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One of two milk cans in which the archives were discovered. (Photo courtesy of the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.)
The Oneg Shabbat Archive was the collection of records kept by a group of activists in the Warsaw ghetto from 1940 to 1943. The name of the group means “Sabbath Delight,” in reference to the Sabbath activities on Saturday afternoon, which is when the group met in secret.
Emmanuel Ringelblum, the founder and leader of the group, had been a scholar of Jewish involvement in the community before the war. Using his knowledge of archiving and history, he decided to chronicle life in the Warsaw ghetto. Rabbi Shimon Huberband, also a historian, helped Ringelblum in the early stages of Oneg Shabbat.
When the Germans sealed the ghetto in November 1940, the group became even more organized, transforming the archive into a complex underground operation. Dozens of people joined its efforts, including writers, teachers, and historians. At this time, the purposes of Oneg Shabbat were to record aspects of life in the Warsaw ghetto, including how the Nazis treated the Jews, and other events occurring in occupied Poland; to protect and preserve historically significant items such as underground newspapers, letters, minutes of meetings, and details of other secret Jewish organizations in the ghetto; and to document the testimonies of Jewish refugees from other ghettos and those who were released from or escaped prisoner-of-war or labor camps. These efforts were mainly funded by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
Once the magnitude of suffering in the ghetto escalated, the purpose of recording testimonies changed direction. The accounts began to describe the drastic changes in individual lives, the structure of the family, and social groups. Oneg Shabbat commissioned inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto and of other ghettos to write about various aspects of life, including the effects of ghetto life on children, culture and religion in the ghetto, and underground political organizations and movements.
In January 1943, as Ringelblum planned a new project that would summarize the experiences and records of the archive over its two-and-a-half years of existence, the group became aware of the mass murder of Jews in Eastern Europe that had been occurring since June 1941. In response to this revelation, Oneg Shabbat launched an effort to collect German documents that evidenced deportations and Hitler’s plan to murder the Jews. Oneg Shabbat spread this project to distant towns and sent reports describing the deportations to other Polish sites.
The group also wanted to convey the atrocities occurring in Poland to other parts of the world. While appealing to the consciences of those outside the Warsaw ghetto, Ringelblum continued his objective to record the events within the ghetto by urging people to store their diaries with Oneg Shabbat (but many people refused to hand over their precious journals). Starting in September 1942, Ringelblum also tried to obtain records of the activities of resistance organizations within and outside of the ghetto.
Oneg Shabbat put the archive into metal containers and milk jugs and hid these vessels around the ghetto in August 1942, March 1943, and April 1943. The first and second sets of the archive were found underneath the remains of a house at 68 Nowolipki Street four years apart on September 18, 1946 and December 1, 1950, respectively. Although there have been extensive searches for the materials hidden in April 1943, nothing has been found; this portion of the archive included documents of the resistance and the fighting. Materials found in the archive include underground newspapers, journals of leaders of Oneg Shabbat, including that of Emmanuel Ringelblum, and other documents.
Ask your students to imagine themselves in a position such as Ringelblum and Huberband’s. How did these people have the foresight to collect as many items as they could and to record such a vast number of testimonies and accounts of life? How must it have felt to replace trying to save one’s own life with trying to save the memory of one’s own people? The Oneg Shabbat archive is the most comprehensive set of original documents on the experiences of Polish Jewry in the Warsaw Ghetto and during the Shoah—historians and Jews today are extremely fortunate to have these sources. What can we do with them, however, other than putting them on display in museums, to honor the efforts of Oneg Shabbat and to appreciate the pre-war culture and the suffering of Polish Jewry?
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