Guidelines for the Study of the Warsaw Ghetto

In 1940, historian Emanuel Ringelblum created the secret Warsaw ghetto archive, code-named Oyneg Shabes (“Joy of the Sabbath,” marking the day of the week on which his contributors met). He brought together a group of more than sixty people, secular and religious, from the political right and the left, to collect documents, artifacts, and photographs to record Jewish life under Nazi occupation and to ensure that posterity and future historians would be able to learn about the Jewish experience during the Holocaust from their own sources rather than from German records. Two caches of the archive, buried in August 1942 and February 1943, were discovered after the war. A third was lost. Of the sixty members of the Oyneg Shabes group, only three survived the Holocaust.