The Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, known as the Ringelblum Archive (ARG) and also by its code name Oneg Shabbat / Oyneg Shabbes, is the most important collection of testimonies about the lives and deaths of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Second World War.1 It was conceived and organized by the distinguished Polish Jewish historian Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum. His collaborators numbered approximately 50-60 people, among them journalists, economists, teachers, rabbis and writers, some of whom were the leading personalities of social resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto. Only three of the group survived the war.
The Archive was retrieved in parts from the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto. Part I (concealed on 3 August, 1942) was unearthed on 18 September 1946 and Part II (concealed in early February 1943) was found on 1 December 1950. It contains 2063 documents altogether, written in Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew and German. Among them are diaries, accounts from approximately 300 Jewish communities from all the territory of the occupied Poland, school essays, research works.There are some 70 photographs adn more than 300 drawings and paitings.The collection includes official German documents such as posters, identification cards, food ration cards. The
Introduction XXI
