WARSAW: A new monument unveiled in Warsaw on Monday consisting of a glass cube above an underground chamber commemorates the extraordinary history of a Holocaust-era archive hidden by Jewish volunteers.
The sombre memorial has been erected on ground now surrounded by Soviet-era buildings where the trove of documents about life and death in the Warsaw Ghetto was buried in total secret in 1942.
Inside the cube is a page from the archive — a handwritten will by 19-year-old Dawid Graber, one of the volunteers who helped hide the documents from the Nazis.
The will, written on a page torn out of a school book, states that “what we were not able to pass through our cries and screams, we hid underground”.
The monument is being inaugurated on the 78th anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising — a failed revolt by hundreds of Jewish fighters against their Nazi oppressors in 1943.
The Ghetto was created by Nazi Germany after its invasion of Poland in 1939 and enclosed 480,000 people — almost all of whom starved to death, died of disease or were murdered by the Nazis.
The Ringelblum Archive is the name given to some 30,000 documents gathered by Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum and his helpers which are now listed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.
It includes official documents and underground publications and statistics on those who died and the testimony of those who witnessed the horrors.
But it also provides insights into daily life by including rationing cards, medical prescriptions, theatre programmes and sweet wrappers.
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