Summary 365
Central Refugee Commission and which are now crucial in reconstructing the history of the Holocaust in smaller localities. During his work for the Archive Wasser was accompanied by his wife, Bluma, who became one of the most prolific copyists of Yiddish documents for its collection.
After the end of the war, it was Wasser, as the only surviving member of the Archival team who knew the location of the concealed archives, who played the key part in unearthing the first part of the Underground Archive in September 1946. In the following months he was the only one who was able to identify the documents and prepare their first catalogue. Simultaneously, in circumstances which are still unclear, Wasser began to take out some documents from the collection and send them to YIVO in New York, most likely seeing it as a way of safekeeping them in face of a difficult situation in post-war Poland. The YIVO Archive now holds 49 envelopes in which, under assumed false names and return addresses, 244 documents sent by Wasser reached New York between April and September 1947. Among them was a copy of Wasser’s wartime diary but also key documents of the Holocaust in occupied Polish, including a testimony of Jakub Grojnowski (Szlama Winer) from the Chełmno death camp (HWC 4.1). Despite his attempts to emigrate to America, Wasser himself never followed his documents to YIVO. He emigrated from Poland to Israel in 1950 and died there in 1980.
The volume contains all previously unpublished documents from the Hersch Wasser Collection which originated in the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto (excluding those copies which can be found in the Jewish Historical Institute’s Archive). It also includes other previously unpublished documents from the Collection which were created during the war and deal with the Holocaust. Documents contained in this volume were divided thematically into ten chapters. The first contains the diary of Hersch Wasser. Chapters 2 to 7 deal with various aspects of life in the Warsaw Ghetto. Chapter 8 is dedicated to Jewish communities outside Warsaw. Chapter 9 contains information on forced labor camps. Chapter 10 consists of personal documents of Hersch Wasser from the second part of the Ringelblum Archive which were not included in volume 7 of this series: Spuścizny.2
Translated by Katarzyna Person
