(Jewish Group) This Secret Archive Documented Life in the Warsaw Ghetto

[Behind the Aegis]

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)

A train rushed through the snow of a Polish winter. Its destination: the Warsaw Ghetto. Its passengers: a group of terrified Jews. Suddenly, a Nazi guard threw a three-year-old child off the train and into the snow. Its mother jumped off the train, too, desperate to save her child. It was too late. She arrived at the ghetto desperate and mentally ill.

This tale of mother and child is just one of the devastating stories we now know about the more than 400,000 Jews who were packed into the Warsaw Ghetto. But it wouldn’t be known at all if not for a secret archive assembled by a group of Jews inside the sealed-off walls of the 1.3-square-mile area they were forced to live in beginning in 1940.

Between 1940 and 1943, these residents amassed a rich trove of documents and testimonies designed to tell the ghetto’s stories. And though thousands of pages of their Holocaust archive survive, even more may still be buried beneath the streets of Warsaw.

The Ringelblum Archive, as it is known, was the work of Emanuel Ringelblum, a Polish social worker who also established a soup kitchen, welfare programs and even a society for the advancement of Yiddish culture within the ghetto. Before Warsaw’s Jewish residents were forced to live behind ten-foot walls topped with barbed wire, Ringelblum had been an aid worker for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which helped Jews in Eastern Europe.

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