Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto

'Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto'' is the vital, raw historical journal kept by Polish-Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum between September 1939 and January 1943. It serves as one of the most significant eyewitness testimonies of the Holocaust, capturing the systematic destruction of Warsaw's Jewish community from inside the walls. Ringelblum was a trained social historian who was safe in Switzerland when World War II began, but chose to return to Poland to document the crisis. He founded a clandestine organization code-named Oyneg Shabos ("Pleasure of the Sabbath") because the team met secretly on Saturdays. He recruited dozens of contributors—including writers, teachers, and economists—to gather essays, diaries, underground newspapers, and Nazi decrees. As the liquidation of the ghetto loomed, the archive was packed into metal boxes and milk cans, then buried beneath Warsaw. Most of it was successfully recovered from the rubble after the war.