Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto: Writing Our History is a companion to Volume 9: 1939-1973 of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, (forthcoming, Fall 2020).
In 1940, the historian Emanuel Ringelblum began an unprecedented project, a secret archive chronicling life inside the Warsaw Ghetto, to be written by its residents as they faced looming catastrophe. Gathered clandestinely by an underground collective called Oyneg Shabes, the archive was hidden in metal containers and buried underground.
Where Volume 9 of The Posen Library offers a rich sample of Ringelblum’s project, Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto: Writing Our History makes available the many documents of the Oyneg Shabes archive, including powerful eyewitness accounts, diaries, poems, jokes, sermons, and drawings. Edited by leading authority David G. Roskies and with a Foreword by Samuel D. Kassow, the book allows victims of the Holocaust to speak to us in their own voices.
Miraculously surviving the devastation of war, the Oyneg Shabes archive includes a range of writers—young and old, men and women, the pious and the secular, optimists and pessimists. Chronicling their own traditions and lives as well as the horrific destruction of their community, the contributors were determined that their murderers would not control history. They wrote with the explicit goal of countering German propaganda and preserving truth for future generations.
The new docudrama “Who Will Write Our History,” produced by Nancy Spielberg and directed by Roberta Grossman, now screening around the world, has brought the amazing story of Oyneg Shabes to public attention. Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto: Writing Our History, gives viewers comprehensive access to the writings themselves. These writings document in detail both the vibrancy and the brutal elimination of the Jewish community in Poland, providing personal, real-time perspectives of diverse victims who were resolved, in the face of genocide, to write their own story.
Advance Praise
“This is the most important collection of surviving documents written by Jews during the Holocaust.”
—Karen Auerbach, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
About the Author
David G. Roskies is the Sol and Evelyn Henkind Chair in Yiddish Literature and Culture and professor of Jewish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary and the editor of The Dybbuk and Other Writings by S. Ansky. He lives in New York City.
Publishing Details
Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto: Writing Our History
Edited by David G. Roskies
Foreword by Samuel D. Kassow
Published April 2019
280 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 ¼, 7 b/w illus.
ISBN: 978-0-300-23672-9
Hardcover $28
A companion volume to The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization