Narrator: In August 1942, as the Warsaw Ghetto was being systematically emptied by the Nazis, a seventeen-year-old boy named David Graber helped bury a treasure. It wasn't gold or jewels, but something far more precious: tin boxes and milk cans filled with diaries, poems, reports, and drawings. As he buried this cache, part of a secret archive, he wrote a final testament, hoping for the moment the treasure would be dug up to "scream the truth at the world." He dreamed that he and his fellow archivists would one day be seen as "the fathers, the teachers and educators of the future." Graber and nearly all his colleagues were murdered, but their treasure survived. The book Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto, edited by David G. Roskies and Samuel D. Kassow, is the scream they buried in the ground. It is the story of the Oyneg Shabes archive, a monumental act of intellectual resistance dedicated to ensuring that the history of a murdered people would be told in their own words.

Narrator: The Oyneg Shabes archive was born from a terrifying realization. The historian Isaac Schipper, imprisoned in the Majdanek concentration camp, observed that what is usually known about murdered peoples is what their killers choose to say about them. This idea was the driving force behind the archive's founder, Emanuel Ringelblum. He and his team of writers, rabbis, teachers, and social activists understood that the Nazis were waging two wars: one against Jewish bodies, and another against Jewish memory. Their mission was to fight the second war.

Operating in total secrecy, the group met on Saturdays, which gave them their code name, Oyneg Shabes, or "Joy of the Sabbath." They were not just collecting documents; they were waging a battle for the control of their own narrative. They were determined that the German version of events—a story of deserved destruction—would not be the only one left for posterity. This was a modern form of resistance, a shift from simply praying for divine intervention to actively shaping the historical record. One writer, Gustawa Jarecka, hoped her words would be "a stone under history’s wheel," a testament that could shock the world's conscience. The archive was their desperate, heroic attempt to hurl that stone.

Narrator: Before the mass deportations began, the archive’s primary focus was to document every facet of life and slow death in the ghetto. Ringelblum insisted on a comprehensive, "from the ground up" approach, deeming no detail too small. This meant capturing not just the grand tragedies, but the "microcosms of ghetto life."

Writers like Peretz Opoczynski would produce detailed studies of a single ghetto courtyard, documenting the gossip, the arguments, and the desperate daily struggles of its residents. Others, like the young rabbi Shimon Huberband, collected folklore, jokes, and expressions of messianic hope, capturing the spiritual and cultural pulse of the community. But the most visceral accounts detailed the all-consuming power of hunger. In his "Chronicle of a Single Day," Leyb Goldin traced the process of slow starvation minute by minute. He described how hunger becomes a "beast" that eclipses all other thoughts, reducing a person's past identity, their intellectual pursuits, and their very humanity to a primal, obsessive need for a single bowl of soup. These documents reveal how the first stage of the genocide was a war of attrition, designed to break the human spirit through systematic deprivation.

In the spring of 1942, the archive's focus shifted dramatically. Chilling rumors of mass murder began to solidify into horrifying fact. The diary of Chaim A. Kaplan records this turning point with terrifying clarity. Refugees arriving in Warsaw from the city of Lublin brought with them eyewitness accounts of a community of 40,000 Jews being "completely and utterly destroyed."

Kaplan documents their stories of the systematic slaughter, which began with the most vulnerable. Hospital patients were murdered in their beds, the elderly were lined up and used for target practice, and children in orphanages were killed. This was followed by mass deportations to the Belżec death camp. The accounts were so brutal, so methodical, that they were initially hard to believe. But as more evidence mounted, the archivists realized the Nazi policy had shifted from oppression and slow starvation to direct, physical annihilation. The work of Oyneg Shabes changed accordingly, from documenting a society under duress to recording the mechanics of its murder. Their mission became a race against time to document the "Final Solution" as it unfolded.

Narrator: While the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 is the most famous act of Jewish resistance, the Oyneg Shabes archive reveals a much broader and more complex spectrum of defiance. The archive itself was a profound act of intellectual resistance. In his last testament, Israel Lichtenstein, the man who physically buried the documents, wrote that preserving this history was "the finest and best that we achieved." He knowingly risked his own life, and the lives of his artist wife, Gela Seksztajn, and their gifted young daughter, Margolit, to ensure the truth would survive.

Resistance also took spiritual forms. Rabbi Kalonymus Shapira, in his ghetto sermons, offered a radical theology for the suffering. He told his followers that God was not punishing them for their sins, but was "weeping with them," sharing in their boundless pain. This reframed their agony as a form of heroic, shared burden with the divine. And resistance was found in the desperate courage of children. The poet Henryka Łazowert’s "The Little Smuggler" gives voice to the child who risks his life daily, not for himself, but to bring back bread for his mother. This poem, like the armed uprising, was a testament to the will to live and to protect others, a defiant assertion of humanity against a system designed to extinguish it.

Narrator: Perhaps the most profound act of dehumanization was the stripping away of a person's name. In his searing essay "4580," the writer Yehoshue Perle explores what it meant to be reduced to a number. He argues that a name is not just a word, but a living thing, a "phylactery on your forehead" that connects you to your ancestors and your moral self. The act of replacing it with a number, he writes, was like having his head "cut off."

Yet, in the inverted and brutal logic of the ghetto, this dehumanization became a form of "luck." Perle describes his neighbor, a man who "kept his beautiful human name" because he wasn't assigned a number. As a result, he was erased from the registers, received no food, and was shunned by others, left to die like a stray dog. To be number 4580 meant Perle was an "aristocrat" in the "Chosen People Club" of those temporarily allowed to live. This bitter irony reveals the depths of degradation forced upon the victims. Perle concludes that his "fortunate number" is not his alone; it is a monument built upon the graves of the hundreds of thousands who were murdered, a single cipher representing an unimaginable, collective tragedy.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto is the ultimate power of bearing witness. The members of Oyneg Shabes knew they were likely doomed, yet they dedicated their final moments to a single, sacred task: to write their own history. They refused to let their murderers have the last word. They meticulously documented their own lives, their culture, their suffering, their debates, their humor, and their defiance, creating a record of unparalleled richness and authenticity. They did not just document their death; they documented their lives.

The legacy of the Oyneg Shabes archive challenges us with a profound responsibility. It is not enough to simply remember the Holocaust as a historical event. The challenge is to listen to the voices buried in those milk cans—the voice of Chaim Kaplan struggling to save his wife from typhus, the voice of Gela Seksztajn bequeathing her art to a future she would never see, and the voice of the little smuggler praying for his mother. To hear their stories is to restore the names and the humanity that their killers tried so desperately to erase. The question the book leaves us with is not just whether we will remember, but whether we are truly willing to listen.