The historian Emanuel Ringelblum initiated the secret underground archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, a unique collection of sources on the situation of Polish Jews under National Socialist occupation. In secret, Ringelblum and numerous employees collected a wide variety of testimonies. They wanted to document and analyze their own stories and that of many others for future generations - even during the persecution and mass murder of Polish Jewry. For this purpose they collected private diaries and letters, archived cultural programs, admission tickets and numerous other sources on the everyday history of the Holocaust. In addition, they produced reports on various aspects of ghetto life, motivated others to write and held essay competitions for children.
In addition to this work, Ringelblum kept a personal diary in which he documented the everyday life of Polish Jews under the conditions of persecution and mass murder. He thouroghly recorded the German crimes. Above all, however, he recorded the actions and reactions of the Jewish society. With a keen sense for details of everyday life in the shadow of annihilation, he writes about humour, circulating rumors and numerous seemingly small incidents on the streets of the Warsaw ghetto.
Ringelblum's diary has been published only in shortened translations in Polish and English. The German edition will be the first complete translation from the Yiddish original. The project is a cooperation with the Research unit for Holocaust literature at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen and the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich.
