break in the ordering of the Archive and that it resumed its efforts as late as
in May and June.
The spring and early summer of 1942 is the period of marked intensification
of Oyneg Shabes’s activity. The information about the annihilation
of a growing number of Jewish communities coming in from the provinces
mobilised the team members to prepare news bulletins regularly and to commence
work on a comprehensive report about the German persecutions thus
far. It seems that initially the resumption of the ordering of the growing
collection resulted more from a necessity to facilitate the team’s access to
materials than from further efforts to secure the Archive. The lists made
by Wasser at the turn of June and July differed slightly from those made six
months earlier. The two main differences were the introduction of a new way
of marking the documents and the change in the manner of calculating the
length of texts. List 8c is a good example. It was a fragment of a longer list,
which originally might have had nine or more pages. Only two of its sheets
have survived, though: pages 2–3 and 8–9. The list enumerates various documents:
testimonies, official documents, and periodicals. Next to the testimonies
Wasser included surnames or codenames of authors or copyists, but
he did not mark the documents in the same way. All handwritten and typewritten
documents were also marked with information about their volume,
calculated using a rather mysterious conversion rate. Considering that a significant
percentage of the documents from the said list have survived in the
Archive, it was possible to determine their volume after typing them up into
a computer. Even though the outcome was ambiguous, it suggests that Wasser
converted the catalogued texts into typical (standard) typescript pages, each
approximately 30 lines long. The information about the number of typical
(standard) pages was written not only in the catalogue, but also on the catalogued
documents, in a visible place, usually on the top of the first page in
a uniform manner in Yiddish: for instance, “5 s. pages”, that is, five standard
pages. Moreover, Wasser sometimes added the date of the cataloguing, for
instance, “June 1942”, also in Yiddish. Neither of these markings was applied
during the cataloguing of periodicals and other typed documents. One sheet
of another list (8d), the layout of which is very similar to that of list 8c, comes
from the same period. It could be that the two lists originally constituted
one whole. The two next lists (8e and 8f), which come from the same period
and might have originally been one list, differ little from the previous ones.
