- Founded
- 1940
- Place
- Warsaw Ghetto
- Organizer
- Emanuel Ringelblum
- Holder
- Jewish Historical Institute
A collective archive
Historians, teachers, writers, social workers and activists collected diaries, surveys, reports, posters, drawings, underground publications and testimony so Jewish experience would survive even if the witnesses did not.
Research from inside the ghetto
Oyneg Shabes documented hunger, family life, religion, politics, work, children, refugees, smuggling, Polish-Jewish relations and German persecution while preserving disagreement and social diversity.
The Great Deportation
During the summer 1942 deportations, documentation became an urgent record of mass murder. The group gathered early information about deportations and Treblinka while many contributors themselves disappeared.
Burying the archive
Collections were hidden in metal boxes and milk cans in 1942 and 1943. David Graber and others left messages explaining their hope that future readers would understand what had happened.
Recovery after the war
Two major caches were recovered in 1946 and 1950. A third cache has never been conclusively found. The surviving materials are preserved by the Jewish Historical Institute.
Why it matters
The archive gives victims documentary agency and provides perspectives absent from German administrative records. It is essential evidence for Warsaw and occupied Polish Jewry.
Sources
This page draws on the institutional sources listed below.