As part of Holocaust and Genocide Awareness Week, Northeastern’s Max Berger delves into the Oyneg Shabes Archive, a vast set of documents collected in the Warsaw Ghetto for future generations.
If you know anything about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, it’s probably the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In 1943, as Germans once again entered the ghetto to round up and send Jews to their deaths in concentration camps, they encountered resistance from hundreds of people armed with guns and Molotov cocktails.
The ensuing clash is often held up as the pinnacle of Jewish resistance to Nazi cruelty, but at the same time there was another group carrying out a different kind of subversion: the Oyneg Shabes.
In a new digital exhibition, Max Berger, a Northeastern University student and the Holocaust Legacy Foundation Gideon Klein Scholar, delves into this clandestine society of Jews and how they used art, not weapons, to resist the Nazis and reassert their humanity. Berger presented the exhibition, “A Poetic Revolt: The Oyneg Shabes and the Art of Written Resistance,” on April 3 as part of Northeastern’s Holocaust and Genocide Awareness Week.
The Oyneg Shabes was a “clandestine society” of Jews living in the Warsaw ghetto who “had a mission to document as much as they could about the realities of the Warsaw ghetto and Nazi crimes.” Over several years, they collected and created materials for the Oyneg Shabes Archive or Ringelblum Archive, named after the endeavor’s primary architect, Emanuel Ringelblum.
Although Ringelblum served as the archive’s editor in chief, the group was made up of dozens of Jews who were invited to chronicle their experiences. Through writing, remembering and documenting, they resisted the Nazi’s campaign of subjugation and dehumanization, of which the Warsaw Ghetto was only one part.
“The Oyneg Shabes wanted to push against that by documenting the fact that the Jews did not lose their humanity, the fact that there was living cultural life and, most importantly, so that future generations of historians wouldn’t rely on a history that was written by the perpetrators of the crimes themselves,” Berger says.
The Oyneg Shabes archives includes thousands of documents collected and created by those living in the Warsaw Ghetto as well as those smuggled in from outside. The Oyneg Shabes aimed to capture the breadth and depth of Jewish experience and memory, which required bringing in as many people and materials as possible. Ringelblum encouraged everyone from rabbis to teenage girls to add their voices to the archive.
The end result is a collection of individual voices that are woven together into a greater mosaic of Jewish history. Diary entries and letters depict the events following Germany’s invasion of Poland in vivid detail. Those accounts exist alongside poems and songs as well as official documents and even candy wrappers that make the mundane parts of life in the ghetto into meaningful markers of history and, ultimately, humanity.
By adding to the archive, people who might otherwise have been lost to the currents of history –– most of the Oyneg Shabes members did not survive the Holocaust –– became immortalized, in their own way, as artists, Berger explains.
“These very palpable, raw emotions that only had a way to come out within art –– without even trying to make art, the victims became the artists,” Berger says.
“They’re in this place where every aspect of external force is applied to them hoping for their annihilation,” Berger adds. “They did not know what the future would be, but all they knew was if they could have a say in what that would, they would try for the future generations of historians to have that.”
Hidden underneath Warsaw’s Ber Borochov school, the archive was mostly uncovered after the war by Hersh Wasser, one of only three Oyneg Shabes members who survived the war and the only one who knew where the archive was hidden. In 1946, Wasser unearthed the archive, although there are likely still documents buried in Warsaw, Berger says.
As part of the exhibit, Berger layers firsthand accounts of Jews who experienced the horrific violence of Nazi rule in Warsaw over archival footage taken from German propaganda films. The intention, Berger says, is to shift the focus of Holocaust history away from the perpetrators and toward the victims, to humanize history that often relies on death counts and statistics.
“You can’t understand the mindset of somebody under genocide unless you read from their words,” Berger says.
In the aftermath of the 1939 Nazi invasion of Poland, one person wrote of the brutality of Germany’s assault on their community.
“Just corpses, corpses, corpses everywhere … rotting and stinking human and equine corpses lying unburied for three weeks,” they wrote. “Crows had left them untouched because they too had abandoned this city doomed to annihilation. Yes, even those creatures that feed on death had left.”
Another wrote of the constant violence, humiliation and violation of the German occupation of Warsaw, specifically an incident involving a Nazi and an “old grey-haired man with a cane.”
“He quickly lifts his shaking hand to his hat,” they wrote. “His grey hair falls in disarray. But he was not fast enough. A thin leather horsewhip lashes his face. A red welt. Another German runs up, snatches his cane, and hits the old man over the head with it. A body lying on the street. The cane broken in two.”
In analyzing and presenting the archive in this way, Berger says he wants to move beyond the phrase “never forget” to ask “what does remembering require of us?”
It means letting these texts unsettle us, not seeking closure,” Berger says. “It means listening to victims not as passive sufferers but as intellectuals, poets, philosophers of catastrophe. And it means asking whether our own forms of resistance — in language, in art, in politics — rise to the moral clarity theirs did.”
At a moment when the arts and history are increasingly under attack, Berger hopes to provide a vision of the future through the lens of the past.
“What I hope people also take away from it is that this is something that’s a timeless lesson and it’s a timeless method,” Berger says. “I hope people look at something like this and they take [the] lesson that there are other ways to spark social and political change.