While discussing the issue of Polish–Jewish relations as presented in the materials from the Ringelblum Archive, it should of course be stressed that those texts were written before the deportations to death centres, the wave of escapes from the ghetto in the summer of 1942, and the uprising in April 1943—that is, the events that proved a real test for occupied Warsaw. Emanuel Ringelblum’s final study written in late 1943 or in early 1944 — Polish–Jewish Relations during the Second World War — in a way answers the question about how these texts would have appeared had they been written from the post-deportation perspective.30 This work, which is a synthesis of Polish–Jewish relations during the Nazi occupation, can be regarded as a full implementation of the principles and scientific methodology devised in the course of Oyneg Shabes’s activity, the crowning achievement of the activity of the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto.
One of the most striking proofs of the Archive team’s striving for full objectivity is seen in its creators’ attitude towards the Germans. In his description of Oyneg Shabes’s activity, Ringelblum claimed that even though most of the texts included in the Archive dealt with German crimes against the Jews, “in the theses developed and in the oral guidelines we kept stressing the need for constant objectivity, even toward our greatest enemies, and the need for the objective presentation of the attitude of the Germans toward the Jews.”31 This statement found its full confirmation in the texts included in this volume. The materials talk about gendarmes who murder children smugglers, Gestapo functionaries escorting prisoners to Pawiak Prison, savage and cruel guards in forced labour camps. But there are also descriptions of “good Germans”. Jewish refugees from Germany describe their neighbours as “rather kind”.32 In other texts there are gendarmes who help child smugglers, sometimes acting more sympathetic to them than the Jewish policemen or the Polish “blue” police.
This is how Różycki sums up his reports: “The reader might be struck by this overly one-sided, bleak, and negative depiction. Dark colours only. Nothing positive, lofty, or noble. I observe the street closely, and I know it like
Introduction XXXII
