 "Photo: Kevin McQuade")
"Hello? Can you hear me?" said Samuel Kassow, as he took the podium in the softly-lit auditorium.
Kassow, a professor of history at Trinity College in Hartford, gave his lecture, "A Historian in the Ghetto: Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes Archives," Tuesday in the Konover Auditorium at the Dodd Center. The lecture, which was part of the Ivry lecture series, focused on the collection and recording efforts of the Oyneg Shabes resistance group in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust, and particularly the efforts of one man: Emanuel Ringelblum.
Ringelblum was a political radical, social worker and historian prior to the outbreak of war in Europe. He was heavily involved with the efforts of YIVO, the Jewish Scientific Institute, to document the history and social fabric of European Jews - a history that was marginalized by the governments of the time.
"If the Jews know about themselves," Kassow said, describing the philosophy behind YIVO's information gathering, "they'll acquire the determination to fight against discrimination." This knowledge required the collaboration of the scholar and the ordinary person, Kassow continued, a methodology which shaped the actions of Oyneg Shabes during the war.
The efforts of Oyneg Shabes, which numbered 60 members at its peak, were directed toward a similar goal: the gathering and preserving of history, and not just the history of massed resistance and dramatic movements. The history of the everyday Jew in the ghetto was the focus of the group, whose name means "joy of the Sabbath" in Yiddish. The artifacts of common living became priceless treasures to the underground historians of Oyneg Shabes, whether they were diaries and photographs or ticket stubs and candy bar wrappers. These collections were eventually buried, in milk cans and tin boxes, in the hopes that one day they would be found.
The efforts that the members took to obtain and preserve these items were astounding: Kassow described teachers and students working together to bury one of these time capsules as Nazi S.S. troopers stood 50 yards away. The opened the capsule back up as they moved further, adding a hasty postscript, then another - getting every thought and memory down, no matter how trivial.
Why would such miscellany be important? How could the men and women of Oyneg Shabes devote so much energy to history at such a trying time? This quest, said Kassow, was far more important that it seems to us initially.
Reportedly, as he was taken to be killed in Riga, Latvia, historian Simon Dubnow called out "Yidn, schreibt!" translated as, "Jews, write this down!" Dubnow's words became the mantra for a people's historical survival.
Kassow described teams of Nazi photographers in the Warsaw Ghetto, recording the Jews in their state of inhuman degradation, for the purpose of "history." The role of Oyneg Shabes became that of defender of a people - to reflect their lives, their strength and weakness, their essential humanity so that the future would know what happened in those five hellish years.
"History was not just study," said Kassow. "History was a national mission."
The particular history collected, through documents augmented by personal interviews, ranges from the sobering, dryly factual to the achingly personal. One percent of the Warsaw Ghetto children in May 1942, read one survey, remained in the city by November 1942. Included in one of the time capsules is a man's last will and testament: "I've put my whole soul in this archive. I just want to be remembered. I want my wife to be remembered. I want my daughter to be remembered."
The archives show everything, even the degradation and collapse of the people who unwillingly became cogs in the Nazi's system.
"Detached historians can always make the distinction between victims and perpetrators," Kassow said, but for the Jews in the ghetto, the distinction became blurred - a confusion which appears in the archives. A Jewish man named Perla, describing with wretched rage the sport-like shooting of a child by a Jewish policeman, wrote that "a people that produces monsters such as these deserves what it's getting."
Certainly, thoughts like these, full of despair and "a world of choiceless choices," as Kassow described it, would not have been remembered had they not been written down in the moment. They could have been censored, "but Ringelblum believed that the archive had to tell the whole truth," Kassow said. Without the efforts of Oyneg Shabes, this world of a people laid bare would have been lost.
Despite the horrors related by the Oyneg Shabes archive, there is a powerful current of optimism as well. For, said Kassow, in order for these people to have made these archives, they must have thought they'd be found. They must have believed in a future. "To write was to say, 'the Germans will lose.' And if you didn't believe that, then what was the point?"
To write, for Oyneg Shabes was to defend one's self, one's people and humanity. To write was to make a testament: something will survive. Not everything will be lost.
Contact John Bailey at
John.C.Bailey@UConn.edu.
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