The discussion was aimed at discussing the challenges faced by the first documentarians of the Holocaust (active during the war) and a comparison of the experiences of Polish and French memory institutions in the post-war years. In the course of the discussion, a presentation was also given on the first accounts of the Holocaust available in the archives of these institutions. As Prof. Żbikowski noted, these materials are “the most authentic, heartbreaking, touching,” and therefore modern Holocaust scholars continuously return to them.
Katarzyna Person, head of the Polish and English edition of the Ringelblum Archive at the Jewish Historical Institute spoke about the subsequent stages of the work of the Oneg Sabbath Group, which included: collecting documents (among others, accounts of inhabitants of other towns, people returning from war wandering, testimonies from labour camps), developing materials and informing about the Holocaust (an underground news bulletin on the subject of murders and deportations from other towns, reports containing the estimated numbers of victims). The Ringelblum Archive is a unique source of current reports on the fate of Jews in occupied Warsaw from the outbreak of the war to the closure of the ghetto, i.e., in the period of growing antisemitic propaganda and consent to violence against Jews. This period, referred in literature as “continuous pogrom” - was displaced from the consciousness of the Warsaw Jews and the researchers of their fate through subsequent drastic events: the closure of the ghetto, indirect extermination, and ultimately the Holocaust. This displacement was also continued in post-war research, which focused primarily on the in-depth study of Holocaust history.