Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Kassow provided an interesting look at the Warsaw Ghetto, and the efforts of Emanuel Ringelblum, a Jewish historian, to chronicle what happened in it througout the Second World War through a collaboration with other Jews in an archive known as the Oyneg Shabes. The first third of the book details Ringelums pre-war life, including his political views, and was quite tedious to read, as it felt to be rather repetitive. After all, there is only so much that can be written about a historian, even if he has radical political and cultural views (which Ringelblum did to an extent). After that, it quickly increases pace, as the Oyneg Shabes works to record every aspect of the Warsaw Ghetto, from the smugglers who crossed the walls, to the way soup kitchens operated, even the types of music the Ghetto produced. It provides excellent details on anything to deal with the Ghetto, and has extensive footnotes and bibliography, totalling nearly 100 pages, for further research.

MR Kassow proves himself a God among mere mortals. Unlike many historical volumes, Kassow's book reminds us of the dire importance of historiography and of the amazing capacity of history in shaping our lives. In exploring Ringelbaum's resistance Kassow illuminates the true courage and defiance of the Jewish, and the scholarly and perhaps more important method of resisting NAZI oppression. Count this as a historical piece that not only chronicles a fascinating story and time period, but also actually has something significant to say. Historians have never come of as vital to society as Kassow reminds us they are and have proven to be in this book. I'm out of breath by the complexity of this work, and of its constant reminder that no matter who we are, we can never be silenced.
WOW

This book is important not just because of its main subject matter, the Oyneg Shabes archives, but also and more importantly for its larger more universal themes, questions, and the meanings they each evoke and force upon the conscience of all aspiring and struggling ethnics: themes about to what extent a struggling people can (if it can at all), and how it might (if there are any avenues to do so at all) go about, finally defining itself, for itself. If identity is destiny, then the Oyneg Shabes archives, more than anything else is about the destiny and deeper yearnings of the Jewish people.

In this sense, the book is very much about how to define the complex and paradoxical Moibus strip of assimilation around which all group identities rather precariously and sensitively seem to revolve. As one traces his route around the strip in the mirror, every inch of the way he sees himself begin on the inside of the strip (assimilated) and miraculously no matter from where on the strip he might begin, nor how much he tries otherwise, or how carefully he watches his movements, he always ends up on the outside of the strip: Always ever the "outsider" in a reality not of his choosing, and invariably ending up as part of Jean Paul Sartre's proverbial discarded "Other."

Through the most meticulous and carefully constructed and preserved history, under the most extreme of conditions, this book struggles with, and then attempts to answer the questions that all Jewish history has raised both for itself and as a proxy for other struggling peoples. It is what the many parables in the Old Testament speak about so elegantly: why it is that no matter how carefully the process is watched and managed, no matter how well the rules of societal existence are obeyed, (or even commandeered) despite all of their best efforts, Jews (and by extension all other similarily targeted and challenging ethnics) end up on the outside of the national drama, looking in?

The short answer is a rather confusing paradox about reality itself: They end up that way because the rules that define the game; that is, the rules that describe the drama of heroism that is reality, are always existential, rather than merely semantic. The script, the rules of the game and the heroics they describe "are the reality." To try to get beyond them somehow to the script below by appealing to it from within, is to miss the most critical lesson about reality: reality is always about (and thus always preserves) that which is existential. One does not get outside the imperatives of existence by merely appealing to the rules that describe it from within. And while, as the Oyneg Shabes archive so aptly demonstrates, history is about "rewriting the script," that only raises a still deeper question: whose script? Whose existence is being protected? Whose identity is destiny? And most importantly what is the vehicle (whose drama of heroism) to carry such a unique identity?

Thus, in sharp relief, this book raises anew these and many other recurring questions Judaism has posed for itself over the last two millennia: Why did God forsake us? Why the holocaust? Where was God from 1939-1945? Why are Jews continually hated even when they are no longer still being oppressed? Where did Jews as a people go wrong? Why hasn't the establishment of Israel solved all of the Jew's problems? Where does anti-Semitism end? How do Jews redefine themselves beyond just being victims of the holocaust? And finally: Who will write Jewish history, and what if any meaning will it have, once written?

The story is about, and is written from the perspective of, and at the pace of, Emanuel Ringelblum, a Polish Jew and historian, and the primary architect and overseer of the archive, as he rushed about in the last days, before the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto was finally crushed. Ringelblum, even though he did not survive, succeeded in "casting a stone in the wheel of history." And as a result, he lives on all but anonymously through his archive, and through the struggles that the Oyneg Shabes archive represents: It is a monumental work and not just for the heroic efforts to save for posterity the writings of the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto, but also as a final act of defiance exposing for all times, the utter barbarity of the Nazi "final solution."

And while the book does not answer the most important and perplexing of the questions it and the archive raises, it does struggle mightily with each of them and begins to point us in the right direction: Parochial realities are all "tainted realities," we are but one humanity and that is the only reality and the only identity that really matters. Ten Stars

The history is great, but the print is way too small to do much reading at one time. I would rather have larger oprint that I can read for longer periods of time. I am not sure if i will ever finish it this way.