The film, in comparison, can only be a haiku. The hardest part of making this film, or really any historical film, is what to leave out.
For every diary entry or literary passage from the Archive that is in the film, there are hundreds of equally moving and revealing passages that have been left in folders on my computer. Sadly, there are also entire categories of materials that are absent from the film. For example, there are dozens of profoundly moving poems in the Archive. There are jokes and collections of songs of beggars. Ringelblum also made sure that Oneg Shabbat members interviewed refugees who were pouring into the Ghetto from hundreds of towns from the provinces outside Warsaw. Ringelblum instructed the interviewers to write detailed reports about what they learned from the refugees about what happened to the Jews when the Nazis arrived in their towns. And what happened to the Jewish architecture, artifacts and libraries that were also destroyed by the Nazis in the process of destroying Polish Jewry. Although Ringelblum called the resulting reports the “jewels of the archive,” they are not represented in the film.
Despite, or because of, the brevity of the film, I hope viewers will be inspired to go to the sources: the Jewish Historical Institute where the Oneg Shabbat Archive is housed and, of course, Samuel Kassow’s historical masterwork Who Will Write Our History?
In the film - especially in the elements with actors - we can see some strong personalities. It shows that it was not the work of one man, but the whole group. Yet, could it all have happened without Ringelblum?
Without Ringelblum there would be no secret archive of the Warsaw Ghetto. The survivors of the Archive, Rachel Auerbach and Hersh Wasser, spoke about Emanuel Ringelblum as “the pulsing motor of a great machine.”
Roberta Grossman