Witnessing Warsaw Ghetto
“The uniqueness of this collection also lies in its survival,” says Michal Trebacz, director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.
Emanuel Ringelblum, an historian murdered in the Holocaust, and the other brave members of Oyneg Shabbes, the clandestine project to gather documents and eyewitness accounts about the demonic Nazi occupation of the Warsaw Ghetto, ensured the abiding narrative would that of the victims, not the perpetrators.
So said Professor Samuel Kassow, a US historian born in a DP camp after World War II, addressing the launch of Underground: The Hidden Archives of the Warsaw Ghetto at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum (MHM) on November 14 – the first time the exhibition has been shown outside Europe.
Kassow quoted Israel Lichtenstein, a contributor to the Ringelblum Archive, whose will was among final testaments hidden with the documents. “We, the Jews of Eastern Europe, are a redeeming sacrifice for the Jewish people,” wrote Lichtenstein. “The Jewish people will survive.”
Lichtenstein and others “fought for their right to be remembered, not just as anonymous victims, but as individuals and as part of a proud and resilient people”, said Kassow.
Michal Trebacz, director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, which houses the extensive volumes of the Ringelblum Archive – viewed by The AJN in September during a study mission sponsored by the Polish government – said the 35,000 documents “uniquely depict life in the Warsaw Ghetto and the extermination of Polish Jews”.
The archive “tells the story in a richly diverse way through the voices of women, men, children and young people and from both private and official documents”.
“The uniqueness of this collection also lies in its survival,” he said, noting that when the Germans started liquidating the ghetto in July 1942, the documents were hidden in metal boxes.
Of three people who survived and had heard about the archive, only one knew the address of the hiding place. After much clamour, the first part of the archive was unearthed in 1946 – found in a box that is part of the MHM exhibition.
“I want to emphasise that today’s event is especially meaningful to me,” said Trebacz. “I was involved in combining and editing the diaries that were deposited in the archive and publishing them in Polish.”
Noting that Underground is the first special exhibition at the MHM’s new premises, the museum’s CEO Dr Steven Cooke told the gathering that, with the input of MHM senior curator Sandy Saxon, artefacts from Melbourne survivors augment the Australian exhibition. “It is an exhibition that intimately connects with the Melbourne story.”
For information on the MHM exhibition, visit mhm.org.au/underground
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