The Underground Archive is the first attempt to document the Shoah from the perspective of
those affected and directly during the events.Before World War II Poland was home to 3.3
million Jews and Warsaw was the cultural religious and political center of this diverse
community. A year after the German war of aggression began the Nazis forced the Jewish
population into a sealed-off part of the city. The historian Emanuel Ringelblum then stimulated
an unprecedented project: a group working in secret documenting the daily life of the ghetto
under the code name Oneg Shabbat (Joy of Shabbat). Cut off from the world it collected and
produced a wealth of material. With the beginning of the systematic murder of Polish Jews they
unwillingly became chroniclers of the Shoah which they themselves with few exceptions did
not survive. After the war a large part of the archive buried in tin crates and milk cans
was recovered from under the ruins of the ghetto. With its approximately 35 000 preserved pages
it is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The volume is published on the occasion of the
exhibition of the same name which the NS Documentation Center Munich will open in cooperation
with the Jewish Historical Institute Warsaw in June 2023.
