As the son of parents who lived through the Holocaust, Trinity College professor of history Samuel Kassow knows the importance of remembering this event.
Out of 60 Holocaust victims, who dedicated themselves to the creation of the Warsaw Ghetto Archive, only three survived and Kassow is trying to make sure that their stories are not forgotten.
As part of the second lecture of the Judaic Studies series on Wednesday, Kassow spoke on “Between History and Catastrophe: Emanuel Ringelblum’s Secret Warsaw Ghetto Archive” at the Fairfield Dolan School of Business. Spanning from 1939 to 1943, the archive contains first-hand accounts of the Jewish experience in the Polish concentration camps. The archive, composed of letters and testimonials, was hidden in tin boxes and milk cans, where it was successfully kept a secret from the German Nazis until it was uncovered in September 1946. Kassow’s research includes the publication of “Who Will Write Our History: Emanuel Ringelblum and the Secret Ghetto Archive,” which details the process and compilation of the Warsaw Ghetto Archive. “Ringelblum wanted to tell the real story with the archive, the quiet heroism of the ordinary Jew,” said Kassow. “The Jews of Poland were not helpless victims, but part of a lasting legacy.” Under the leadership of Ringelblum, a Polish Jew born in Galicia, the careful planning, recording and hiding of the archive was accomplished.
Ringelblum formed committees for the archive: an executive board to conduct interviews with refugees from the area, a team of copiers so that the accounts would not get lost and a technical committee to make sure the archive was kept hidden from the Nazis. “Ringelblum had three agendas,” Kassow said in his lecture, to an audience of 40. “The first was to collect everything: diaries, essays, menus, candy wrappers, anything that told a story.
“The second was to study Jewish society under German occupation, and later, the agenda was to document the killers, bring the killers to justice.” Kassow described how the motives of all those involved in the documentation of the archive was to spread the history of their experiences to future generations. “They were exposing reality when they were not yet survivors,” he explained. “The archive gives insight into values we might not have been able to get.” “I think it is really neat how the archive creators wanted to preserve the people’s history and not have it told from another person’s point of view,” said Marissa Godfrey ’10.
“It makes you think about other historical events and if we heard what individuals were actually thinking at that time, would that change history’s view of what happened,” she added. The 25-30,000 pages of testimonials from the archive are only finally starting to surface in importance and meaning. In addition, the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. recently added an index of the archive. “[The archive is] not used as much as it should by historians,” said Kassow. “Only 60 years later is this happening.” In addition to the indexing and cataloguing of the archive, Kassow is working as a consultant for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews that will be built in Warsaw, and hopes that recent efforts to preserve and inform others of these accounts will serve the original intent of the archive. “I myself am Jewish,” said Godfrey, “so it was particularly interesting for me to hear about this, and it makes me proud in a way to know that despite the ever-present threat of death that these people wanted their stories to be preserved.”
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