Personal archives hidden under Warsaw Ghetto

As the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto closed in and death became an ever-present reality, a group of Jews made an extraordinary decision. They believed preserving the truth mattered as much as staying alive. They collected everything from diaries and school timetables to children’s drawings and candy wrappers and buried them in the hope that one day someone would find them. 

Their story is now told in More Important Than Life, a travelling exhibition at the Cape Town Holocaust & Genocide Centre. 

The exhibition explores the Ringelblum Archive, one of the most significant collections of Holocaust documentation. Compiled by members of the Oneg Shabbat group in the Warsaw Ghetto, it offers an intimate record of Jewish life under Nazi occupation and stands as a remarkable act of spiritual and cultural resistance. 

Before World War II, Poland was home to one of the world’s largest Jewish communities. Following Germany’s invasion in September 1939, the Nazis forced hundreds of thousands of Warsaw’s Jews into a sealed ghetto covering just 3.4 square kilometres. About 460 000 people were confined there under increasingly brutal conditions. 

Within the ghetto lived historian Dr Emanuel Ringelblum. Long before the war, he had dedicated his career to studying Jewish history in Warsaw. As conditions deteriorated, he concluded that recording what was happening had become an urgent responsibility. 

Ringelblum brought together historians, teachers, journalists, doctors, writers, social scientists, and other volunteers. The group became known as Oneg Shabbat, meaning “Joy of the Sabbath”, because its members met on Saturdays to plan their work. Their mission was simple but immense. “Everything is important, nothing is unimportant,” Ringelblum instructed the group. 

They documented every aspect of life in the ghetto. They collected official notices, personal letters, poems, essays, newspapers, photographs, ration cards, birth certificates, school records, and cinema and concert tickets. 

As visitors move through the exhibition, they encounter photographs and personal testimonies alongside reproductions of documents that demonstrate the determination of those who refused to allow their community’s history to disappear. 

The purpose of the archive also changed as Nazi persecution intensified. What began as a record of everyday life became evidence of systematic persecution and murder. One display features Ringelblum’s words “When the time comes, and it surely will, the world will read and the world will know”. 

As deportations accelerated in 1942, the group realised the archive might not survive if it wasn’t hidden. Thousands of pages were packed into metal containers and buried in the basements of buildings in the ghetto. One cache was placed inside specially constructed metal boxes, while others were sealed inside milk cans before being hidden underground. 

The specially built boxes suffered extensive water damage after the war, but the milk cans preserved much of their contents. Today, about 35 000 pages survive. Historians believe a third cache may still be buried beneath Warsaw. 

Only three members of the Oneg Shabbat group survived the Holocaust. Among them was Hersz Wasser, who had coordinated much of the archive’s daily administration. After the war, he helped investigators locate the buried collection because he alone remembered where it had been hidden. Rachel Auerbach, a journalist and fellow survivor, also played an important role in recovering and preserving the archive. 

Ringelblum, his wife, Yehudis, and their son, Uri, escaped the ghetto for a time and lived in hiding. They later returned to assist the resistance. After being discovered in a bunker with other Jews, they were murdered by the Nazis. 

Jakub Nowakowski, director of the Cape Town Holocaust & Genocide Centre, said the exhibition originated at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw before travelling to South Africa through cooperation with the country’s three Holocaust and Genocide centres. 

“The exhibition premiered in Johannesburg, then travelled to Durban, and has now arrived in Cape Town,” he said. “We scheduled it to coincide with our broader programme of exhibitions and events, as it fits very well with the themes we are exploring this year and offers visitors an opportunity to engage with one of the most remarkable acts of documentation and resistance during the Holocaust.” 

Nowakowski said the archive remains especially significant. “At a time when Holocaust distortion and denial continue to circulate, it is more important than ever to remind people that the Holocaust is not a myth but a meticulously documented historical event,” he said. 

“What makes this archive so remarkable is that it was created by people living through those events, who understood the importance of recording their experiences as history was unfolding, often at enormous personal risk. Their determination to preserve the truth for future generations makes the exhibition especially powerful and deeply relevant today.” 

The centre’s director of education, Orli Barnett, said the exhibition’s greatest strength is the diversity of voices represented within the archive. “What resonates with me personally is the rich diversity of both the documents and the backgrounds of their authors.” 

“At such a fraught and desperate time, Emanuel Ringelblum was able to gather eye-witness sources from a broad section of the ghetto inhabitants in order to genuinely answer the question, ‘Who will write our history?’” 

Barnett said she is deeply moved by the fact that most contributors did not live to see the defeat of Nazi Germany. “I hope that visitors will join us in learning their stories, and passing them on to future generations.” 

More than 80 years after they buried proof of their lives beneath the Warsaw Ghetto, the archive’s creators continue to fulfil the purpose they intended. Through thousands of fragile pages, preserved against overwhelming odds, they ensured that future generations would not have to rely on memory alone. Their own words became history.