the Warsaw ghetto. This collection includes printed announcements from
public institutions, organisations and firms, blanks, forms, leaflets, prescriptions,
stationery, bills, tickets, packaging, labels, and so on. Unlike the other
catalogues of archival materials, which contain information about materials,
most of which have survived in the ARG, the fate of documents from this list
remains unknown. It should be assumed that this portion of the Archive’s
materials was not buried in either 1942 or 1943. Consequently, it seems even
less probable that it was included in the third part of the ARG. It is also difficult
to ascertain the date of the list itself, which must have been formulated
no earlier than at the beginning of January 1942.
The purpose of the individual lists is not entirely clear. It seems that
they were produced with different needs in mind, depending on the time
of a given list’s creation. Planning to divide the collection, the team tried to
facilitate identification of individual texts and authors (copyists) by making
appropriate annotations on the documents and assigning codenames to the
authors. Before summer 1942 such methods were gradually abandoned, as
the team concentrated on collecting information about the character, contents,
and volume of the documents. Even though it might seem otherwise,
the attempt to introduce a universal conversion rate to estimate the volume
of the texts was not made exclusively for the purpose of paying remuneration.
For using such a conversion rate, Wasser could estimate the scale of the
future study prepared by the Oyneg Shabes team. It might seem surprising
that all efforts connected with converting the pages of the manuscripts to
standard pages, determining the number of described towns and ghettoes,
estimating the total volume of the collected documents, and other items, were
made on the eve of the liquidation campaign, that is, at the beginning of the
summer of 1942.
An analysis of the surviving lists suggests that the cataloguing of the
ARG encompassed only the materials selected for burial in late July 1942. Yet
even in that part of the ARG not all documents had been catalogued, as the
team had listed only a selected portion of the collection. Of course, the actual
number of the catalogued documents was much larger than the currently
known one, as a substantial number of the lists deteriorated in the ground.
For instance, there are no surviving lists of private collections submitted to
the Archive (deposits). Perhaps those collections were added to the other documents
at the last moment and there was no time to catalogue them.
