murdered in Auschwitz, and those who were isolated in the Warsaw ghetto
died in Treblinka. Documents included in this book tell about the last two
years of their lives.
In early 1943, Emanuel Ringelblum wrote about the material accumulated
by Oyneg Shabes: “The most valuable are essays on towns big and small
[. . .] written with feeling. Often one wonders how the writer can relate with
such epic calm the most tragic events that occurred in the shtetl. But the calm
is a calm of a cemetery, the calm that is the result of the feeling of resignation
caused by terrible suffering. The only people who can write that way are
those who know that you can expect anything from the Germans.”⁴
There are approximately 400 of those essays in the Archive, and this
volume includes roughly one third of them. Each one preserves a record of
the most terrible experiences of the expellees, the experiences still multiplied
in the overcrowded and hunger-stricken Warsaw ghetto where many of
them were eventually sent, and then shared the fate of its residents. We are
very grateful to our translators for their meticulous rendering of the complicated
language, matter and structure of the texts into English. Our special
thanks go to Barry Smerin, who verified all the translations from Yiddish
and Hebrew.
The Editors
4 See ARG II 263/1 (Ring. II/233). The translation is taken from Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis 2007, pp. 269, 270.
