Description
An engrossing narrative chronicles the work of the Oyneg Shabes, a group of Jewish scholars in the Warsaw ghetto who dedicated themselves to recording the thoughts, experiences, and other aspects of Jewish life in wartime Poland, hiding thousands of documents prior to the destruction of the ghetto to ensure that the voices of a doomed people would survive. Reprint. 30,000 first printing.
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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.
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