown-under-the-wheel-of-history-gustawa-jarecka,5276.

• 19

  Majchrowska.

• 20

  Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?,  308-309.

• 21

  Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 372.

• 22

  “In Memoriam: Emanuel Ringelblum 1900-1944,” JDC Archives, accessed April 26, 2025, https://archives.jdc.org/exhibits/in-memoriam/emanuel-ringelblum/.

• 23

  Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?,  386.

• 24

  Kassow 6-7.