Who Will Write Our History?

In November 1940 the Nazis sealed the Warsaw Ghetto with four hundred and fifty thousand Jews inside. Days after that, a group of journalists, scholars and community leaders set up a secret undertaking. At its head was the historian Emanuel Ringelblum, and the group’s code name was Oyneg Shabes. What they did was resist with paper rather than weapons: documenting daily life in the ghetto. They buried sixty thousand pages so that the archive would survive even if they did not. Just before the uprising of April 1943 they hid the material in three separate caches. Two were found in 1946 and 1950; the third is still underground. The documentary uses that archive together with interviews and dramatisations. Roberta Grossman’s ninety five minute film, a joint Polish and American production, was completed in 2018.