A Stone Under History's Wheel: The Oyneg Shabes Archive

Abstract

The Oyneg Shabes was a secret society of Jewish academics within the Warsaw ghetto who documented the Jewish experience during World War II. The following research paper examines the founder of the Oyneg Shabes, Jewish activist-historian Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, and gives archival evidence of the suffering of the Jewish people at the hands of their Nazi oppressors and their ultimate triumph over genocide. The Ringelblum Archive was unearthed in 1946 and contained thousands of letters, propaganda posters, essays, interviews, pictures, and more. This surviving archive is one of the most effective forms of resistance against Nazi persecution because the Oyneg Shabes gave a voice to the hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children whom the Nazis attempted to permanently silence. The Oyneg Shabes Archive combated the Nazis’ version of the war. This research paper was written to shine a light on the archive that the Oyneg Shabes sacrificed their lives to preserve.