As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett said in an interview for 'Who Will Write Our History': “The marvelous thing about the Ringelblum archive is that those documents were written on the very spot and in the very moment of the events that they record. And they were created by those whose experiences they communicate. And that makes the material in the Ringelblum archive absolutely unique, an extraordinary antidote to the German perspective.”
An important part of the film is the idea of having this meeting of two completely different kinds of sources - coming from the world of the perpetrators and the victims. There are many difficult images of death in the film, and somehow they are balanced by the stories from the Archive. Was that the purpose?
The film is, in a way, a dialogue between Nazi sources (including footage and photographs taken by Nazi propaganda units in the Ghetto) intended to show the world how dirty and heartless the Jews were, and the first-person voices of the Jewish people imprisoned in the Ghetto. The main point or question of this conversation is literally: who will write our history? Will the Germans, who are out to destroy us, be the authors of our story? Or will we, the Jewish people in all our complexity - good guys and bad guys, rich and poor, religious and atheist, collaborators and resistance fighters - be the ones who get to tell our own story? The film is, I hope, a way for the voices of the Oneg Shabbat to finally be heard loudly and clearly. That’s what they wanted. As one young member of Oneg Shabbat said in his last will and testament, which he placed in the cache of the Archive that he helped to bury during the Great Deportation, “I hope to live to see the moment when the great treasure will be discovered and scream the truth at the world.”
What was the most challenging part of creating the script and the whole idea of the movie?
It took six years to make the documentary 'Who Will Write Our History?' based on Samuel Kassow’s book of the same name. Kassow spent ten years researching and writing his book, which encompasses inter-war Jewish life, Ringelblum’s biography and the story of the creation, discovery and preservation of the Oneg Shabbat Archive. Kassow’s book is a weighty bible.
Scholar Sam Kassow and daughter/actor Serena Kassow. Photo Credit: Anna Wloch