Letters on the Shoah Publishing the Ringelblum Archive

The Oneg Szabat Program was founded by the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland. It was initiated to give access to the original documents, disseminate knowledge of the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto and to commemorate the members of the Oneg Shabbat group. The Oneg Shabbat group had preserved the memory about Jews imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto and about their death in the extermination camps. They decided to combat Germans through intellectual resistance and work. Their work, the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto is one of the most important testimonies of the Holocaust.

One particularly important part is to translate the documents of the Underground Archive into English. The materials are being translated from the original languages (Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, and German) and are thus made accessible to the public.The translation is being done in cooperation with other academic and research centers around the world. It is a large-scale project that will take many years to complete.

In course of the event, Monika Krawczyk (director of the JHI Warsaw) and Katarzyna Person (editor of the full complete edition of the Ringelblum Archive), will talk about the project itself, its significance and in particular about egodocuments in the archival collection, the methods and grounds for collecting them and the way in which they contribute to our understanding of the individual experience of the Holocaust.