The Harris Center for Judaic Studies will host Samuel D. Kassow to lecture on the secret archives found buried in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II.
The lecture, “History and Catastrophe: The Secret Warsaw Ghetto Archive of Emanuel Ringelblum,” will be at 7 p.m. March 4 in Love Library South, Room 102. The talk is free and open to the public
The son of two Holocaust survivors, Kassow was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany in 1946 and his first spoken language was Yiddish. Years after getting his doctorate, he began to research and write about the Holocaust, specifically the Warsaw Ghetto and Polish Jews. This research led him to the hidden archives of the Oyneg Shabes organization — a group of writers, historians and rabbis lead by Emanuel Ringelblum. The Oyneg Shabes were able to collect and create thousands of documents about life in the Warsaw Ghetto during the war. These documents consisting of diaries, drawings, decrees issued by German authorities and more. They describe the daily life and horrors for the Jewish people imprisoned in the Ghetto.
From the abstract: “During World War II Jews turned pen and paper into effective tools of spiritual resistance. The Germans not only wanted to wipe out the Jews but also to erase their memory. But even in the face of death, Jews set up secret archives to bury ‘time capsules’ full of documents and ensure that future generations would remember them on the basis of Jewish sources and not German propaganda. The clandestine archive in the Warsaw Ghetto, organized by the historian Emanuel Ringelblum, was one of the largest examples of cultural resistance in Nazi occupied Europe. Of the 60 people who worked on this national mission, only three survived. This will be their story.”
