President Andrzej Duda, in a letter on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the establishment of the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute thanked the employees of this institution for taking care of monuments and documents of the past, for their research, education and popularizing efforts. “Thank you for being the great custodians of memory and the Institute a treasury of knowledge about the social, political and religious life of Polish Jews”, wrote Duda.

The President of Poland expressed his appreciation and gratitude to the management, employees and collaborators of the Institute, whose “importance for Polish and world heritage, science and culture cannot be overestimated.” He also thanked for the contribution of the institution “to the contemporary revival of the Jewish community in our homeland”.

“I recall the meeting with you five years ago during the opening of the permanent exhibition “What we could not shout out to the world”, presenting the activities of the underground group “Oneg Szabat” with real emotions. Hidden, and excavated after the war, literally from under the ground, the collections and studies by Emanuel Ringelblum and his associates, constitute the foundation on which the idea and ethos of the Institute are based, although the institution’s traditions go back even further – to the pre-war times, when this building adjacent with the Great Synagogue in Tłomackie, hosted the Main Library and the Institute of Judaic Sciences. President Duda added that that temple, written in golden letters in the history of the joint struggle of Jews and Poles to preserve their identity and regain our independent state, was demolished by the Germans”.

“The Holocaust annihilated almost all the Jewish inhabitants of the capital and the entire Republic of Poland. This genocide, unprecedented in the history of the world, will always arouse dread and terror. But the Nazis did not manage to destroy memory and truth. Thanks to heroes such as Dr Ringelblum, the evidence of their crime survived and was used in post-war investigations and trials; they are also the subject of research conducted to this day. And this building also survived – a silent witness of the ghetto extermination, the barbarity of the occupiers, the heroism of the dying and the epic of survivors who avoided extermination in German death factories”, wrote the president.

Adrian Andrzejewski