WILL THESE WORDS REACH YOU? THE RINGELBLUM ARCHIVE
IN NEW YORK
Based on: Jewish Historical Institute and Museum of Jewish Heritage
“And will these words reach you, who still remain? Faithful friend, will they bring them out into the light of day? For it is for you that I write.”
These words were written on 28 August 1942 by Lejzor Czarnobroda, during the Great Deportation from the Warsaw ghetto. He did not belong to the permanent circle of Oneg Shabbat collaborators. His diary, however, was one of many testimonies incorporated into the archive being created in conspiracy. It is from his question that the title of the new exhibition was taken.
The exhibition opened to the public on 18 September 2026, exactly 80 years after the day when the first part of the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, known today as the Ringelblum Archive, was found in the ruins of Warsaw. The route of the Jewish Historical Institute’s new travelling exhibition begins in New York. The exhibition was created in cooperation with the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute in Poland.
Telling Their Own Story
When the Germans sealed the Warsaw ghetto in November 1940, more than 400,000 Jews were confined within a small area of the city. Hunger, disease, overcrowding, and German terror became part of everyday life. Yet it was not only people’s lives that were under threat. The memory of their world, and the possibility of telling its story from the perspective of the victims themselves, were also endangered.
The historian Emanuel Ringelblum gathered around him a clandestine group of researchers, journalists, teachers, social and political activists, religious people, artists, and representatives of youth organisations. They usually met on Saturdays, hence the code name Oneg Shabbat, meaning “the joy of the Sabbath”.
The network of collaborators numbered around 60 people. They were divided by political views, attitudes toward religion, social background, and visions of the future. What united them was the conviction that the experience of Jews under German occupation had to be described by Jews themselves. Under conditions of extreme danger, they collected testimonies, conducted social research, copied documents, gathered underground press materials, letters, drawings, notices, food ration cards, and children’s writings.
Over the course of around three years, they collected nearly 35,000 documents. It is one of the most important surviving source collections concerning Jewish life during the Holocaust and an exceptional example of documentation created in real time by people whose experience the perpetrators intended to annihilate together with them.
As the exhibition curator Zuzanna Schnepf-Kołacz emphasises, the members of Oneg Shabbat were able to act together across religious, political, and ideological differences. Their story also shows that civil resistance can take many forms. In this case, one of them was the consistent documentation of reality and the preservation of testimony.
Documents in the Face of Crime
The significance of the Ringelblum Archive lies not only in the scale of the material collected. What is especially important is who created it.
A significant part of the sources on which the history of the Holocaust is based was produced by the German state, police, and military apparatus. These include orders, reports, administrative correspondence, deportation documents, and statistics. Oneg Shabbat created a different perspective. Jews documented their own lives while they were still being lived, recording both the operation of the German machinery of persecution and extermination and people’s responses, their everyday lives, fears, conflicts, mutual aid, culture, and attempts to understand what was happening around them.
Sara Softness, Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, points out that the Archive is a rare example of a situation in which Jews themselves ensured that the historical record would include their lived experience in real time, and not only the documentation left behind by the Nazi perpetrators.
This perspective is one of the most important elements of the exhibition.
Hiding the Testimony
In the summer of 1942, the Great Deportation from the Warsaw ghetto began. From 22 July to 21 September, the Germans deported around 265,000 Jews to the Treblinka extermination camp.
The exhibition in New York presents, among other objects, the German order of 22 July 1942 concerning the beginning of the
Eighty years after the discovery of the first part of the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, the exhibition Will These Words Reach You? The Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto opened at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. Prepared by the Jewish Historical Institute, the exhibition tells the story not only of one of the most important collections documenting the Holocaust, but above all of the people who, in the very midst of catastrophe, decided to record their own experience and pass it on to the future.
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