Only until 7 January, the exhibition ‘More Important Than Life: The Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto” organised in cooperation with the Jewish Historical Institute.

In 1940, the German occupiers limited much of Warsaw and displaced the Jewish population there from the city and surrounding villages and towns. In order to document these events for the outside world and for posterity, historian Emanuel Ringelblum initiated an unprecedented campaign to collect materials documenting life in the ghetto. A collective of scholars, writers and activists working in conspiracy called themselves Oneg Shabbat (The Joy of Shabbat), and the collection is known today as the Ringelblum Archive.

The archive assembled by Oneg Shabbat is a unique and outstanding example of Jewish self-determination during the Holocaust and represents the first attempt to directly document the mass murder of European Jews initiated by the Germans and then to archive this documentation.

The original purpose of Oneg Shabbat was simply to document life in the ghetto, which housed Jews from Warsaw and other regions of Poland, Jews deported from Germany and from countries under German occupation – including some who had converted to Christianity – as well as Roma. They all tried to survive in the oppressively overcrowded conditions of the closed ghetto in the centre of Warsaw. As many as 450,000 people were forced to live together in inhumane conditions.

It is not known how many people worked at Oneg Shabbat; it is known that only three of them survived the Holocaust. However, most of the archive has been preserved, buried in a hiding place under the ruins of the ghetto.

The archive contains some 35,000 sheets of notes, diary entries, essays, photographs, drawings, official documents and other testimonies of everyday life. It is stored at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1999.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński