The Nazis expected the world to know about Polish Jewry only through Germany’s vicious anti-Semitic propaganda. Ringelblum and his comrades thought otherwise. Jews, they decided, not those who hated, slandered and ultimately murdered them, would be the ones to tell the story of both the rich and varied life and the ruthless destruction of the Jewish people of Poland. Oyneg Shabes undertook this unprecedented task “in one of the deepest circles of hell during one of the darkest hours in the history of mankind,” Culture.pl continues.

The record that the group produced “remains one of the most astonishing research projects in human history,” the Polish website adds. “An attempt to write history from within the most terrible event of the 20th century, it gave a voice to victims of the Holocaust, preserving a record of a world doomed to destruction.”  Through limitless courage and ingenuity, with full recognition that they would likely not survive and finally with a crucial dose of luck, the ad hoc historians ultimately succeeded in defying the dictum that the victors write history.

With much of the archive recovered, the testimony of the murdered Jews rather than the lies of their Nazi conquerors forms the accepted narrative of Polish Jewry under German occupation. The archive received international recognition in 1999 from UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), including it in its registry of the Memory of the World. It described the archive as “absolutely unique, both in terms of its origin and its historic value,” having been “collected by victims of the Holocaust in order to pass on information about the Holocaust to future generations.”

Oyneg Shabes members certainly had no illusions. “We have nooses fastened around our necks,” wrote the author Gustawa Jarecka, in one of the unearthed documents, as quoted by Kassow.

Still, Jarecka and her colleagues believed they were “noting the evidence of the crime,” just as Sherlock Holmes had in Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel, “A Study in Scarlet.” That book’s “dying victim,” Jarecka notes, “writes … one word on the wall containing proof of the criminal’s guilt.” Even though the effort probably “will not help us,” she believed that “the record must be hurled like a stone under history’s wheel in order to stop it.”

At the age of 20, he began history studies at the University of Warsaw, where he and other Jewish students organized the Young Historians Circle, which grew to about 40 members. To earn his doctorate in 1927, he presented a dissertation that was the first scholarly treatise on the history of Warsaw’s Jewish community. Though Jewish scholars had little possibility of landing university positions, Ringelblum remained active in Jewish historical circles, publishing his dissertation, a number of articles in Polish and Yiddish and a second book on Warsaw’s Jewish history. Meanwhile, he supported himself as a secondary school teacher. For the young historians, history studies were not mere academic exercises but a way of serving the Jewish community and helping to “defend Jewish honor by demonstrating that Jews lived in Poland by right and not by sufferance,” Kassow writes in the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe.

For Ringelblum and his cohorts, the study of Jewish history properly focused on the everyday life of ordinary Jews, not, as had earlier generations of historians, on the doings of famous rabbis. The historian’s sources, Ringelblum believed, should include the testimony and experience of a broad range of community members, forming what he called “history of the people and by the people,” according to Kassow. An association, the Yiddish Research Institute (now known as YIVO), which was devoted to documenting the Jewish experience in Eastern Europe, strengthened this point of view. This dedication to capturing and recording the lives of everyday Jews eventually found expression in the work of Oyneg Shabes.

The Wassers narrowly escaped death through a series of fortunate accidents. Auerbach was able to leave the Ghetto and survive on the “Aryan” side of the city, disguised by false identity papers and what was said to be a “non-Jewish” appearance. But the work she had begun with Oyneg Shabes continued after the war, first in Poland and, after she immigrated to Israel in 1950, during a long career at Yad Vashem as a leader in the effort to record and organize the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, including preparing them for use as evidence in the 1960 trial of Adolf Eichmann. She died in 1976 at the age of 73.        

“What we were unable to cry and shriek to the world we buried in the ground,” wrote 19-year-old David Graber — one of the three men who carried out the burial of the first tranche of documents — in a last will he composed in the final days of the Ghetto. Kassow further quoted him in his book. “I would love to see the moment when the great treasure will be dug up and scream the truth to the world.” Knowing how unlikely that outcome was, he hoped the treasure would “fall into good hands, … last into better times, [and] alarm and alert the world to what happened.”  His work complete, “we may now die in peace. We fulfilled our mission. May history attest for us.”    

Almost 75 years after the diggers raised the Oyneg Shabes archive from the earth, it continues to fulfill Graber’s hope and Ringelblum’s vision. “Out of [Ringelblum’s] initiative, his humanity, and … the great national and humanitarian fire within him,” Auerbach wrote in a memoir published posthumously, “grew a great national project … an example for Jewish generations, a model of Jewish humanism, of Jewish creative life, young and eternal.”