The Voices of the Warsaw Ghetto. We Write Our History

From 1940 to 1943, an underground group called "Oyneg Shabes" existed in the Warsaw ghetto. In response to the systematic extermination of Jews, the group's members opposed it with their work as historians and archivists, aiming to collect and preserve testimonies of the vast, diverse Jewish culture of Eastern Europe and the evidence of its destruction. Eyewitness accounts and photographs, chronicles and diaries, prose and poetry, drawings, sermons and anecdotes, programs of creative evenings and underground currency courses, tram tickets and candy wrappers, restaurant menus and food ration cards, collected over three years, were carefully packed and hidden in three caches. After the war, only two of them were discovered. The work of deciphering this unique archive continued for several decades, with the publication of 36 volumes completed in 2018.
The collection, compiled by Professor David G. Roskies, includes works and documents that tell the story of the Holocaust through the voices of its first researchers - the victims themselves - "from the first person, in real time, against time and for all time".