The activity of
Oneg SHabbat constitutes the main subject of the exhibition.
builds credibility. What we are doing here, this is the work on memory. The biggest work was done by the people from Oneg Shabbat during the war, but we lacked those who could have transmitted it. It was only possible to find it. It was buried in milk cans, metal boxes. And this is how it survived, impersonally. If we would like to learn what happened during the war, we know it only from documents”.
And these documents – fragments of diaries, journals (original testaments of Izrael Lichtenstein, Gela Seksztajn, Nachum Grzywacz and Dawid Graber), compilations, photographs, memoirs, newspapers, personal documents, drawings and other – are for the first time being shown to the public. As emphasized by Piotr Duma and Aneta Faner, designers of the exhibition, the applied forms of expression and “visual silence” aim at emphasizing their meaning, multiplying the message they contain. They make it possible for the visitors to enter into a state of internal concentration, in which the construct does not obscure the words, and the words do not obscure those who wrote them. The exhibition honours those who, in spite of horrifying circumstances, decided that they would shape their memory themselves and that, as Professor Śpiewak emphasized it, “each voice, of each killed Jew, each Jew in agony, needs to be recorded. Not polished, not added. It must be presented in its actual form”.
Original milk can, in which the second part of the Archive was stored, constitutes the concentric point of the exposition. It has been placed in a narrow claustrophobic space formed from 35 tons of rubble, symbolizing the cellar of Borochow school at ul. Nowolipki 68, where Ringelblum Archive was buried.
The activity of Oneg Shabbat group constitutes the main subject of the exhibition. Biograms of subsequent members of the team were presented in the hall constructed from vertical raw tree trunks. At the wooden table representing the space of physical, intellectual and spiritual co-presence of this – as written by Emanuel Ringelblum – “brotherly union” – their contribution to the creation of the Archive was shown. Two timelines were superimposed on the next table: one relating to the events of WW2 and the other to the activity of Oneg Szabat. dwie osie czasu: odnoszącą się do wydarzeń II wojny światowej oraz działalności Oneg Szabat.
Photographs of the exhibition: Paweł Sawicki