Teksty złożone w ziemi, czyli Archiwum Zagłady
Buried Under the Ground: Texts of the Shoah Archive

Summary/Abstract: The author treats the rescued documentation of the Ringelblum Archive as specific testimony. Nowhere in occupied Europe, and in no concentration of a Jewish population existing in the conditions of German terror was a documentation initiative undertaken on such a scale. Thanks to a group led by Emanuel Ringelblum, which called itself “Oneg Shabbat” (i.e. Joy of the Sabbath, from the day on which it usually met) there emerged an archival collection created according to strict methodological principles and realised as a research project by a team of professionals and representatives of science, literature, and culture as well as social activists. The phenomenon of the Ringelblum Archive, however, does not consist exclusively of its historical, cultural, and symbolic value. Testimonies collected while risking life were concealed in the ground. Their authors speak to us via their writing, because that too enjoys the rank of evidence testifying not only by means of that, which it transmits, but also the fact that it survived and exists, and the way it looks. The substance of the testimony, its texture, the paper on which it was written down, and handwriting are of absolutely key importance for the Ringelblum Archive. The discovered and unearthed texts successfully passed the test of four elements: fire – in the blazing ghetto and the fire of the Holocaust; earth – into which they were cast as seed sown for a future harvest; water – telluric dampness, underground streams dissolving and destroying the records, but also water submerging them in the whirlpools of oblivion; and, finally, air – discovery, liberation from darkness, extraction into daylight.

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