Shabes on August 3, 1942, they all wrote last wills and testaments, even as they knew that their lives hung by a thread.
David Graber wrote that
What we were unable to cry and shriek out to the world we buried in the ground . . . I would love to see the moment in which the great treasure will be dug up and scream the truth at the world. So the world may know all. . . . We would be the fathers, the teachers and educators of the future . . . we may now die in peace. We fulfilled our mission. May history attest for us.1
Another writer for the Oyneg Shabes, Gustawa Jarecka, voiced her hope that summer that the words she wrote would turn into “a stone under history’s wheel.” A longtime socialist, she had long believed that the direction of that wheel had been towards humanism and decency. But now, as she saw Germans murdering children on the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto, she realized that her optimism had been misplaced. But there was one slight ray of hope. If her writings surfaced, then perhaps those who read them would be so shocked and so moved that they would do all they could to push history in a different direction.2
Of the sixty or so people who worked in the archive only three survived the war. But against all odds, much of the Oyneg Shabes archive was retrieved. As one of those three survivors, Rachel Auerbach, mordantly remarked, “We had more luck saving documents than we had in saving people.” That first cache of the archive, buried in August 1942 in ten tin boxes, was found in September 1946 after an intense search in the rubble of the former ghetto. The two milk cans of the second cache were accidently discovered by Polish construction workers in December 1950. A search for a third cache, which according to Hersh Wasser was buried just before the outbreak of the ghetto uprising in April 1943, was unsuccessful. So not all the documents of the Oyneg Shabes have survived. But those that did tell an incredible story.
Most of the documents remained in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, although some found their way to YIVO in New York and to the
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