(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)March 25, 2009

MAHWAH – “Underground History: The Clandestine Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, 1939-1943” was the topic of a talk by Dr. Robert Shapiro, an associate professor of Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. Held on March 25, 2009, it was co-sponsored by Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Ramapo College’s History Club.

Shapiro related how the archive was retrieved after World War II from metal boxes and milk cans buried beneath the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto. Clandestinely compiled between 1940 and 1942 under the leadership of historian Emanuel Ringelblum, the Oyneg Shabes–Ringelblum Archive creates a documentary record of the wartime fate of the daily lives, struggles and sufferings of the Jews of Poland. Conscious of the momentous events unfolding and conscious of their mortality, Ringelblum and his associates dedicated themselves to leaving behind a record of the tragedy that had befallen them and their people.

Born in Germany to Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors, Shapiro was raised and educated in New Jersey and Maryland. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University and completed his doctorate in Jewish History at Columbia University while holding fellowships at the Max Weinreich Center of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and

the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His books include “Holocaust Chronicles,” “Why Didn’t the Press Shout” and “Lodz Ghetto: A History.”

With Tadeusz Epstein, he recently completed editing The Warsaw Ghetto Oyneg Shabes–Ringelblum Archive, of which he also one of the translators. Indiana University Press will publish the work in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw.

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