Rarely can a dozen subterranean shoeboxes and a couple of corroding buckets be classified as buried treasure.
Yet those modest receptacles held something more precious than platinum — the jaw-droppingly thorough archives of the Warsaw ghetto.
Nearly 30,000 scraps of rotting papers, posters and even paintings were pulled from beneath Warsaw; the crowning achievement of historian Emmanuel Ringelblum. The scholar began recording the goings-on in occupied Poland almost immediately following the September 1939 outbreak of war and Poland’s rapid defeat, then expanded his operation as more and more fellow Jews told him their stories.
He eventually founded Oneg Shabbat, an organization of archivists recording the stories of the deported Jews, collecting Nazi decrees plastered on the walls, snipping out articles and saving even ration cards.
Portions of this “hidden archive” will be on display at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco through June 30 in an exhibition sponsored by numerous local and national Jewish and Polish organizations including the Jewish Community Relations Council, the Taube Foundation, the Jewish Community Endowment Fund, the Holocaust Center of Northern California and U.C. Davis’ Jewish studies program.
“People were doing something. They felt they were doing something important,” explained Eleonora Bergman, the curator of the archives and the deputy director of Warsaw’s Jewish Historical Institute.
“People wanted to do something that was using their skills. They just had a need to do something that normal people would do,” she said. “One man was asked to write the history of his Jewish community before and during the war. And, in fact, it was saving his life for a long time; he did not think about his everyday reality.”
The posters, diaries and histories are especially poignant because so very few of the men and women who wrote and recorded them survived the war. Ringelblum and his family were shot by the Nazis in 1944 after their hiding place beneath a Warsaw home was discovered. The Polish Christian who housed the Ringelblum family also was executed.
But the historian’s right-hand man, Hersz Wasser, did survive and helped to unearth and, at times, decode the documents. Now historians are able to piece together the nightmarish day-to-day existence of Warsaw’s Jews. Establishing the archive was, in itself, an act undertaken to maintain sanity. Within the archive, however, extreme behavior is recorded.
“There’s the story of a woman who always put a clean cloth on the table. There was nothing to eat, but the plates and cloth were always clean,” said Bergman, who made her first trip to the Bay Area this week. “She was preparing for a normal meal. She tried to keep whatever positives there were to be kept.”
A portion of the archive is comprised of letters sent to ghetto residents who had died or moved on. The postcards are rife with code language, noted Bergman. Since the Germans outlawed using Hebrew text, Hebrew words are often written out in Latin characters.
When the letter writers penned phrases such as “We are going where Uncle Chaim went,” it wasn’t good news.
The archive is also full of newsletters from Warsaw’s underground press. Bergman is perhaps most surprised at the high level of antagonism between Zionists and Bundists and the countless other factions of Polish-Jewish life, even within the confines of the ghetto.
While Wasser led researchers to the first two portions of the archive shortly after World War II, the third segment has never been discovered.
Its probable resting place — beneath the Chinese embassy — was excavated recently with the help of Israeli archaeologists. The Chinese allowed Bergman and her team four weeks to dig around (“and they permitted us to cut one tree”), but they did not find what they were looking for. In a few years, maybe they’ll try again.
Still, Bergman has her hands full with the voluminous documents that historians did manage to unearth.
“They wanted to show what happened to them,” she said. “They wanted to prove it. Not only to tell, but to show.”
“The Hidden Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto” is on display until June 30 at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, 3200 California St. Admission is free.