archive of the Ghetto Fighters Museum in Israel. In 1955 the first handwritten catalogue of the Oyneg Shabes was completed. The following decade the Jewish Historical Institute microfilmed the collection and sent a copy to Yad Vashem in Israel.
Despite these efforts one might well ask whether in those first post-war decades, the reception of the archive justified the high hopes of Ringelblum, Graber and Jarecka. Did those documents throw a “stone under history’s wheel?” Did they become the posthumous “educators of the future?” Did the three survivors of the archive walk around “with medals on their chest?”
Unfortunately for many years the archive remained largely unnoticed, especially in the English-speaking world. To be sure, John Hersey’s 1951 novel The Wall, with a main character loosely modelled on Ringelblum, sold well; many streets in Israel bore Ringelblum’s name; here and there speakers at Holocaust memorials referred to precious documents buried in milk cans. But on the whole, apart from a small circle of professional scholars, there was little interest in the Oyneg Shabes. Many of its materials did not easily comport with how Jews in Israel, the United States, and elsewhere wanted to remember the Holocaust after the war. The reality of Jewish life under Nazi occupation—which included not only heroism and dogged resilience but also the grim, humdrum details of everyday life in the ghetto and many instances of moral breakdown and decline—was not as compelling a subject as stirring accounts of heroic ghetto fighters or religious martyrs.
In first decades after the war, some sections of the archive were published by the Jewish Historical Institute in Poland, often in bowdlerized versions dictated by political conditions. Valuable Hebrew translations appeared in Israel. But little was published in English. A faulty Warsaw edition of Ringelblum’s diary served as the basis for an incomplete English version that was edited by Jacob Sloan and that appeared in 1958.3 In 1986, Yad Vashem published an English-language selection of writings from the archive whose editing and translation left much to be desired.4
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