Kulawy [Lame] = [Schwartzbard?], Ogolony [Shaved] = Schwartzbard),³⁷ or other
designations. Several close colleagues of Oyneg Shabes received codenames
in the form of the street names on which they lived in the ghetto (Nowolipie
Street = Lewin, Nowolipki Street = Gutkowski, Orla Street = Shainkinder,
Wołyńska Street = Opoczynski, Zamenhofa Street = Shimon Huberband, etc.).
For himself Wasser invented a designation in the form of a combination of
numbers, which denoted the number of the building and flat the Wassers lived
in on Muranowska Street – 6/15. The most difficult to identify are the codenames
made up of full first names and surnames which have nothing to do
with the actual personal data of an author or copyist. It seems that the name
Stanisław Różycki served in precisely that way. It could very well be a pseudonym,
but one that was given by the team members or at least was known to
them. It was consistently used in the texts and descriptions by that author.³⁸
One also needs to consider the fact that some pseudonyms and codenames
were not invented by Ringelblum’s colleagues. It seems that the pseudonym
of Szlamek Winer, an escapee from the Chełmno death camp who
figures as Jakub Grojnowski in the ARG documentation, is a good example. For
many years the scholars of Ringelblum’s Archive were unable to determine the
real name of the author of the most important testimony regarding Chełmno.
It may be that even the Oyneg Shabes team did not know his true surname.³⁹
It needs to be stressed that an overview of Ringelblum’s closest colleagues
revealed that they were the ones for whom the codenames which were the
most difficult to decipher were reserved. None of them was referred to by a full
surname, as those were used mostly with regard to more distant co-workers
of Oyneg Shabes. Moreover, many people who worked for the team did
not have pseudonyms or codenames. One does not know the codename(s)
of, for instance, Rachel Auerbach, Shmuel Breslav, Stefa Szereszewska, Israel
Lichtenstein, or Bluma Wasser.
37 The last three nicknames appear only in Yiddish; see Table No. 3.
38 ARG I 455 (Ring. I/428) and I 869 (Ring. I/427). One’s suspicions are based, for instance,
on the fact that Stanisław Różycki is not named in the Oyneg Shabes cashbook despite
the fact that he was an author of many texts for the ARG.
39 Hersh Wasser did not know Szlamek’s real surname. The matter was finally settled in
the following article: Przemysław Nowicki, “Zanim ‘przybył z zaświatów’, nazywał się
Winer. Krąg rodzinny i konspiracyjny Szlam ka, uciekiniera z ośrodka zagłady w Chełmnie
nad Nerem”, Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały 5 (2009): 163–192.
