Emanuel Ringelblum’s clandestine Oyneg Shabes collective took shape under conditions of near-total annihilation and held fast to a principle that “nothing is unimportant.” In the heart of the Warsaw Ghetto, historians, teachers, poets, and everyday residents risked their lives to gather diaries, letters, children’s artwork, poems, and ordinary objects like ticket stubs or candy wrappers — remnants of a world the Nazis intended to erase. Spearheaded by Ringelblum, a committed historian, the group resisted a future in which their histories were written by their occupiers. Instead, they aimed to secure an authentically Jewish vantage on the final chapter of Polish Jewry. They believed that every eyewitness testimony or scrap of paper embodied a final rebellion against genocide — that their words could be cast as a “stone under history’s wheel.”
This singular assembly of documents, now known as the Ringelblum Archive, transformed ephemeral moments of life and destruction in the Ghetto into enduring evidence of a people who refused to let their experiences slip into oblivion.
This singular assembly of documents, now known as the Ringelblum Archive, transformed ephemeral moments of life and destruction in the Ghetto into enduring evidence of a people who refused to let their experiences slip into oblivion.
—Emanuel Ringelblum
Historian
Social/Political Activist
Emanuel Ringelblum (1900–1944) was a historian, educator, and political activist whose leadership of the Oyneg Shabes archive made him one of the most significant chroniclers of Jewish life and death during the Holocaust. Born in Buczacz, Galicia, Ringelblum moved to Warsaw in 1920, where he earned a doctorate in history from the University of Warsaw with a dissertation on the Jewish community in the early modern city. Barred from an academic career due to antisemitic quotas, he taught in Jewish secondary schools and devoted himself to grassroots historical work through YIVO and the Joint Distribution Committee.
Ringelblum was a lifelong member of the Marxist-Zionist party Left Po‘alei Tsiyon and believed that scholarship and activism were inseparable. In the 1930s, he helped organize mutual aid networks, adult education courses, and document collection campaigns across Poland. His work emphasized Jewish history from below—focusing on workers, small-town communities, and cultural life in Yiddish.
After the German invasion in 1939, Ringelblum remained in Warsaw and helped establish the underground Oyneg Shabes group. Meeting in secret, its members gathered testimonies, essays, documents, and everyday ephemera to record both the destruction of Polish Jewry and its continued resistance. Under Ringelblum’s direction, the archive documented mass deportations, ghetto hunger, religious life, street culture, and Nazi crimes. Much of this material was buried in metal containers beneath the ghetto.
Ringelblum survived the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and went into hiding on the Aryan side. In March 1944, his family’s bunker was discovered. Offered a chance to escape, he refused to abandon his wife and son. All three were executed.
Courtesy the Yad Vashem Archives.
Emanuel Ringelblum’s notes about the Oyneg Shabes
Ringelblum with his young son, Uri. Courtesy the Yad Vashem Archives.
Notes of Emanuel Ringelblum
Ringelblum during his studies. Courtesy the Jewish Historical Institute.
Accountant
Social Activist
Hersch Wasser, born 1910 in Suwałki, Poland, was an activist and accountant who served as the secretary of the Oyneg Shabes.
As its secretary, he handled everyday matters — like cataloguing documents, recording meeting notes, and maintaining lists of employees —, managed the organization’s finances, and worked with Emanuel Ringelblum to develop strategy. As the secretary of the Central Refugee Commission, which brought together Jewish refugees in Warsaw, he had access to the institution’s accounts and letters, which he included in the Archive. He also kept a diary of events in the ghetto, though he spared personal details: “One feels no desire to write about oneself. I’m just happy that the day passes with active social work.”
Perhaps Wasser’s most crucial task, however, was to carry the Archive itself to be hidden in the basement of the Ber Borochov school at 68 Nowolipki Street, which is what allowed him to unearth it after the war. He was one of only three of Ringelblum’s collaborators that survived the war — and the only one who knew the location of the Archive itself.
Hersch Wasser and Rachela Auerbach as they uncover the Ringelblum Archive in Warsaw. September, 1946. Courtesy Yad Vashem.
Businessman
Philanthropist
Born in 1891 in Włocławek, Szmuel Winter was a businessman, folklorist, and philanthropist whose support was vital to the archive’s execution. Educated in both religious and secular traditions, he earned a degree in economics from Frankfurt and ran a successful export company before the war. Deeply committed to secular Yiddish culture, Winter was active in YIVO and published on Jewish folklore and dialects.
In the Warsaw Ghetto, he worked in the Supply Department and became a key liaison between official institutions and underground efforts. Through his position and personal funds, Winter provided crucial financial support to Oyneg Shabes — more than half of its budget, according to archival records. He also arranged jobs for contributors and helped protect collaborators like Rachela Auerbach.
After the Great Deportation of 1942, Winter continued to support both Oyneg Shabes and the Jewish Combat Organization. Though devastated by the loss of his wife and youngest son, he refused to flee, focusing instead on preservation and resistance. His office at 30 Franciszkańska Street became a key meeting point and shelter for the remaining underground.
On May 3, 1943, the Germans discovered the bunker. Winter, among the last members of the Oyneg Shabes leadership still in the ghetto, was captured and killed that same day. Though most of his diary was lost, fragments recovered after the war reveal a man tormented by loss and driven by a singular question: “Where was the world when the Jews were going to their death?”
Courtesy the Jewish Historical Institute
Rachela Auerbach
Writer/Journalist
Historian
Rachela Auerbach (1903—1976) was a writer, historian, and journalist born in Lanovtsy (today Lanivtsi), in the Volhynian Governorate of the Russian Empire (today Ukraine). In the interwar years, she was a writer and editor for several Zionist and Yiddish publications; namely, the Polish-Zionist Chwila, the Yiddish Morgen, the Yiddish Tsushtayer, the Galician Yidish, and a weekly column published by Poalei Zion.
Relocating to Warsaw in 1933, she continued to write on Polish and Yiddish art, literature, psychology, folklore, and linguistics. She was the director of a soup kitchen by day, and avid diarist by night — she wrote poems and essays that reflected on famine and devastation and interviewed Jacob Krzepicki, an escapee from the Treblinka extermination camp, before she escaped the Warsaw Ghetto herself on March 9, 1943.
Auerbach played a key role in the compilation and burial of the Ringelblum Archive, and, being one of only three members of the Oyneg Shabes who survived the war, returned to Warsaw to help unearth it.
Rachela Auerbach and Hersh Wasser as they uncover the Ringelblum Archive in Warsaw. September, 1946. Courtesy Yad Vashem.
Eliasz (Eliyahu) Gutkowski)
Teacher
Social/Political Activist
Eliyahu Gutkowski, born in 1900 in Kalwaria, Lithuania, was a teacher, social and political activist, and the second secretary of the Oyneg Shabes. Prior to the war, he taught in city schools in Lodz, was an active member of the Poalei Zion-Right, and developed expertise in Hebrew culture through his years in Palestine.
As the second secretary of the Oyneg Shabes, he worked closely with Hersch Wasser and Emanuel Ringelblum, compiling accounts from refugees, cataloguing manuscripts, writing informational bulletins addressed at the underground press, and collecting information about Nazi pogroms in Lviv and Lublin. He encouraged writers, poets, and community leaders to involve themselves in the Archive. He also helped edit the Poalei Zion-Right’s prominent newspaper, Dos vort. He became involved in the Dror-Frayhayt, one of the most important youth organizations of the Ghetto, a warm connection to resistance fighters that would prove invaluable for the Oyneg Shabes.
In June 1942, with Ringelblum and Wasser, they wrote their report The Gehenna of the Polish Jews, recording mass deportations, ghetto conditions, and the cultural and physical genocide of the Jews. This would become “one of the first attempts taken by Jewish activists to describe and explain the Final Solution while it was taking place.” (S. Kassow). Yitzhak Zuckerman described Gutkowski’s death: In April 1943, he tried to escape the ghetto with his wife via the canals, and was gassed by the Nazis.
Courtesy Yad Vashem
Szymon Huberband
Rabbi
Historian
Social/Political Activist
Szymon Huberband (1909–1942), born in Chęciny, Poland, was a rabbi, historian, and social activist whose work significantly shaped the Ringelblum Archive. Raised by his grandfather, a respected tzadik, Huberband was deeply rooted in Hassidic tradition but never isolated himself from secular circles. He maintained relationships with non-Orthodox Jews, published historical research, and engaged in communal service.
When World War II broke out, Huberband was in Piotrków with his family. During a bombing in Sulejów, his wife Ryfka and their son Kalmish were killed—a loss he described with raw anguish in his wartime diary. He arrived in Warsaw in 1940 and was appointed head of the religious division within the Jewish Social Self-Help. Soon after, he joined Oyneg Shabes at Ringelblum’s invitation, becoming one of its most prolific and committed contributors.
Huberband wrote extensively in Yiddish, often under grueling conditions — working in unheated rooms with no electricity and sharing space with the terminally ill. His contributions included firsthand accounts of forced labor, detailed reports on religious persecution, and studies on Jewish life under both Nazi and Soviet occupation. He also played a leading role in surveys and outlines for the “Two and a Half Years” project, designed to offer a comprehensive history of wartime Jewish experience.
On August 18, 1942, Huberband and his second wife were caught during a roundup and sent to the Umschlagplatz. They were deported to Treblinka, where they were murdered. Just hours before, Huberband had discussed upcoming Oyneg Shabes projects with a colleague. His colleagues remembered him as tireless, principled, and deeply compassionate—an irreplaceable pillar of the Archive whose work remains central to Holocaust historiography.
Courtesy the Jewish Historical Institute
Registration card for Jews no. 21321.
Social/Political Activist Resistance Fighter
Born 1919 in Wyszków, Poland, Mordechaj Anielewicz was a couragous activist and leader of the armed resistance against the Nazis. He was a member of the socialist-Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatza’ir, and a prominent leader of the Warsaw underground — both its armed resistance and its written one.
Following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, he returned to Warsaw, where he actively organized underground educational and cultural activities. He assumed command of the Jewish Combat Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ŻOB), leading the militia as it coordinated clandestine arms procurement, established fortified bunkers, and planned defensive operations, culminating in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943. Despite overwhelming odds, his resistance lasted nearly a month, a dramatic symbol of Jewish defiance and courage. On May 8, 1943, he fought to his death along with his comrades when the Nazis encircled their bunker at 18 Mila Street.
Szmuel Bresław
Social/Political Activist Resistance Fighter
Born in 1920 in Moscow, Szmuel Braslaw was an activist deeply committed to the Socialist-Zionist movement, a member of youth movement Hashomer Hatza’ir, an editor of literary publications such as Młody Czyn, and a member of the Oyneg Shabes.
With the outbreak of World War II, Bresław initially fled Warsaw, embarking on a harrowing 550-kilometer journey to Vilnius amidst bombings and immense hardship, determined to preserve the Hashomer Hatzair flag and his dream of reaching Palestine. In February 1940, driven by a sense of duty, he returned to occupied Warsaw, dedicating himself tirelessly to educational and cultural initiatives under severe risk: “I don’t care about difficulties. I believe that it is all my sacred duty. I was brought up in the spirit of the Hashomer Hatzair movement, which has always been an avant-garde of our HeHalutz youth, so in these days, I have to be where they need help and advice. Difficult Warsaw Ghetto days are coming.”
In 1942, Bresław joined Ringelblum’s Oyneg Shabes, contributing significantly to the archive works including studies of Polish-Jewish relations, ghetto life and individuals, and international radio broadcasts. As Nazi deportations intensified, Bresław became a founding member of the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB), playing a critical role. In September 1943, attempting to ascertain the whereabouts of his arrested friend Józef Kapłan, Bresław was shot and killed after weilding a knife against Nazi forces.
Courtesy the Jewish Historical Institute
Courtesy exhibition: Scream the Truth at the World - Emanuel Ringelblum and the Hidden Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto
Businessman Social Activist
Born in 1881 in Ostrów, Menachem Mendel Kohn was a businessman turned activist who became treasurer of the Oneg Shabes archive in the Warsaw Ghetto. A refugee at the outbreak of the war, he joined Jewish Social Self-Help and quickly became central to the founding and daily operations of the archive.
Kohn was responsible for managing the archive’s finances, keeping meticulous records and providing not only logistical but material support. He used his own funds to purchase food, medicine, and supplies, and was personally responsible for saving lives—including that of his close friend and collaborator Szymon Huberband. Messages in the Archive attest to Kohn’s selflessness, describing him as a man who gave his "blood and soul" to the people.
In addition to financial duties, Kohn supported contributors in crisis, organizing care for those suffering from typhus and starvation. He likely authored the report "My Visit in the Ghetto Prison," a grim account of the Gęsiówka prison’s brutal conditions, and his diary from the Great Deportation in 1942 remains a powerful chronicle of terror and survival.
Afterward, Kohn helped fund escapes to the Aryan side and supported the Jewish Combat Organization. He remained one of five core members of Oyneg Shabes in the ghetto after February 1943, continuing to support its work under increasingly desperate circumstances.
Kohn was employed in Brauer’s workshop on Nalewki Street, repairing German military gear, and died in April 1943 during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. His work and writing endure as a testament to moral clarity and quiet resistance under catastrophe.
Menachem Mendel Kohn’s ID card
Daniel Fligelman
Writer
Born in Aleksandrów Kujawski, Daniel Fligelman was a student, refugee, and key contributor to the Oyneg Shabes archive. Known for his incisive wit, Fligelman transcribed, edited, and compiled testimonies that vividly captured the persecution of Jews in ghettos, labor camps, and the Eastern Borderlands.
Following the destruction of his hometown in the 1939 bombings, Fligelman and his family fled to Warsaw, where they settled at 24 Śliska street within the Warsaw Ghetto. Recruited into the Oyneg Shabes by Hersz Wasser, he diligently documented harrowing accounts of anti-Jewish violence in northern Mazovia, labor camp experiences, and early reports of mass atrocities committed by Germans and Lithuanian collaborators, notably in Vilnius and Słonim. His writings, often penned under pseudonyms "Fligar" and "Fligel," combined precise narrative with literary flair, peppered with Latin quotations and marked by a sharp, "vitriolic" humor.
On May 31, 1942, Fligelman narrowly escaped deportation during a violent roundup, rescued through the courageous intervention of Jewish women. Ultimately, though, Fligelman was likely murdered during the Great Deportation to Treblinka in the summer of 1942, leaving behind powerful writings — and no photographs of himself — that were unearthed in the first discovery of the Ringelblum Archive in 1946.
Folman-Raban
Social/Political Activist Courier
Born on April 19, 1924, in Kielce, Chawa Folman-Raban (née Folman) was a devoted activist deeply engaged in the socialist-Zionist youth organization Dror, associated with Poalei Zion. Within the Warsaw Ghetto, she resided at Dror’s headquarters on Dzielna Street, and was an underground liaison officer and courier for both Dror and the Oyneg Shabes.
As a liaison officer, Folman-Raban courageously traveled between multiple cities across occupied Poland, facilitating critical communication and coordination among Jewish resistance groups. Her resistance activities led to her arrest in Kraków in December 1942, following an attempted attack by the Jewish Combat Organization on the Cyganeria cafe. Under false Polish identity documents naming her Emma Marciniak, she was interrogated and subsequently deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau as a Pole accused of aiding Jews. Later transferred to Ravensbrück concentration camp, she survived until liberation.
After the war, Folman-Raban returned briefly to Poland before emigrating to Palestine in 1947. She became a key figure in establishing Kibbutz Lochamei HaGeta'ot—the Ghetto Fighters Kibbutz—where she lived for many years, dedicated to preserving the memory of Jewish resistance. Her memoir, "I Have Not Parted With Them," poignantly details the harrowing experiences of life in the Warsaw Ghetto.
Chawka Folman-Raban passed away on January 9, 2014 in Israel.
Courtesy exhibition: Scream the Truth at the World - Emanuel Ringelblum and the Hidden Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto
Icchak Cuckerman
Social/Political Activist Resistance Fighter
Born December 13, 1915, in Vilnius, Yitzkhak Zuckerman (Icchak Cukerman), affectionately known as "Antek," was a charismatic leader within the Zionist youth movement He-Halutz ha-Cair and later Dror-He-Halutz. Known for his romantic spirit, eloquence, and exceptional sense of humor, he deeply impacted those around him with warmth and humanity, despite the grim realities he faced.
At the outbreak of World War II, Zuckerman was organizing seminars for future Jewish pioneers in Volyn, returning to Warsaw illegally in April 1940. In the Warsaw Ghetto, he swiftly became instrumental in organizing clandestine education, underground publications, and resistance networks. As deputy commander and co-founder of the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB), he played a critical role during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. Zuckerman operated primarily outside the ghetto, coordinating arms supply and liaising with Polish underground groups, a position of both crucial strategic importance and personal torment, as his wife, Cywia Lubetkin, fought inside the ghetto.
Zuckerman and Eliyahu Gutkowski compiled an anthology of Jewish history and martyrdom, Payn un guvre (Pain and heroism), which they taught in Dror youth organization. The situation of the Jews, however, led Zuckerman to differ from Ringelblum in his pedagogy: he believed that the lessons of Jewish history were of limited value to the Ghettoized Jew, with one exception — “that Jews had to fight for their honor.”
In 1944, Zuckerman led a Jewish combat unit within the Armia Ludowa during the Warsaw Uprising, calling on Poles and Jews alike to fight shoulder to shoulder for liberation. Following the war, he and Cywia actively supported Holocaust survivors and organized mass Jewish emigration to Palestine. Profoundly affected by the Kielce Pogrom of 1946, Zuckerman personally intervened, delivering aid and coordinating evacuations.
In Palestine, he co-founded Kibbutz Lohamei HaGeta’ot and the Ghetto Fighters' Museum, institutions dedicated to preserving the memory and legacy of Jewish resistance. Yitzkhak Zuckerman passed away on June 17, 1981 in Israel.
Courtesy exhibition: Scream the Truth at the World - Emanuel Ringelblum and the Hidden Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto
1945 — Zuckerman (center) and others at the Warsaw “Kibbutz I”, a memorial for their comrades. A Polish sign reads “Honor to the Fallen Heroes.” Courtesy Yad Vashem.
Welfare Organizer Social Activist
Icchak Gitterman, born 1889 in Hornostopol, Ukraine into a distinguished Hassidic family, was a dedicated social activist and key figure in organizing aid for Jewish communities.
In 1926, Gitterman became director of the American Joint Distribution Committee (Joint) in Poland, promoting programs aimed at economic empowerment of the Jewish population through initiatives like interest-free credit unions. His efforts extended to cultural support, significantly aiding secular Jewish schools, theatre, and art.
Captured by Germans during a mission to Stockholm, he spent months in a POW camp before returning to Warsaw in April 1940, driven by a sense of mission to support the community.
In the Warsaw Ghetto, Gitterman involved himself in the Oyneg Shabes, providing organizational guidance and financial support. He helped coordinate aid through Joint, securing critical funds used for resistance efforts and the collection and preservation of testimonies documenting Jewish persecution. He was also instrumental in establishing self-help networks and supporting clandestine cultural and educational activities within the Ghetto — a critical arm of the resistance to cultural genocide.
Despite personal tragedies, including the loss of his wife and son, Gitterman remained committed to his work until he was killed by Nazi forces on January 18, 1943, during the January Aktion.
Courtesy Yad Vashem
Władysław Szlengel
Poet Lyricist
Born in Warsaw in either 1912 or 1914, Władysław Szlengel was a poet, lyricist, and satirist whose writing became one of the most vivid literary voices of the Warsaw Ghetto. The son of painter and set designer Maurycy Szlengel, he was educated at the School of Trade and began publishing poetry in the early 1930s. His songs, lyrics, and satirical sketches appeared in a range of prewar Polish periodicals, and were performed in popular cabarets and recorded by artists such as Adam Aston and Wiera Gran.
Szlengel’s early works often captured the street life of Warsaw, written in a sharp, urban style that celebrated and caricatured the city’s working-class characters. But with the outbreak of war, his tone shifted. After fleeing to Białystok and later Lviv, he returned to German-occupied Warsaw and entered the ghetto with his wife, resuming residence at Waliców Street. There, he became a central figure in ghetto cultural life, hosting literary events and co-founding the satirical cabaret Żywy Dziennik (Live News), which documented ghetto life in real time through parody and performance.
Szlengel's poems, often circulated in typed or hectograph copies, resonated widely. They offered bitter irony, urgent testimony, and emotional clarity. As Emanuel Ringelblum noted, Szlengel gave voice to the despair and resilience of daily life in the ghetto. His most iconic poems—including "A Small Station Called Treblinka," "Things," and "Five Minutes to Midnight"—chronicled the Holocaust from within, often written just days after the events they described.
Though he may not have formally belonged to Oyneg Shabes, Szlengel’s poetry survives in the Ringelblum Archive. He published several underground collections, including What I Was Reading to the Dead, which was intended for postwar readers but became an elegy for those already lost. In his final months, he worked on an encyclopedia of the ghetto, a novel about Polish theatre, and a play titled A Monument to Judas, none of which survived.
During the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Szlengel hid in a bunker at 36 Świętojerska Street. On May 8, 1943, he and his wife were discovered and executed by German forces. He died as he had lived — bearing witness in words to a world disappearing around him.
Władysław Szlengel (right) and Ignac Papelbaum. Courtesy the Jewish Historical Institute