lacking prints and official documents. The list does not introduce any further
classification of the materials.
It should be noted that the first catalogues listed only one copy of a given
testimony, proving that the cataloguing had been selective from the beginning.
The aim was not to list all files in the Archive, but to collect information
about the titles and types of the materials. Why was the cataloguing conducted
in such a way? It seems that there might have been several reasons,
but most probably Oyneg Shabes wanted to divide the collection by means of
extracting one copy of each document. The method of marking the documents
seems to confirm this suspicion. If material existed in several copies, only one
of them was marked and very often it was the duplicate. Wasser simply did
not mark the remaining copies. After all, the Archive was not divided but it
remains unknown why. The plan to extract a part of the collection and hide
it in a separate place in the ghetto or to smuggle it to the “Aryan” side certainly
changed in the following months. Perhaps the situation in the ghetto
after 22 July 1942 made it impossible to execute the original plan to divide
the collection.
At the turn of 1941 and 1942 the team still intended to divide the collection,
which may be inferred, for instance, from the cataloguing conducted
by Wasser from the second half of 1941. Then he marked groups of files, from
about a dozen to twenty odd, with a combination of successive numbers and
dates, for instance, “107/1 January 1942”, “108/1 January 1942”, “109/1 January
1942”. The materials catalogued in the individual groups were usually marked
analogously with the addition of the number under which a given manuscript
figured in the catalogue. During that cataloguing Wasser also marked
the duplicate if a given document had several copies. The only lists made during
that cataloguing that survived are those with the numbers 107, 108, and
109 (early 1942) (see document 8b), but the marks on the documents show
that there were also lists numbered 104 and 105 (1941).³⁴ There is no information
about any other lists made during that cataloguing time. It seems that
after the January 1942 cataloguing endeavour the team took a few months’
34 See list No. 104: ARG I 241 (Ring. I/28), I 458 (Ring. I/1220/88), I 1134 (Ring. I/6), I 1154 (Ring.
I/663); list No. 105: ARG I 668 (Ring. I/71), I 758 (Ring. I/10), and I 1162 (Ring. I/658) – on
those documents Wasser wrote not only their file number, but also the codename of their
author (“Kampel”).
