Oyneg Shabes Archive

In 1940, the Warsaw Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum created the secret Warsaw ghetto archive, code-named Oyneg Shabes to preserve secrecy. He brought together a group of more than sixty people, secular and religious, rightists and leftists, imbued by a national and moral mission of collecting documents, artifacts, and photographs to record Jewish life under Nazi occupation and to ensure that posterity and future historians would know the Jews on the basis of Jewish, not German, sources. Two caches of the archive, buried in August 1942 and February 1943, were discovered after the war. A third was lost. Of the sixty members of the Oyneg Shabes there were only three survivors. Because of ghetto archives like the Oyneg Shabes, historians can write about Jews in the Nazi ghettos not as faceless, anonymous victims but as individuals and members of a community that still reflected prewar values and culture.