documents. In 1999 UNESCO recognized Oyneg Shabes as one of the world’s most important archives.
In the late 1990s Dr. Ruta Sakowska and Dr. Feliks Tych of the Jewish Historical Institute started to publish a complete edition of the Oyneg Shabes archive. This was not a simple task. The sheer mass of materials, the diversity of topics, the fact that the documents were hurriedly buried before Ringelblum had a chance to properly organize them, presented editors with formidable challenges.8 The editors decided on a thematic approach as well as the proper transcription of all documents in their original languages.9
Between 1997 and 2000 three volumes of the archive appeared in Polish. Ruta Sakowska edited Volume One (Letters on the Shoah) and Volume Two (Children—Secret Schooling in the Warsaw Ghetto) while Andrzej Żbikowski edited Volume Three, Accounts from the Borderlands.
After the publication of Volume Three in 2000 a hiatus ensued. The ZIH shifted its focus temporarily to digitizing the archive and reorganizing the all-important catalogue, which dated from 1955 and which suffered from many omissions and inaccuracies.
The monumental publication project resumed in Warsaw in 2008 under the direction of Dr. Eleonora Bergman and Dr. Tadeusz Epsztein. Katarzyna Person, and more than fifty other scholars and translators joined the project with every subsequent volume. Instead of the facsimiles of original documents contained in the first three volumes, these new volumes included DVD
Foreword XIX
