peculiarity of the address list, it might be that the document was not directly
connected with Oyneg Shabes’s activity. Could it be that it was a list of beneficiaries
of a ŻSS relief campaign? Similar problems arise with an analysis of
the next documents (documents 2–5), which contain lists of names as well as
various notes, some of which remain unclear today (particularly fragments
of documents 4 and 5).
Other lists of names that have survived among the ARG documents do
not enable one to answer questions about the character of the group, the
interrelations, its hierarchy, and the participation of individual people in
the organisation’s activity. Only an attempt to divide and isolate individual
groups within Oyneg Shabes and an analysis of other documents could shed
more light on the structure of Ringelblum’s group and the manner in which
it functioned. Who led Oyneg Shabes and how was the team managed? Some
testimonies mention members of the ARG senior management. That organ is
referred to in several different ways – the board, the executive, and so on –
but most of the time it had a similar composition. Aside from Ringelblum,
those mentioned most frequently are Hersh Was ser, Eliyahu Gutkowski,
Menakhem Mendel Kon, Shimon Huberband, Yitzhak Giterman, Alexander
Landau, Daniel Guzik, and Shmuel Winter.¹³ How were decisions made and
who was formally responsible for the team’s work as a whole? There are no
clear answers to this question. According to Ringelblum’s or Lewin’s recollections,
the most important decisions were made by a group of the closest colleagues
during an open discussion. It is difficult to say anything more about
the decisive influence of certain people on the direction of the organisation’s
activity. But it is certain that Wasser and Kon held important administrative
positions as the former was Oyneg Shabes’s secretary and the latter its
bookkeeper.
Much more is known about the participation of certain people in specific
activities of the team. Some of the co-workers were in charge of documentation
13 Hersh Wasser, “Archiwum Dra Emanuela Ringelbluma”, Przełom 3 (1946): 7; idem, AŻIH,
manuscript “Getto warszawskie”, 303/XX/583, p. 6. Meetings of Oyneg Shabes were organised
even during the Aktion in July and August 1942, for instance, on 24 August 1942, when
the following were present: Emanuel Ringelblum, Yitzhak Giterman, Leyzer Lipe Bloch,
Abraham Lewin, Eliyahu Gutkowski, Yehuda Feld, Shmuel Winter, Joseph Kaplan, and
Alexander Landau. See Abra ham A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto, ed. Antony
Polonsky, transl. Ch. Hutton (Oxford, 1989), p. 164.
