the writing of memoirs. Testimonies and reports were produced especially for the Archive. Autobiographical materials and private letters were collected, too. The authors visited ghetto cafés, dance halls, cemeteries, and paupers’ homes to gather material for their texts. This volume contains highly personal testimonies as well as professional and objective scientific studies.
Most of the texts included in this volume are examples of microhistory — the history of everyday life, where the life of the ghetto is presented through the prism of the fate of its individual residents. “During this war every Jew is a separate, individual world”,6 wrote Emanuel Ringelblum. In line with the Archive’s principles, the texts talk about people from almost all spheres of the ghetto society. Consequently, there are physicians, teachers, artists, social activists, shop owners, and tenement superintendents as well as large-scale and petty smugglers, prostitutes, and thieves. The authors of the texts are as diverse as their heroes. Even though the texts were written within the framework and guidelines of one research team, each text reflects its author’s individual story and personality. Among the authors are both women and men, both young and much older. Some of the authors are uneducated, while others are prominent scholars. Some are native inhabitants of Leszno or Nalewki Streets, while others moved into the newly established ghetto from more affluent or poorer quarters. Still others fled to Warsaw or were resettled there.
A fragment of Ringelblum’s diary regarding the activity of Oyneg Shabes reads: “The main principle of our activity was to be comprehensive. Our second principle was objectivity. We were trying to tell the whole truth, no matter how bitter. Our photographs are faithful, unretouched.”7 Ringelblum intended Oyneg Shabes to be a collection of sources for “a future tribunal which will bring the Jewish, Polish, and German perpetrators to justice after the war.”8 Consequently, as historian David Roskies has observed, no later texts about the Warsaw ghetto reality were as brutal as those written for the Archive.9
Introduction XXIV
