Inventory

 

Volume 1:

Letters on the Shoah

The Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto is a testimony to one-of-a-kind posthumous intellectual success. Despite the isolation, on the basis of incomplete, fragmentary and often late information regarding the fate of local ghettos, Ringelblum’s team was rather quickly able to identify the character of Nazi holocaust of the Jews. Not limiting themselves to the so-called macro-history, the researchers of the conspiratorial Archive of the Ghetto boldly reached for the issues of micro-history — fate of experience, spiritual world of individuals in the face of national catastrophe. The letters concerning the Holocaust, farewell letters of Jews from local ghettos depict despair and hope, rebellion and resignation, faith and uncertainty of dying people.

 

Volume 2:

Children — clandestine education in the Warsaw Ghetto

Both the entire Jewish population under the German occupation as well as the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto fought for survival in inhumane conditions. The main problems of this survival included taking care of children. Orphans, starving and emaciated children, exempted from family and school disciplines. Taking care of those children was one of the main aspects of civil resistance movement in the ghetto. In the movement volunteered both: scholars and ordinary ghetto teachers, often hungry themselves, prone to infectious diseases, struggling with cramped conditions, lack of books, notebooks, teaching aids. They tried to adjust their pedagogical knowledge to the previously-unknown conditions. These attempts lasted for a year until the holocaust of the ghetto. In the years 1942–1943 both the ghetto carers and children died at hands of the occupier.

 

Volume 3:

Accounts from Borderlands

In the third volume the reader will find testimonies from the years 1939–1942 documenting the situation on those territories of the Second Republic of Poland which between September 1939 and the German attack on USSR on 21st June 1914 were under Soviet occupation, and later under German rule. It concerns a bit over 50% of entire territory of pre-war Poland, inhabited by around 40% of Polish Jews. After September 1939, additionally at least 250 thousand Jews were staying on those territories. Predicting rising anti-Jewish repressions, they fled from Polish territories remaining under German occupation. Testimonies collected in the Warsaw Ghetto by the team of Emanuel Ringelblum in the majority of cases are being published for the first time.

 

Volume 4:

Life and work of Gela Seksztajn

In early August 1942, thirty-five-year-old Gela Seksztajn, an artist, painter, wrote, „I have to die, but I did my thing. I would like the memory of my paintings to survive.” The works of Gela Seksztajn and the story of rescuing her artistic achievements constitute a significant part of the history of Polish Jews, which survived thanks to Emanuel Ringelblum and his associates. This artistic legacy is a rarity among the materials of the Ringelblum Archive, which includes mostly written texts. But just as them, this preserved collection of artwork documents both fate of an individual or family and fate of entire community, which the author was part of in her life and death.

 

Volume 5:

The Warsaw Ghetto. Everyday life

Hidden on the eve of the holocaust, the texts concerning the Jewish Quarter in Warsaw were to constitute a testimony to everyday life of the closed district made up of the history of fate of its inhabitants. The texts compiled in this volume give names to the blurred faces of the ghetto photographs. They give floor to a woman selling vegetables, a bagging child sitting by the wall, an actress from a second-rate cabaret, a quarrelsome caretaker, but also civil workers, expert of the Talmud, literary men, social activists and pre-war academics and politicians. The texts from the Ringelblum Archive are priceless historical documents which give answers to the most difficult questions regarding the limits of humanity, but it also shows how the inhabitants of the ghetto lived, loved, what made them laugh and what kinds of books they read before going to sleep.

 

Volume 6:

The General Government. Accounts and documents

The volume includes various sorts of materials. The vast majority of them are accounts by displaced people and refugees from different towns and cities of the General Government, living in the years 1940–1942 in the Warsaw Ghetto. It also includes diaries, a journal and part of the correspondence assembled by „Oneg Shabbat” 4. There is also a small number of personal documents, such as individual permits, health certificates, Ausweisen. A separate place is dedicated to official documentation: German ordinances, reports and minutes of Jewish Councils (RŻ), Jewish Self-Help (ŻSS) and American Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC), official correspondence.

 

Volume 7:

Legacies

The volume includes materials given to the Ringelblum Archive by its close associates: Rachel Auerbach, Hersz Wasser, Eliasz Gutkowski and Menachem Mendel Kon. However, these documents do not include the kinds of materials that we usually identify with the activity of „Oneg Shabbat”. What we will not find here are: reportages, memorials, interviews or accounts. Instead, we can read their complements: an invitation to a concert, a certificate of having been deloused, a letter to parents. Documents being more about the tragedy of everyday life than about the panache of activity of the intellectuals confined to the ghetto.

 

Volume 8:

Territories incorporated in the Third Reich: The Reich District of Danzig-West Prussia, Ciechanów district, Upper Silesia

The volume is primarily comprised of accounts of refugees forced to leave their homes during the first weeks of the war and people included in the action of concentration of Jews in bigger centers on the Reich territories and then displaced from those territories to the General Governatore. In many documents, we can find memoirs even from the pre-war period, short outlines of the history of described cities or reports on preparations for the war.

Translations by: Sara Arm, Joanna Feldman-Kwiecień, Magdalena Siek, Marcin Urynowicz

 

Volume 9:

Territories incorporated into the Third Reich: Wartheland

The volume includes documents concerning northern and western territories of Poland, annexed in 1939 by the German occupier to the so-called Reichsgau Wartheland. The volume is comprised mainly of accounts describing the September Campaign and first months of the occupation. There are also descriptions of crimes committed by the German army entering Poland already during the first few days of the war. Not only do the authors of the accounts show persecutions of Jewish people, but they also talk about the situation of the Polish.

Edited by: Magdalena Siek

Translated by: Sara Arm, Joanna Feldman-Kwiecień, Michał Koktysz, Magdalena Siek, Marcin Urynowicz

 

Volume 10:

The fate of Łódź Jews, 1939–1942

The volume includes various materials: accounts of escapees from Łódź to Warsaw, especially from the first months of the occupation; letters of the Jews from Łódź to their families in Warsaw; official ordinances signed by Head of the Council of Elders Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski as well as scripts of his speeches; official price lists and lists of workplaces; food coupons and special currency of the Łódź Ghetto. What catches attention is a collection of anonymous poems: satires on the ghetto bureaucracy, office workers and Rumkowski himself.

A unique document of everyday life of the ghetto is a calendar for the year 1942 created by Szmul Rozensztajn. Anniversaries of all important events in the Łódź Ghetto were marked in it. They include: opening of the clinic, appointment of the department of investigation, foundation of the Secretariat for Requests and Complaints at the president’s office and, of course, birthday of the Head of the Council of Elders.

The book is conventionally accompanied by a CD with scans of original documents.

Edited by: Monika Polit 

Translated by: Piotr Kędziorek, Monika Polit

 

Volume 11:

People and work of “Oneg Shabbat”

Edited by: Monika Polit

Edited by: Aleksandra Bańkowska and Tadeusz Epsztein

 

Volume 12:

Jewish Council in Warsaw 1939–1943

Edited by: Marta Janczewska

 

Volume 13:

The last stage of resettlement is death: Pomiechówek, Chełmno on the Ner, Treblinka

Edited by: Ewa Wiatr, Barbara Engelking and Alina Skibińska

 

Volume 14:

Hersh Wasser Collection

Edited by: Katarzyna Person

 

Volume 15:

September 1939. Kalisz letters. Płock letters

Edited by: Tadeusz Epsztein, Justyna Majewska, Aleksandra Bańkowska

 

Volume 16:

Warsaw Ghetto underground press: Bund and Zukunft

Edited by: Martyna Rusiniak-Karwat and Alicja Jarkowska-Natkaniec

 

Volume 17:

Warsaw Ghetto underground press: Left Poale-Zion and Right Poale Zion

Edited by: Maciej Wójcicki

 

Volume 18:

Warsaw Ghetto underground press: Hashomer Hatza’ir

Edited by: Ewa Koźmińska-Frejlak

 

Volume 19:

Warsaw Ghetto underground press: Hechaluc Dror and Gordonia

 

Volume 20:

Warsaw Ghetto underground press: Right wing parties

Edited by: Marcin Urynowicz

 

Volume 21:

Warsaw Ghetto underground press: Communists and Trotskyists

Edited by: Piotr Laskowski and Sebastian Matuszewski

 

Volume 22:

Warsaw Ghetto underground press: Radio broadcast records

Edited by: Franciszek Zakrzewski and Maria Ferenc

 

Volume 23:

Diaries from the Warsaw ghetto

Edited by: Katarzyna Person, Zofia and Michał Trębacz

 

Volume 24:

Forced labour camps

Edited by: Marta Janczewska

 

Volume 25:

Writings of Rabbi Shapiro

Edited by: Marta Dudzik-Rudkowska

 

Volume 26:

Literary works

Edited by: Agnieszka Żółkiewska and Marek Tuszewicki

 

Volume 27:

Jewish Self-Help

Edited by: Aleksandra Bańkowska and Maria Ferenc

 

Volume 28:

Diary of Tzvi Prilutsky

Edited by: Agata Kondrat and Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov

 

Volume 29:

Emanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Ghetto

Edited by: Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov, Marta Janczewska and Eleonora Bergman

 

Volume 30:

Writings of Chaskel Wilczynski

Edited by: Eleonora Bergman

 

Volume 31:

Writings of Peretz Opochinsky

Edited by: Monika Polit 

 

Volume 32:

Writings of Rabbi Huberband

Edited by: Anna Ciałowicz, Alicja Gontarek and Eleonora Bergman

 

Volume 33:

Warsaw Ghetto II

Collected texts

 

Volume 34:

Warsaw Ghetto II

Collected texts

 

Volume 35:

Emanuel Ringelblum, pre-war writings

Edited by: Paweł Fijałkowski

 

Volume 36:

Sermons of Rabbi Shapiro

Edited by: Daniel Reiser

 

The Warsaw Ghetto. Oyneg Shabes-Ringelblum Archive. Catalog and Guide

Edited by: Robert Moses Shapiro, Tadeusz Epsztein

Introduction by: Samuel D. Kassow

Indiana University Press

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