The Ringelblum Archive. Warsaw Ghetto is the fifth in a series of scholarly editions of documents from the Ringelblum Archive — the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto published by the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. From among the 35,000 pages of documents which constitute the Archive, we have chosen 71 texts, originally written in Polish and Yiddish, and concerned with social life in the Warsaw Ghetto. Though composed in the same place and at roughly the same time, the diversity of these materials serves as at least partial evidence of the scale of the documentation work undertaken by Emanuel Ringelblum and his collaborators. In the majority of interviews, survey questionnaires, memoirs, diaries and private letters that constitute this volume, the history of the ghetto is shown through the singular life stories of its inhabitants, representing the whole spectrum of wartime Jewish society. At the same time, although created within the framework of a single research group, each text clearly reflects the individual story of its author.
The volume has been divided into eleven chapters, each focusing on a different aspect of ghetto life. Within the chapters, texts are grouped chronologically, showing the evolution of everyday life in the closed quarter.
Chapter One: Images From the Ghetto provides an introduction to the Warsaw Ghetto, a glimpse of its streets, as seen through the eyes of its inhabitants. Among the materials gathered in this chapter, particularly notable are the texts by journalist Stanisław Różycki, who was commissioned by Ringelblum to provide the Archive with a report on the physical space of the ghetto. Różycki crafted a series of impressions which, even though often shocking in their brutality and harshness
