Scholar David Roskies said in an interview for my film that Ringelblum “became great because of Hitler, it was the war that brought out his greatness.” Before the war, Ringelblum earned his PhD with a study of the Jews of Warsaw in Medieval times. He was an early and enthusiastic participant in the YIVO. He was an active and loyal member of his political party, the Left Poalei Zion. He wrote books and articles and supported his family by teaching history at a Jewish girls’ school in Warsaw. In 1938, he went to work full-time for The American Joint Distribution Committee helping impoverished Jewish communities throughout Poland. All these various aspects of his personal and professional passions and experience coalesced in the Oneg Shabbat Archive.
Only eight days after the Warsaw Ghetto was sealed, Ringelblum held a meeting of people whom he carefully selected from across the religious and political spectrum. He told them that it was up to them to write, collect and record the story of the war from the Jewish point of view. At first, they thought most of them would survive to write this history after the war from the primary documents they had collected. As it became apparent that few if any of them would survive, Ringelblum encouraged archive members to work faster, as Rachel Auerbach wrote: “to finish before it was too late.”
Even in the darkest hour, Ringelblum kept the members of the archive on track for what he correctly perceived as a monumental historical mission. Without his vision, his organizational skill, his commitment to objective historical methods, and his love of the Jewish people, the 60,000 pages of material in the Oneg Shabbat archive that survived would simply not exists. And, as a result, we would know next to nothing about the Warsaw Ghetto from the perspective of the people who were incarcerated there. Ringelblum should be a household name. He’s not. I hope that my film will help to put Ringelblum on the heroic pedestal where he belongs.
Is there a story in the Archive that left a personal trace in you?
Many people have asked me, how is it possible to be immersed in such painful material for so many years? People must ask those, like you, who work at Auschwitz the same thing.