Jack Khoury
The missing third part of the Ringelblum Archives chronicling life in the Warsaw Ghetto has been found in a cellar at Kibbutz Lohamei Hageta'ot. The archives consist of essays, diaries, drawings, wall posters and other materials describing life in the ghetto, collected between September 1939 and January 1943 by a group working under historian Emanuel Ringelblum. After the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Ringelblum had stored the archive in three milk cans and ten metal boxes. The first two parts of the archive were discovered in 1946 and 1950, but researchers long believed a third part remained hidden.
On Tuesday, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Simcha Stein, director of the Ghetto Fighters' Museum at the kibbutz, presented what he believes to be the third part of the archive, brought to the kibbutz in the late 1980s by Adolph Berman, a ghetto resistance leader. Stein said researchers had long been unable to decipher the handwriting in the Berman Collection, which was an elaborate code. "Today, after Sisyphean investigation, we believe it is highly likely that this is indeed the third part of the Warsaw Ghetto archive," he said. One of the most important documents is the diary of an unidentified girl who hid in a bunker with members of the Resistance and documented the last six days of the uprising.
(Ha'aretz)
