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 The "What We Could Not Shout Out To The World"
exhibition will for the first time display original documents
prepared and hidden by historian Emanuel Ringelblum and a few
dozen helpers who risked their lives in the Ghetto to save
whatever was possible for posterity.
Nazi occupiers in 1940 corralled some 400,000 Jews into a small
section of Warsaw most of whom were then sent to camps to be
killed or died from the conditions in the Ghetto itself.
The Ghetto was destroyed in 1943 when the Nazis, attempting more
deportations, were met with fierce opposition and a month long
uprising.
The exhibition marks the completion of many years of work to
organize and translate the archives, and often decipher the
documents that were partly damaged.
Ringelblum and all but three of his aides perished in the
Holocaust. But deep under the rubble of the burnt-down Ghetto
they left a one-of-a-kind, meticulous chronicle of
extermination.
"We want to help shout out all that they said, find a language
that will make this archive well-known and accessible," said
Pawel Spiewak, head of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw
where the exhibition is held.
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The Ringelblum archive, consisting of more than 35,000 pages,
survived the war and destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in 10 metal
cases and two metal milk bottles that were recovered in 1946 and
1950, respectively.
In 1999, the Ringelblum archives were assigned "Memory of the World"
status by UNESCO, along with such Polish documents as the original
manuscripts of composer Frederic Chopin and the treatises of
astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.
"We want to show that this archive deserves this title," Spiewak
said. "It has to be shown and that people have to see it."
The archives include documents in Polish, German and Yiddish, Nazi
proclamations and Jewish appeals, ghetto ration cards, tram tickets,
private letters and photographs depicting life in the ghetto.
(Reporting by Marcin Goettig)
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