While I was standing in the Jewish archives in Warsaw, Poland, during a recent humanitarian trip to strengthen programs of protection and safety for refugees from Ukraine, time became quite circular — an evocation of William Faulkner’s adage that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” For brought before us were portions of an archive created at great personal risk during the Holocaust by Jewish ghetto residents that laid forth to an indifferent and inattentive world their experiences of fear, flight and displacement.
What is known to history as the Ringelblum Archive produced more than 30,000 pages of narratives and source material depicting the diversity, richness, despair, hopes, daily life and vitality of the Warsaw ghetto’s Jewish community. Residents faced starvation, economic disruption, rampant poverty, fetid air, typhus, dysentery, corpses strewed on the streets and random killings by Nazi guards, on top of the imminent threat of deportation to concentration camps.
But for these individuals, their resolve to memorialize their experiences and resist being perceived as an undifferentiated mass reflects their desire to call upon the world to shed indifference to persecution, evil and displacement. Faced with the knowledge that the world simply would not respond to the deprivations they experienced, the archive was surreptitiously buried, only to be unearthed in the postwar years. As 19-year-old David Graber, a ghetto resident, wrote: “What we’ve been unable to shout out to the world, we buried in the ground.”
