Oneg Shabbat: What to Do With the Ghetto's Memory?

Emanuel Ringelblum has been leading a secret network for several months — one he named Oneg Shabbat, after the Sabbath day when its members gather. In the streets and cellars of the Warsaw Ghetto, dozens of collaborators collect diaries, testimonies, statistics, posters, children's drawings, and correspondence. The aim is to document with rigour what the 450,000 Jews imprisoned behind the walls are enduring.

In early 1942, the first reports of mass killings carried out to the east begin filtering into the ghetto. Ringelblum knows, or suspects, that systematic destruction is approaching. The accumulated mass of documents represents an irreplaceable record — but also a mortal danger for anyone who holds or knows of it. If the archives are discovered, the entire network will be destroyed.

Ringelblum must decide what becomes of this collective memory: intensify the collection effort and bury the documents in milk cans and metal boxes beneath the ghetto's buildings, so that they survive where the people who wrote them may not; abandon the clandestine work, since its discovery would condemn every member of the network; or attempt to smuggle the documents westward, at the risk that the attempt fails and nothing is saved.