I would guess that the answer you give is similar to mine. The satisfaction that comes from helping to give voice to the people who lost their lives in the Shoah, the knowledge that you are helping to ensure that their names and experiences, their individuality will not be forgotten, far outweighs the despair that comes from dealing with the facts, the words, the images, the incomprehensibility of their suffering.
Why should people today take a look at all the documents gathered by the Oneg Shabbat group?
After the war Rachel Auerbach could not understand why she survived. Like many survivors, she felt guilty that she lived while so many others had perished. The only meaning/reason she could find for her survival was to dedicate her life to making sure the world would not forget her murdered people. In 1946, there was a commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. She stood up and admonished the survivors present that day that there should be no more speeches, talk was meaningless. All available resources and energy needed to be focused on finding and unearthing the archive in the rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto. Rachel Auerbach believed that the diaries, letters, postcards, poems, commissioned works on the Ghetto street, women in the Ghetto and so much more buried in the Oneg Shabbat Archive, was the collective voice of a murdered people, the time capsule of the destroyed civilization that was Polish Jewry. She was right.
Interview by Paweł Sawicki, the editor-in-chief of the Memoria magazine.