On Ringelblum’s milk cans, Anne Frank’s diary, and a grandmother who softened her story for the camera

There is a page I cannot stop thinking about.

It is dated June 1941. Warsaw. The handwriting runs edge to edge across the paper, fast and controlled. There is much to say, and the world is closing. At the bottom is a signature: E. Ringelblum.

He is writing from inside the Warsaw Ghetto to a colleague in Geneva, reaching across the wall the Germans have built around his city, across the silence they are already imposing on his people, with the only thing he has left.

The act of writing it down so that someone, somewhere, will know.

…men would pull something else out of the ground beneath the wreckage of a building on Nowolipki Street. Ten metal boxes and two milk cans, sealed with tar. Inside were thousands of pages like this one. Diaries. Drawings. Underground newspapers. Wedding invitations. Candy wrappers. Tram tickets. Recipes for what to make from potato peels. The last poems of Władysław Szlengel.

The man who buried them was Emanuel Ringelblum. He called the project Oyneg Shabbos, because they met in secret on Saturday afternoons to write down everything. What the Germans were doing. What the Jews were doing. What it smelled like in the streets. What a mother said to her child before they were taken.

Ringelblum knew what was coming. He knew his people were being erased. And he knew the murderers would try to........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)