General Introduction
This volume contains accounts on personal experiences and observations in the years of the Soviet occupation and the first months of the German occupation. Almost all accounts come from refugees from Central Poland and were written in Warsaw in late 1941 and early 1942, after their return from the Borderlands. For the most part, the accounts were recorded by the Ringelblum Archive associates (they used copying pencil, and usually wrote in triplicate). Only in several cases do we have any information about the authors. For safety reasons, they did not record the personal data of their respondents and did not sign their own names. The only indications as to the identity of authors and their interviewers are annotations by Hersh Wasser, the secretary of the Oyneg Shabes, attached to the documents after the war. In two cases, additional information about the authors of accounts from Vilna were provided by the Israeli historian Israel Gutman; and confirmed by a pioneer researcher of the Archive, Ruta Sakowska.
According to Wasser, virtually all activists of the Oyneg Shabes were involved in collecting memories or personally interviewing people who arrived from the Borderlands. Materials they collected cover most major cities in that area; some accounts only contain information about German actions against the Jews in the summer and autumn of 1941.
Since it is impossible to accurately determine the date the accounts were recorded, the material has been arranged in groups according to subject andplace, and within each of those groups, if possible, in chronological order.
GENERA L INTRO D U C TION XXII
