Oneg shabbat
collective VOICE OF
a MURDERED PEOPLE
Paweł Sawicki
Defining the Oneg Shabbat group on a factual level is relatively simple. It is much more challenging to talk about when we start thinking about their work on a symbolic level. How would you define the symbolism and meaning of Oneg Shabbat?
On one hand, Oneg Shabbat was a group of people who collected primary documents so that, when the war ended, they and other historians could document the war years from the Jewish perspective - certainly, a noble, farsighted and very modern thing to do. But, on the other hand, when understood from the context of the hell these people were living in and the obstacles arrayed against them for survival, let alone for sophisticated research and intensive collecting, the members of the Oneg Shabbat were no less brave resistance fighters than those who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. As Samuel Kassow, author of the book Who Will Write Our History? said in an interview for my documentary of the same name, “You don’t need guns to fight, you could fight with paper and pen. This was a battle too. A battle for memory.” The members of Oneg Shabbat were giants of spiritual resistance - people who risked their lives to collect and record so that the truth would survive even if they did not.
What is the value of the sources created in this context? An archive gathered by victims in the most extreme situation who looked at it not from the big historical perspective, but from their own, very intensive, but very limited view.
The value of eyewitness accounts is incalculable, priceless. For so long, the story of the Holocaust was told from the perspective of the perpetrators: German documents, charts, protocols, photos and footage – history seen literally through a German lens. Historians asked important questions about how and why mass murder was committed. Yet for decades after the Holocaust, the voices of the people whose lives were devastated were absent from the reconstruction of the story. In fact, there was suspicion, even dismissal of survivor voices as important historical information.
Rachel Auerbach, one of the three Oneg Shabbat members (out of sixty) who survived the war, went to Israel in 1950. There she created and led the Survivor Testimony Department of Yad Vashem. She supervised or personally collected 50,000 survivor testimonies. During her productive tenure at Yad Vashem, Auerbach often clashed with the powers that be, mostly classically-trained historians who were skeptical about the reliability of survivor testimony.
Auerbach persisted. She had, after all, been “trained” by Emanuel Ringelblum, or rather inspired by him, to value the spoken and written words of everyday people: what they saw, what they felt, how they struggled to survive.
Roberta Grossman's new movie 'Who Will Write Our History' tells the story of the underground archive of the Warsaw Ghetto created by
the Oneg Shabbat Group, led by Emanuel Ringelblum.