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November 21, 2008
An archive of their courage
New exhibit depicts the daily life of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.
OLGA LIVSHIN
Faced with Hitler's Final Solution to wipe the Jewish nation off the face of the earth, many Jewish heroes fought the Nazis during the Holocaust – some with guns and home-made bombs; others with words and songs of courage.
The Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto found a scientific way to fight the horrors: they created an archive of Jewish life. The exhibition Scream the Truth at the World: Emanuel Ringelblum and the Hidden Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, which opened at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre on Oct. 29, presented parts of that extensive collection to Vancouver.
At the beginning of the Second World War, Emanuel Ringelblum was a Warsaw historian. His main interest was the history of Polish Jews. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and the deprivation of the Jews started to escalate, Ringelblum recorded everything he could in his journals. By the middle of 1940, with the Warsaw Ghetto already sealed and the deportations and executions in full swing, he realized that his efforts alone would not be enough. He wanted to preserve the facts of Jewish life in the ghetto and the horrors of the Nazis' occupation for future generations.
Ringelblum gathered a clandestine group of writers, teachers, historians and Zionist fighters. They called themselves Oyneg Shabbes (Joy of Sabbath). The goal of the group was to collect documents and personal testimonies of Jews in the ghetto. At first, they assumed that they themselves would be able to use those documents later to write the bitter history of the Holocaust. But, as time went by, many of Oyneg Shabbes' members realized they might not survive. Just before the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, they buried their accumulated archive in three locations, using tin boxes and milk crates.
True to their own grim predictions, only a handful of Oyneg Shabbes members lived to tell the tale after the war. Among the survivors was the secretary of the organization, Hersz Wasser. He showed the rescuers the burial places of the documents. The first hidden deposit was dug out in 1946, the second in 1950. The third cache was never recovered.
The Ringelblum Archive is now part of the collection of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. It comprises 1,692 items, written in Polish, Yiddish, German and Hebrew, plus numerous paintings, photographs and examples of underground press. In 1999, UNESCO, the United Nation Education, Science and Culture Organization, placed the archive in the Memory of the World Register. In 2001, 50 of its items were copied and assembled into a travelling exhibit, under the aegis of New York's Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial of the Holocaust.
The name of the exhibition is a quote of one of the Oyneg Shabbes members, Dawid Graber. At the age of 19, Graber wrote in his last will: "What we were unable to cry and shriek out to the world we buried in the ground ... I would love to live to see the moment in which the great treasure will be dug up and scream the truth at the world." Graber didn't survive and didn't see his will coming true, but his words still live.
"This exhibition is like a time capsule," said Frieda Miller, executive director of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, during the opening night.
The range of documents displayed is staggering, proving that the Jews of the ghetto continued to live with dignity and honor under inhumane conditions. While the Germans denied them every right imaginable and treated them horribly, the Jews taught their children in underground schools, organized hospitals and orchestras, painted flowers and wrote poetry. Being abandoned by the Allies, they lived, fought and died as human beings. And the exhibition reflects their lives and their deaths.
One of the items shown is a list of mortality rates in the ghetto. From November 1940 to September 1941, it shows the steady growth in the average daily rates (from 14 to 150) and monthly rates (from 445 to 4545). People died from sickness and hunger. They were killed for the smallest infractions of the rules. Rozenfeld, an artist in the ghetto, created a cycle of drawings called Pictures from the Warsaw Ghetto, one of which depicts the funeral fund collection and is included in the exhibit.
Despite mounting deaths and deportations, despite the deteriorating living conditions, despite the terrifying news of the death camps that trickled into the ghetto, life continued. The Jewish civilians resisted their oppressors in their own quiet way.
Ringelblum and his colleagues asked many ghetto denizens to contribute to the archive. Among the items in the exhibition are a list of tenants of one overcrowded apartment, a painting by art teacher Gela Seksztajn, a recipe for cooking frozen potatoes, letters, postcards and children's essays on their life in the ghetto. There are even posters of classical music concerts and invitations to art shows. Beside them are the German announcements of the executions and deportations, a food ration card and an underground news bulletin.
The exhibit doesn't only scream of horrors of the Holocaust. It's a tribute to the life force of the Jewish people, who didn't simply lie down and die. They lived and loved and left a stunning legacy of their courage and defiance in the Ringelblum Archive.
Scream the Truth at the World runs until Dec. 18.
Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer.
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