Shortly before he died in Maidanek in 1943, Isaac Schipper, a famed Jewish historian and one of Emanuel Ringelblum’s teachers, told a fellow inmate in that camp that what one knows about murdered peoples is usually what their killers choose to say about them. If the Germans were to win the war and write its history, Schipper believed, they might choose to depict the murder of European Jewry as one of the most glorious chapters of world history. Or they could well decide to obliterate the memory of the Jews altogether.
In order to foil these German plans to distort or obliterate the memory of Polish Jewry, Schipper’s student, Emanuel Ringelblum, organized the Oyneg Shabes archive in November 1940. Its agenda evolved over time, as the noose around the Jews tightened and as Ringelblum and his co-workers slowly learned about the Final Solution. As the grim fate of Polish Jewry became ever clearer, Ringelblum redoubled his efforts to ensure that even if the Germans murdered him, his family and most of his people, historians would write the story of Polish Jewry on the basis of Jewish, and not German sources. And he was convinced that when the time capsules of the Oyneg Shabes surfaced after the war, they would so shock their readers that future generations—Jews and non-Jews—would use their lessons to fight for a better world.
To that end Ringelblum imbued his associates with his deep faith in the mission of the archive. As Israel Lichtenstein and his two teenaged helpers David Graber and Nahum Grzywacz buried the first cache of the Oyneg
Foreword XV
