Oyneg Shabes Archive

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 in 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 know the Jews on the basis of their own, not German, sources. Two caches of the archive, buried in August 1942 and February 1943, were discovered after the war. A third was lost. Only three members of the Oyneg Shabes group survived the war. In this excerpt, Ringelblum describes the process by which the collections of materials were organized.