Documentary WHO WILL WRITE OUR HISTORY Tells of Warsaw Ghetto Efforts to Preserve History
At previous Passover seders I have spoken about the book “The Warsaw Ghetto Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan” (originally published under the title “Scroll of Agony”). This WWII diary includes descriptions of Passovers in the Nazi-controlled ghetto of Warsaw in which each year food was more scarce.
In the 1970s when I was a reporter and editor for the Jewish Exponent newspaper in Philadelphia I had the privilege of knowing Dr. Abraham Katsh, who translated and published Kaplan’s diary entries, which were written between September 1, 1939 — the day the Nazis attacked Poland and started WWII — and August 1942. Although Chaim Kaplan was deported from the ghetto to a concentration camp and murdered, his diary entries were hidden and then found after the war.
Until I recently saw the 2018 documentary WHO WILL WRITE OUR HISTORY, I was unaware that there was a large organized history project in the Warsaw Ghetto of which Chaim Kaplan was not a part.
Who Will Write Our History tells the story of Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, the secret archive he created and led in the Warsaw Ghetto. With 30,000 pages of writing, photographs, posters, and more, the Oyneg Shabes Archive is the most important cache of in-the-moment, eyewitness accounts from the Holocaust. It documents not only how the Jews of the ghetto died, but how they lived. The film is based on the book of the same name by historian Samuel Kassow.
Not all the hidden archive material was found after the war ended in 1945. Some material was found years later while some material may never be found. (There were a very few members of the archive project who survived the Holocaust and knew where the material had been buried.)
Following the screening I attended there was a Q and A with the documentary’s director Roberta Grossman and executive producer Nancy Spielberg. I asked why Chaim Kaplan was not mentioned in the film and was told — I think by the director — that the producers had decided to only feature the members of the Oyneg Shabes Archive and that Kaplan had been asked to take part in this group effort and declined. Then Nancy Spielberg added that Kaplan diary translator Abraham Katsh was her husband’s uncle.