The Ringelblum Archives: the Hidden History of the Warsaw Ghetto

The exhibition The Ringelblum Archives: the Hidden History of the Warsaw Ghetto reconstructs a little known episode, but one which is of key importance to our understanding of the Shoà (Holocaust) and the events of the Nazi occupation of Poland. The archives were complied by the Polish-Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum (1900-1944), working first on his own and then with the support of the clandestine organisation Oneg Shabbat, whose members risked their lives to safeguard the documents, burying them among the ruins of the ghetto in August 1942 and in March and April 1943. After the war, only two of these three caches were found, containing a total of 1,617 documents. The archives are now kept in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. In 1999 UNESCO listed the Warsaw Ghetto Archives (or Ringelblum’s Archives) on the Memory of the World Record.