Samuel Kassow, Charles H. Northan Professor of History

Who Will Write our History: Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes Archive
Indiana University Press, 2007

Reporter: What is the Oyneg Shabes Archive?
It is one of the biggest examples of cultural resistance during WWII. Emanuel Ringelblum was a historian in the Warsaw Ghetto who organized a secret project that included about 60 people to document Jewish life under the Nazi occupation. This meant everything from collecting artifacts to writing essays. Of the 60 or so people, only three survived the war. Between 1940 and 1943, members of Oneg Shabbat buried the documents in milk cans, and only about 20,000-30,000 documents have been found and that is only half of what was buried.

It was resistance in the sense that the Germans thought that they would win the war and that they would be able to write the history of it. Jews knew that they were being murdered, and they wanted to prevent this one-sided history of the war. Thus the title of the book, “who will write our history.”

Reporter: How did you become interested in the subject?
Anybody who is interested in Eastern European history knows about this secret archive. It’s a major source of the social history in Poland during WWII. I was amazed that nobody had written about this story. I was the first one to try to write the story not just framed around Emanuel Ringelblum, but on the basis of something else – you cannot explain the Holocaust without knowing the background before the war. The Jews had a culture and they continued that culture in during the war and in the ghettos. I was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany, and my parents were holocaust survivors, so this is a topic that is very close to me.

Reporter: What kind of research did you do in order to prepare for the publication?
It took years to research. I reviewed original archival materials located in Poland and in Israel, as well as at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, and conducted several interviews.

Reporter: What would you like someone to take away from reading this book?
I think a sense that history matters, that history is a way of rendering a sense of dignity and identity to people who were murdered. That it is a way of providing some link of empathy between us and a generation that was destroyed.

Reporter: Now that this book is finished, what are your plans for future publications?
I am doing a number of things. I am preparing to co-editing a book that will appear in Yale University Press about ghetto writing. I am hoping to edit a book that will appear on Indiana Press about ghettos. I have been invited to be Shear Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto next year. I am still involved as consultant for the Museum of the History of the Polish Jews in Warshaw, which is set to open in April 2013.

Reporter: Who Will Write Our History has been widely successful and continues to be translated into different languages – to what do you contribute the book’s success?
I think it is a compelling story, and I think that people are beginning to realize that in order to understand the Holocaust we have to dig deeper. We are not just remembering faceless victims, but instead recognizing the individuality of those who died. I think my book restored some of this identity. The book also talks about the relevance of being a historian while so many people doubt the relevance of history. Emanuel Ringelblum was a historian who knew that he would probably die; he knew the importance of preparing information for future generations of people to uncover.

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