Showcase 1

“List of prints”, list of archival material collected by Oneg Shabbat, first of several pages with an overall number of 707 items, after December 1941

1.

“Every Saturday, we a group of Jewish social activists meet and discuss our diaries and chronicles. We want our suffering, these labour pains of the Messiah, to be impressed upon the memory of future generations, and of the entire world. We meet every Saturday, and we talk over our duties in this matter and in doing this we are unable to refrain from recounting to each other everything they are doing to us [ … ]. These stories make my soul hurt, my head aches, as if a lead weight was pressing on it. This is how it was today too. They talked and talked and I felt a chillness and utter despondency.”

Abraham Lewin, Diary, Entry of June 6, 1942

2.

“These documents and notes are a remnant resembling a clue in a detective story. I remember from childhood such a novel by Conan Doyle in which the dying victim writes with a faint hand one word on the wall containing the proof of the criminal’s guilt. That word, scrawled by the dying man, influenced my imagination in the past. The traces left by us, whose survival is so uncertain, remind me of that stereotype image that once so moved me. We are noting the evidence of the crime.”

Gustawa Jarecka, The Last Stage of Resettlement is Death, account on the deportations from the Warsaw ghetto, penned after October 1942