Nowolipki 68: The Underground Ringelblum Archive

Why is it significant?

Stand before the low glass memorial cube set into the grass between the modern apartment houses of Nowolipki: beneath your feet, in the cellar of what was once the Ber Borochov Jewish school, was buried the greatest secret chronicle of the Second World War.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand before the low glass memorial cube set into the grass between the modern apartment houses of Nowolipki: beneath your feet, in the cellar of what was once the Ber Borochov Jewish school, was buried the greatest secret chronicle of the Second World War. This is the discovery site of the Emanuel Ringelblum Archive, known to the underground as Oneg Shabbat, the Joy of the Sabbath.

In late 1939, young historian Emanuel Ringelblum began assembling a clandestine team of writers, teachers, economists, rabbis and teenage couriers. They met every Saturday afternoon to document every detail of ghetto life: ration coupons, smuggled underground newspapers, children's school compositions, tram tickets and eyewitness testimonies from escapees who fled the death camps. They knew the Nazis intended to destroy all witnesses, so they decided the Jewish people would write their own history before they died.

In August 1942, as deportations emptied the ghetto, schoolteacher Israel Lichtensztejn and two eighteen-year-old pupils, Dawid Graber and Nahum Grzywacz, sealed the first part of the archive into ten tin boxes and buried them beneath the basement floorboards. Eighteen-year-old Dawid slipped his own testament into the box: I don't want thanks, I only want you to remember our names. In February 1943, two large 30-litre milk cans containing the second part were buried in the same basement. Ringelblum himself was sheltered on the Aryan side but was discovered and executed with his wife and young son in the Pawiak ruins in 1944.

In September 1946, surviving team member Rokhl Auerbakh directed excavation crews to the sea of rubble and uncovered the tin boxes, and in 1950 Polish construction workers accidentally dug up the two milk cans. Today, the Ringelblum Archive is listed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register, preserving over thirty-five thousand pages of irreplaceable truth.

Continue south along Aleja Jana Pawła II towards the busy crossing with Aleja Solidarności, where a legendary wartime theatre once gave solace.