Who Will Write Our History?: Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto (Vintage) [Paperback]

Samuel D. Kassow (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 6, 2009 | Series: Vintage

In 1940, in the Jewish ghetto of Nazi-occupied Warsaw, the Polish historian Emanuel Ringelblum established a clandestine scholarly organization called the Oyneg Shabes to record the experiences of the ghetto's inhabitants. For three years, members of the Oyneb Shabes worked in secret to chronicle the lives of hundereds of thousands as they suffered starvation, disease, and deportation by the Nazis. Shortly before the Warsaw ghetto was emptied and razed in 1943, the Oyneg Shabes buried thousands of documents from this massive archive in milk cans and tin boxes, ensuring that the voice and culture of a doomed people would outlast the efforts of their enemies to silence them. Impeccably researched and thoroughly compelling, Samuel D. Kassow's Who Will Write Our History? tells the tragic story of Ringelblum and his heroic determination to use historical scholarship to preserve the memory of a threatened people.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“This may be the most important book about history that anyone will ever read.”
–The New Republic

“Brilliant. . . . Illuminating and heartbreaking. . . . A heroic act of synthesis and contextualization. . . . Kassow honors the efforts and restores the names of men and women who wrote though they knew their lives and those of their families and even their culture were doomed.”
–Los Angeles Times

“A rich and complicated study. . . . Surprising and extraordinarily moving.”
–Newsday

“Magnificent. . . . A stellar exploration of how history . . . can and should be preserved.”
–Deborah Lipstadt, author of History on Trial

“If there is one book that should be read this year (or any year) about the Holocaust it is Who Will Write Our History?”
–Jewish Book World

“A gripping biography. . . . We should be grateful to Professor Kassow for allowing us to share in Ringelblum’s heroic efforts.”
–Jewish Ledger

“One of the most important books I’ve ever read. . . . Kassow has created a stunning and brilliant social history.”
–Reform Judaism

“One of the most important studies on the Holocaust to have appeared in years.”
–Zachary Baker, Curator of Judaica and Hebraica Collections, Stanford University

“A stunning revelation of the enduring spirit of the decimated residents of the Warsaw Ghetto.”
–NUVO Weekly (Indianapolis)

“Without the faux romanticism or faux spirituality that often accompanies Holocaust historiography, Kassow is able to bring to life the tragic and moving story of these Jews doomed by Nazi fanaticism.”
–Tikkun

About the Author

Samuel D. Kassow is the Charles Northam Professor of History at Trinity College. He is author of Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia, 1884-1917 and editor (with Edith W. Clowes and James L. West) of Between Tsar and People: The Search for a Public Identity in Tsarist Russia. He has lectured on Russian and Jewish history in many countries, including Israel, Russia, and Poland.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 576 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (January 6, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307455866
• ISBN-13: 978-0307455864
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.2 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #227,575 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Documenting for the future, and struggling to comprehend the incomprehensible, October 3, 2009

By 

curiouser (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Who Will Write Our History?: Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto (Vintage) (Paperback)

This fine book is a difficult, but rewarding read. The second half of the book describes the work of the Oyneg Shabes, the organization founded by Emanuel Ringelblum and other ghetto residents to document the life of the Warsaw ghetto, which then turned to documenting the Nazi program of extermination. The first half of the book attempts to set Ringelblum's work in the ghetto in the context of his life before the war: his historical training and activities and his political commitments.

The first portion of the book is, as other reviewers have noted, slow going for non-specialists: it is difficult to keep track of the ideologically charged battles between religious and secular Jews; between Zionists and non-Zionists; between proponents of Yiddish, Polish, and Hebrew; and between different flavors of Jewish left-wing politics in interwar Poland. Nonetheless, Ringelblum's commitments become fairly clear. Politically, he belonged to the Left Paolei Zion, a party which endorsed Marxist-style historical materialism, but combined it (with some tension) with a deep commitment to Yiddish and to radical change in the Diaspora. Ringelblum's approach to history was in keeping with his political commitments: following his senior colleague Isaac Schiper, he wished to write the history of ordinary Jews. Ringelblum's early work focused on the relationship between Jews and Poles, in particular on the economic position of the Jews and the lives of poor Jews in Poland. The Jewish historian's mission was to defend the historical role of Jews in Polish society by objective presentation of the evidence. (p.89)

Even before WWII, Ringelblum combined his historical research and teaching with work in social organizations that served the Warsaw Jewish community. After the foundation of the Warsaw Ghetto, he was a key member of the Aleynhilf (Jewish Self-Help Society), which worked independently of (and often in opposition to) the Judenrat. Deeply involved in the aid work of the Aleynhilf, Ringelblum worked closely with the "house committees," which, working within individual courtyard apartment buildings, attempted to organize the life of the ghetto. He also used his position there to support his work organizing the Oyneg Shabes archive, which chronicled first the life and then the death of the ghetto. According to Kassow, Ringelblum's diary, begun early in the war, served as preparation for the larger collective enterprise. (p.148) Ringelblum drew participants in the archive from as much of the political spectrum as would cooperate with him, with substantial representation from pre-war communal leaders and those involved in the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) and the LPZ before the war. Of the participants, only three survived the war, and helped unearth the carefully buried archives from the ruins of the ghetto.

Oyneg Shabes had multiple goals, which evolved over time. Drawing on Ringelblum's work before the war, it was an effort to collectively document the history of the community: to document Jewish resilience and Nazi persecution. Despite circumstances, the archive attempted to capture shades of gray: for example, the complicity of the Jewish police in persecution and cases in which Germans and Poles provided aid and sympathy to Jews. Over time, as information accumulated in the ghetto about the true extent of the Nazi extermination program, Oyneg Shabes' focus changed, to documenting and publicizing the death camps and publishing that information (with the aid of sympathetic westerners and Poles) outside Poland. Finally, the archive became a record of the destruction of a civilization.

Kassow's book is at its strongest reporting on the archive itself: how it was collected and what the surviving portions contain. Ringelblum and his colleagues were amazingly systematic, identifying the questions they wanted to answer and the sources that would be most appropriate to answer them. Some questions were best answered by interviewing ordinary or specially placed individuals; interviewers were assigned to these cases. Some questions demanded documentation: well-placed sources in the Judenrat bureaucracy helped provide it. In the early years of the ghetto, the work focused on everyday life, from soup kitchens to smuggling to house committees. By late 1941, increasing attention went to documenting extermination: reporting on deportations from the ghetto and interviewing escapees from trains and camps. After the Great Deportation of the summer of 1942, Ringelblum and his collaborators knew that the end of Warsaw Jewry was near, but continued to report even as they looked for ways to escape to the Aryan side of Warsaw.

Kassow describes in detail much of the material from the archive. In doing so, he provides a vivid portrait of the life and death of the ghetto. We see a particularly articulate, self-conscious group of reporters struggling to comprehend the unanticipated and largely unprecedented catastrophe in the midst of which they found themselves. Even after the rebellion, Ringelblum spent his final months, underground in the bunker where he was eventually arrested, writing a history of Polish-Jewish relations during WWII - filled with a sense that many Poles had proven indifferent to the fate of the Jews, but ever conscious that Poles had saved his life during the war and were hiding him now.(p.379)

The arc of Ringelblum's work echos the fate of Warsaw's Jews.(p.386) As the community grew in importance in the interwar years, he documented its history with pride; as it attempted to retain its cohesion in the early years of the ghetto, he and his colleagues reported its resilience; as the Germans destroyed the community, he tried, against tremendous odds, both to report resistance and ask why it had taken so long for violent resistance to begin. His steadfastness in the face of this tragic arc provides us with a vivid, painful picture of events. Kassow has done justice to his story.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Civilization in Warsaw Ghetto, August 9, 2009

By 

Henry H. Bradley, Jr. "the voice of reason" (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Who Will Write Our History?: Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto (Vintage) (Paperback)

A detailed report on the life, education and activities of Emmanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes organization he headed, culminating in their detailed gathering of the history of Polish Jews throughout the course of the establishment and ultimate destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. Despite fearsome hardships, and the transportation and murder of most of the hundreds of thousands of ghetto inhabitants who managed to survive starvation and disease, Ringelblum and his associates collected and preserved every sort of historical information they could obtain, commissioning hundreds of personal articles and testimonies by writers from all stations in life, and buried the records in three locations shortly before their own murder. Through the efforts of a very few survivors, the records were recovered from two of those locations after the war, and shine a painfully clear light on one example of the mechanics of inhumanity, as systematically chronicled by some of the intended victims of the Hitler regime. This volume is encyclopedic in scope, and has lovingly rendered in meticulous detail the history of the history-collection, and of the daily lives within the ghetto of those who accomplished it.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Documenting a genocide, April 11, 2010

By 

Tom (Rochester, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Who Will Write Our History?: Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto (Vintage) (Paperback)

I first became familiar with Emanuel Ringelblum when I read his excellent "Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War." Historian Ringelblum was the leader of the Oyneg Shabbos Archive group which documented the suffering and ultimate destruction of the Jewish inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto. "Who will write our history?" is an extremely well-researched history of Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabbos Archive and their heroic effort to record the hellish existence of the ghetto's victims. Samuel Kassow's book is an important and moving contribution to Holocaust literature.