Summary 339
issuing the bulletin “Wiadomości i Komunikaty” (doc. 7). It was established by the leftist, Zionist youth organization, Hashomer Hatzair, and run by members of the strict leadership of the organization: Mordechaj Anielewicz and Szmuel Bresław, with the assistance of Mira Fuchrer, Towa Frenkel and others. Doc. 1 is in a very bad physical shape, but thanks to special methods of scanning, some parts that were previously illegible, have now been deciphered.
Doc. 2 is an anonymous manuscript covering January and February of 1941. Doc. 3 is a one-page typewritten bulletin of unknown origin covering only one day, January
13, 1941. Doc. 5 is a bulletin from radio monitoring that was prepared on the basis of notes from doc. 4. Both documents cover the end of June and beginning of July, 1941. Doc. 6 is a typewritten bulletin of unknown origin covering news from 28 and
29th August, 1941.
“Wiadomości i Komunikaty” (doc. 7) is the biggest one in this volume: parts or full
copies of more than 160 bulletins issued between November 1941 and July 1942 were
preserved. It was published and prepared by Hashomer Hatzair and was based mostly
on Polish news broadcasted by BBC from London and Radio Moskwa from Moscow
and Kujbyszew (there are mentions of two other locations in the headlines of bulletins: New York and Berno). The first part (November 1941–April 1942) was typewritten and probably circulated not only among the members and supporters of Hashomer,
but also other inhabitants of the ghetto as well. The second part (April–July 1942) is
almost entirely handwritten. Such a transition is due to the exacerbation of German terror aimed at Jewish underground movements (ca. 50 people were murdered on the night
of 18–19 April 1942). We can be sure that this shift resulted in diminished circulation
of bulletins in this period. There were however two typewritten exceptions to this rule.
The first was the special bulletin issued after a broadcast regarding the extermination of
Polish Jews that was aired on June 26th 1942. The second was the very last “Wiadomości i Komunikaty” bulletin issued less than a week before deportations from Warsaw to the
Treblinka death camp had started.
Doc. 8 is an anonymous manuscript that certainly came from a different source
than “Wiadomości i Komunikaty” as it covers the same dates as the latter and some
information is repeated in both.
Doc. 9 consists of various bulletins that were issued between November 1942 and
January 1943. Most were typewritten, but some were handwritten by Eliasz Gutkowski,
one of two secretaries of Oneg Shabbat, a clandestine organization gathering documents
for the Ghetto Archive. They contain news from the Eastern and Western fronts and a summary of Szmul Zygielbojm’s radio speech.
The last document probably dates from June 1942, so it is chronologically earlier
than doc. 9. It closes the volume, because to our best knowledge it is a very interesting example of a ‘false’ bulletin – it contains references to events that did not take
place. Some diarists remembered that such ‘false’ bulletins were issued and distributed
for money in the Warsaw ghetto, especially after “Wiadomości i Komunikaty” had to
diminish their circulation by switching from a typewritten to handwritten form and limit
the number of copies produced after April 1942. The existence of such false bulletins
is yet another proof for the huge popularity of news from radio monitoring caused by a yearning for any news from the war fronts.
