“When we were looking for filming locations and actors, and watched the subsequent versions of the edit, we focused on technical issues and professional challenges. Today, following the subsequent premieres in various cities, we can only hope that we have helped create a film that will outlive us, because it tells a tremendously important story,” says Anna Różalska, interviewed alongside Nancy Spielberg. Różalska and Spielberg are the producers of the film Who Will Write Our History (dir. Roberta Grossman).

Dr Emanuel Ringelblum – a Jewish social activist. During the war, he decided to stay in the Warsaw Ghetto with his family. The originator and guardian of the Oyneg Shabes group that collected materials describing life in the Warsaw Ghetto and other ghettos. A Marxist. After the liquidation of the Ghetto, he went into hiding on the Aryan side, and was subsequently betrayed and handed over to the Nazis. Together with his wife and son, he was executed in the ruins of the Ghetto. Their bodies were never found.

Oyneg Shabes – a group of a few dozen people who, while in the Ghetto, documented the living conditions of Jews, Nazi politics, the state of consciousness of the imprisoned, and Polish-Jewish relations. The name of the group means ‘the Joy of the Sabbath’. The archive created by the group is now available to view at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and is gradually being published – to date, 36 volumes of documents have been released. Only two of the three parts of the archive were uncovered. The part buried at 34 Świętojerska Street on the eve of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising has not been recovered yet. It is probably located on the grounds of today’s Chinese Embassy.

Since 2017, the Oneg Szabat Program commemorates the Oyneg Shabes group and the Ringelblum Archive.

Paulina Małochleb: Are Emanuel Ringelblum and the archive he created recognized in the West?

Nancy Sp