"More important than our lives". The underground archive of the Warsaw ghetto

The exhibition is dedicated to the underground archive of the Warsaw Ghetto. After the invasion of Poland by the German Wehrmacht in 1940, the German occupiers sealed off a large part of Warsaw and deported the Jewish population of Warsaw and other occupied territories there. In order to document the events for posterity, the historian Emanuel Ringelblum initiated an unprecedented collection campaign in the ghetto: the so-called 'Ringelblum Archive'. It was the joint project of a group of Jewish academics, writers and activists working in secret, who called themselves Oneg Shabbat ('Joy of the Sabbath'). The Oneg Shabbat Archive is a unique and outstanding example of Jewish self-assertion during the Shoah. It is an act of civil resistance and the first attempt to simultaneously and directly document and archive the mass murder of the Jewish population of Europe initiated by the Germans.

The archive, which is kept at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1999. It consists of around 35,000 sheets: Notes, diary entries, essays, photographs, drawings, official documents and other evidence of daily life. The original aim of the Oneg Shabbat group was to document life in the ghetto. Jews from Warsaw and other Polish regions, Jewish deportees from Germany and German-occupied countries - including Jews who had converted to Christianity - and Roma lived there together and side by side. They tried to survive in the oppressive confines of the sealed-off ghetto in the centre of Warsaw. Up to 450,000 people were crammed together there under inhumane conditions.

As it became increasingly clear from 1942 onwards where the German occupation policy was leading, Oneg Shabbat began to document the Shoah - the organised mass murder of European Jews in the German extermination camps in the East. The up to 50 employees of Oneg Shabbat worked in secret and their exact number is still unknown today. Only two of them survived the Shoah. However, a large part of the archive survived the war, hidden and buried under the ruins of the ghetto.

The exhibition offers a radical inside view of the ghetto from a Jewish perspective by focussing on the Oneg Shabbat archive and letting the documents and photos speak for themselves. In this way, a dense and multi-faceted picture of life, suffering and death in the ghetto emerges. The exhibition makes the underground archive of the Warsaw ghetto comprehensible as an act of resistance: As an infinitely laborious and agonising, but ultimately successful attempt to write the history of the Shoah from the Jewish side, in defiance of the extermination of Polish Jewry.

Last edited on 27.12.2024