The Most Important Holocaust Story Never Told

The Fellowship  |  August 13, 2018

Writing at Tablet Magazine, Leonard Felson tells us about a new Holocaust film about the Oyneg Shabes Archive, a collection of hidden documents that explain life in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Who Will Write Our History is the story of the men and women who created the Oyneg Shabes Archive, a trove of once-hidden documents, essays, and reportage that chronicled in real time what life and death looked like in the Nazi-occupied Warsaw Ghetto. The star, if you can call him that, is Emanuel Ringelblum, a Polish-Jewish historian and community organizer, who led the secret project with the sensitivity of a sacred mission.

The film had an under-the-radar world premiere this spring in Warsaw at Polin, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, during the 75th anniversary of the ghetto’s uprising. A 2007 book, also called Who Will Write Our History? by historian Samuel D. Kassow, on which the film is based, was critically acclaimed, but it wasn’t a popular bestseller. Then, by chance, film director Roberta Grossman read a review in The New Republic, and decided she had to turn it into a movie.