Poland, 1940. As the Nazis tightened their noose around Warsaw’s Jewish community, Emanuel Ringelblum did everything he could to free himself or die trying.
Sadly, he did die trying, but not before forming one of the most remarkable secret societies in the annals of the Holocaust.
A teacher and historian by training, Ringelblum perceived the looming disaster and set to work. He organized dozens of Jewish writers, artists, rabbis and ordinary Jewish citizens to chronicle both Nazi oppression and daily life in the ghetto. Photos, dispatches, essays, official documents, drawings and other materials were squirreled away even as Germany systematically wiped out Warsaw’s Jewish community.
Those collected archives were then secretly buried in three sites just as the Warsaw Ghetto uprising began. Two of the three sites were later recovered, surviving the war and surviving Ringelblum. Today, those priceless artifacts are preserved at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.
But Bay Area Jews won’t need a transatlantic flight to see them. Fifty samples from the Ringelblum archives are coming to the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco in an exhibit titled “Scream the Truth at the World: Emanuel Ringelblum and the Hidden Archives of the Warsaw Ghetto.” The exhibit opens in the JCC’s KS Gallery on Friday, April 1.
“This being the 60th anniversary of the end of the war, we wanted to do something,” says Rabbi Yoel Kahn, director of the Taube Center for Jewish Life at the JCC. “The exhibit is an amazing array.”
The real articles won’t be moved from the Warsaw institute. Rather, the exhibit consists of facsimiles. But the power of the Ringelblum legacy remains undiluted in the exhibit, say organizers. Notes Kahn, “My first response upon seeing it was: Tragedy is captured in the ordinary.”
The “ordinary” includes ration tickets for potatoes, a Jewish armband, a child’s crayon sketch of Shabbat dinner and a last will scrawled on a notepad in Yiddish (“Poised on the border between life and death, more certain that I won’t live than that I shall … “).
Ringelblum was a natural for the job. He had been documenting Jewish life in Eastern Europe since 1925, thus recognizing the importance of preserving a legacy before the firestorm.
He named his underground team Oyneg Shabbes (Joy of Sabbath), so called because the group met on Saturdays. Their efforts to collate evidence of Jewish life in the ghetto began shortly after the German invasion of Poland and continued until early 1943.
In the wake of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the lethal efficiency of the “Final Solution,” the Germans ultimately began liquidating the ghetto. The members of Oyneg Shabbes collected their materials in caches of tin boxes and buried them in three sites. In September 1946, the first site was recovered, the second four years later. The third was never found intact. Only a handful of Ringelblum’s team survived the Holocaust.
The painful memories of wartime Poland have not fully faded, but in recent years, the Polish government has gone to great lengths to reconcile the past. Those efforts continue today, with the Polish consul general planning to attend the opening of the JCC exhibit.
“It’s significant that Poland is openly honoring and connecting to its past,” says Kahn. “They are embracing this as part of their history. This is an unambiguous message of support with the Jewish community and with Poland’s Jewish citizens.
Beyond the particulars of Polish Jewry and the Holocaust, the Ringelblum archives speak to the universal desire to live freely and to remember those who were lost.
“These people did not despair despite awful circumstances,” says Kahn. “It’s a model to me about what it means to have spiritual resistance. The exhibit reminds me of the famous Hannah Senesh passage, ‘Blessed is the match that is consumed in kindling flame.'”
“Scream the Truth at the World: Emanuel Ringelblum and the Hidden Archives of the Warsaw Ghetto” will be on display from Friday, April 1, through June 30 at the KS Gallery, located on the second floor of the JCCSF, 300 California Street. Admission is free. Information: (415) 292-1200.