Director Roberta Grossman sets the secret Jewish archive in the Warsaw Ghetto with an impressive docu-Drama, a cinematic monument. For Holocaust remembrance day, the Film should be shown to the world publicly.
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Who will write our history? “Who will write our history?” This is the title of the historian Samuel Kassow published in 2007 his book on Emanuel Ringelblum and the secret archives in the Warsaw Ghetto. In this Text, the new documentary by the American Director Roberta Grossman is based.
In it, she tells the story of the Polish historian Emanuel Ringelblum, who was locked in the autumn of 1940 with the tens of thousands – at the end of it were enjoyed a half – a-Million-Jewish suffering of the German occupiers in close to Warsaw’s city district. 70,000 people died here alone in the first year of the “Warsaw ghetto” of disease and malnutrition. As “precursors of the destruction” describes the Holocaust researcher Wolfgang Benz, the function of the ghetto. And that seems to have Emanuel Ringelblum knew, in view of the commonplace in the Ghetto experienced horror and terror. He decided to archive everything for posterity.
The educator and journalist, Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum (1900 to 1944)
Kept in milk cans and tin boxes
“Oyneg Shabbes”, “joy of Shabbat” – this is the Codename Ringelblum and 60 comrades-in-arms gave their secret archive documenting the atrocities of the Holocaust, but also Jewish life and culture before the war. They began to unique documents to gather: photos, films, posters, newspaper reports, food cards, diaries and poems, and documents of the German occupiers, but also seemingly unimportant everyday objects. All of this was hidden in metal boxes and milk cans.
Emanuel Ringelblum was shot in 1944 by the Germans. But three of his archive staff survived the Holocaust – and ten metal crates with about 1700 archive pieces were excavated in the autumn of 1946 under the rubble of the completely destroyed ghetto. A few years later, two large milk were discovered cans and fragments of a diary.
Sovereignty over their own history
“To write to the German, our history, or are we?” asks at the beginning of the film, the voice of Rachel Auerbach’s. The journalist and literary critic operating in the Ghetto, a soup kitchen and was one of the early employees of the secret archives project of your well-Known Emanuel Ringelblum. In this work, and the everyday fight against the Hunger in the Ghetto of the Film Auerbach accompanied with documents, quotations and downstream of the scenes (our title image provided shows how to Ringelblum secures documents).
Again and again it is a question of Hunger in the by the Germans systematically under-served Ghetto. A strategy, on the other hand: “Write, as the last proof that you belong to you yourself,” it says at one point in the Film. So Auerbach and Ringelblum wrote. It was concerned to preserve the sovereignty over the own historiography: With reference to early photographs and Film footage from the Ghetto is a quote of the 1976 deceased Rachel Auerbach from the Off, warns: “We are looking through a German lens.”
The Warsaw Ghetto after its destruction in 1943 – still in a hiding place of the Ringelblum is suspected to be the archive under the city
The Incredible part of this story is the late victory from the archive: in The end, only three people knew the hiding places, and only two of the four hiding places remained intact – a is believed to this day in the soil of Warsaw. The preserved archival documents of “Oyneg Shabbes” were declared by Unesco in 1999 a world heritage site. You are and will remain a Central source for today’s Knowledge of the Shoah.
Like Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist” of 2002 with its depiction of the Warsaw ghetto has shaped our picture of strongly, Roberta Grossman’s documentary-Drama, with its realistic trailing flanked by scenes of everyday life, and underlined by the historical Documents and quotes, the audience is at least as touching and thoughtful.
On the occasion of Holocaust memorial day on 27. February will be shown “The secret archive in the Warsaw Ghetto” (in the Original “Who Will Write Our History”) in 45 countries around the world publicly: among other things, in the Unesco headquarters in Paris, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, in the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, as well as 300 other museums, cinemas, theatres and Unesco field offices.
In the media library of the TV channel Arte, the Film is still to 14. April 2019 is available in the ARD Mediathek until 22. April.