deportations. The official language spoke of “resettlement to the East”. In reality, it meant transporting people to their deaths in Treblinka. Alongside this document, visitors can see, among other items, a page from Emanuel Ringelblum’s diary written in Yiddish.
As the deportations progressed, members of Oneg Shabbat realised that their own chances of survival were dramatically diminishing. The materials they had collected were therefore placed in metal boxes and milk cans, and then buried underground.
One of the original boxes in which the documents were hidden is today one of the most important objects in the New York exhibition. It is shown alongside original testimonies, diaries, letters, underground newspapers, children’s writings, artworks, food ration cards, and other traces of everyday life. The narrative is complemented by maps, infographics, animated projections, and film materials documenting the postwar recovery of the Archive.
Only a few of the people connected with Oneg Shabbat survived the war. Among them were Hersz and Bluma Wasser and Rachela Auerbach. It was the survivors who helped locate, after the war, the places where the documents had been hidden.
A “Treasure” Beneath the Ruins
The first part of the Archive was found on 18 September 1946 in the ruins of a building at the former 68 Nowolipki Street.
During a special preview presentation of the exhibition on 16 September 2026, Dr Michał Trębacz, Director of the Jewish Historical Institute, evoked the image of postwar Warsaw: an almost completely destroyed city in which Holocaust survivors searched beneath many metres of rubble for what they themselves called a “treasure”. They knew that somewhere under the ruins lay a testimony whose value extended far beyond the history of one group or one city.
The first cache was recovered from the ground six years after the ghetto had been sealed. The second part of the Archive was found in 1950. Searches for another, probably third, part brought no results. The surviving collection is now held by the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. It has been inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.
It was the 80th anniversary of the first discovery that became the point of reference for the new exhibition.
“Our exhibition opens exactly 80 years after the day when the miraculously preserved documents [...] were found by Holocaust survivors,” Zuzanna Schnepf-Kołacz said during the New York presentation. She also recalled the effort undertaken after the materials had been recovered to save and conserve them.
The New York exhibition strongly emphasises another aspect of the history of Oneg Shabbat: documentation as a form of Jewish resistance.
As the Museum of Jewish Heritage stresses, the authors of the documentation were not recording history from the perspective of later knowledge. They were doing so while events were unfolding. They did not know how they would end. What they did know was that someone in the future should learn what had happened.
Lejzor Czarnobroda’s question, “Will these words reach you?”, was not rhetorical. He wrote in a world in which Jewish Warsaw was being destroyed, people were disappearing en masse from the streets of the ghetto, and those documenting events could not know whether their notes would ever be found.
Eighty-four years later, visitors to a museum in New York are reading his words. In this sense, the exhibition itself becomes part of the answer.
Will These Words Reach You? The Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto can be seen at the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York from 18 September 2026 to 14 February 2027. The exhibition is curated by Zuzanna Schnepf-Kołacz and Marta Janczewska of the Jewish Historical Institute, with Marta Sarnowska as organising curator.
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