The bulk of the material was written in Yiddish, which is why it was first published in Yiddish. The first fragments of Ringelblum's notes were published as early as 1948 in Bleter Far Geszichte. Work on translations also began shortly afterwards. The first Polish translation of Ringelblum's notes was published in the Bulletin of the JHI in 1951. The full version of the Warsaw Ghetto Chronicle, translated by Adam Rutkowski, was ready in the 1960s, but only published in 1983.
Documents published after the war were censored. The coordinator of the full edition, Katarzyna Person, PhD, tells the story. The texts were censored on at least three levels: political (preventive censorship, which was a common occurrence at that time in all institutions in Poland), associated with the shaping of the memory of the Holocaust, and the memory of the war in general. It is not only a matter of Poland and the Jewish community but also of sexuality, which was removed from both Polish and Jewish documents everywhere in the world.
In subsequent decades, editorial work continued, mainly in magazines: “Bleter Far Geszichte” and “Bulletin of the JHI”. Several books were also published. In total, however, in the first three post-war decades, only a small portion of the surviving documents were published, and by the end of the 1970s it was impossible to undertake broader work in this field.
The full edition of the Ringelblum Archive
Research work on the Ringelblum Archive began in the 1960s. Ruta Sakowska submitted a proposal to edit all the materials from the Archive. In the mid-1990s, she developed a concept for separating Archive documents into individual volumes. In 1997, the first volume of "Listy o Zagłady" ("Letters on the Holocaust") was published, and soon the next two volumes were prepared for publication. Eleanor Bergman, PhD: Ruta Sakowska believed that it was necessary to begin the multi-volume edition with documents that most strongly appeal to people, i.e. private letters, micro-histories. The second volume - documents concerning children and what happened to them - was also her original idea.
To speed up the editorial work, Feliks Tych, the then director of the Jewish Historical Institute, decided to prepare a new inventory of the collection, entrusting this task to a team headed by Prof. Tadeusz Epsztein. At the beginning of 2007, Eleonora Bergman, PhD, was appointed the director of the JHI and set about creating a new editorial team of the series. She managed to obtain funds from the Foundation for Polish Science - thanks to which we were able to prepare the “territorial” volumes. In turn, with the funds obtained from the Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation, we assumed systematic translations. A very fortunate coincidence for us was the establishment of the Polish Society for Yiddish Studies. Some of the translators are members of the group. An additional facilitator was the fact that since 2008 everyone could work on scanned documents. It was a phenomenal coincidence.
Several translations were performed by the employees of the Jewish Historical Institute. Thanks to a grant from the National Programme for the Development of Humanities in 1012, the translation project gained momentum - from that moment on it was issued several times a year.
One would spend days on a single word.
The translators encountered many problems and challenges at all stages of their work, resulting from the specific nature of individual documents - their subject matter, language and writing style, or the period of their creation. Most importantly, the majority of documents have survived as manuscripts. They were created by many people, not just regular collaborators of Emanuel Ringelblum. Reading them was extremely cumbersome for many reasons: because of the handwriting (they were often written in a hurry, on poor quality paper or in pencil) and the destruction of the first part of the Archive. As Sara Arm recalls: sometimes you couldn't read anything at all, and you had to spend days on a single word. Marta Dudzik-Rudkowska adds: the translator may assume that it will take a day to translate a page, but sometimes it is just about half a sentence, as it takes a day to search for the meaning of a word. And then it turns out that it is a typo because the translator misread the manuscript.