At the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw there is a narrow passage lined in broken stone, floor, walls, and ceiling. It reminds me of the memorial stones at Treblinka, the nearby death camp. [Read about that visit here.]

At the end of the corridor, light shining on it in a glass case, is a milk can.

The metal is pitted and rough with rust. It’s an ordinary can, one of many that were used to carry milk before the war. Only this one is lit the way you would light a treasure.

In February 1943, a teacher named Israel Lichtensztajn buried the can in the basement of a school at 68 Nowolipki, inside the Warsaw Ghetto. It held a portion of an archive that had been divided into three batches. He and two of his students had already hidden the first part in that same basement six months earlier, in ten metal boxes.

The building that now holds the milk can was built in 1936 as the Main Judaic Library, next to the Great Synagogue, then the largest Jewish house of worship in the world. The archivists worked out of the same library. They ran a Jewish charity that operated openly under German rule, so their real work drew no suspicion.

In April 1943, Jews still trapped in the ghetto rose up in armed resistance, the first uprising against the Germans in any occupied city. Four days into the fighting, with his troops taking losses he hadn’t expected, the German commander Jürgen Stroop made a decision. He would destroy the entire quarter, “setting every block on fire”. He wrote those words in his own report to his superiors.

German forces spent weeks crushing the uprising, marching residents out of burning buildings toward the Umschlagplatz, the collection point where they were loaded onto trains bound for Treblinka.

On the evening of May 16, Stroop declared the uprising over by personally blowing up the Great Synagogue, shouting “Heil Hitler” as he pressed the detonator. The explosion set the library next door on fire.

The synagogue is gone, but the library survived. Its floor still carries the burn marks, and we walked across them and climbed the stairs to the archive.

A Secret Group

The archivists called their group Oneg Shabbat, Hebrew for “the joy of the Sabbath,” because they met in secret on Saturdays, when such gatherings could pass as religious observance.

A historian named Emanuel Ringelblum started the group in 1940. That November, German authorities forced every Jew in Warsaw—about 400,000 people—into a walled district, confining them to a tiny section of the city. Ringelblum had already spent a year writing down what he saw, and once the ghetto was sealed he began recruiting others to help him. He told them to collect as much as possible and that historians could sort it out after the war. The group grew to several dozen people: teachers, writers, rabbis, students.

Behind the relief work, Oneg Shabbat was assembling an archive. They collected ration cards, tram tickets, theater posters, deportation notices, even candy wrappers. Nothing was too small. Ringelblum was a historian, and he understood that if the Jews of Warsaw did not write down what was happening to them, the only surviving account of the ghetto would be the one written by the Germans. What they compiled instead is the largest account of the Holocaust written by the people it was happening to, while it was happening.

In January 1942, a man escaped from a place called Chełmno and made it to Warsaw. His name was Szlama Ber Winer, and what he’d escaped was a death camp, one of the first the Germans built. He told Oneg Shabbat everything he’d seen. They wrote it down and gave it a false name to protect him, in case it fell into the wrong hands: the Grojanowski Report.

The report went out of the ghetto through the Polish underground. By June it had reached London. On June 26, 1942, the BBC broadcast what it said, and used Oneg Shabbat’s own number, saying 700,000 Polish Jews had already been murdered.

A month later, the mass deportations to Treblinka began.

The Teacher Who Buried It

Lichtensztajn ran that school before the war, and he kept teaching there in secret after the Germans banned Jewish schools. When the deportations began, Oneg Shabbat told him to bury the archive. “It was I who hid the materials,” he wrote. “No one else knows the exact spot.”

Three days before the first batch went into the ground, Lichtensztajn wrote his testament and put it in with the boxes. He asked that his wife Gela be remembered, a painter who never got to show her work. He asked the same for his daughter Margalit, not yet two years old. He wrote that he wanted no gratitude, no monument, no praise: “I want only a remembrance.”

Students Who Hid the Archive

Dawid Graber and Nachum Grzywacz were teenaged students who worked in the school’s kitchen when Lichtensztajn recruited them. On August 3, 1942, they helped him bury the first cache, and each wrote his own testament to put in with it. Graber called the archive a treasure, and said he was proud to be the one saving it. Grzywacz wrote that police had sealed off the street where his parents lived, and that he didn’t know if they were safe. He never found out. He left his final wish: “Remember, my name is Nachum Grzywacz.”

A third cache went into the ground that April, days before the uprising began. Lichtensztajn, Gela, and Margalit did not survive what came after. Neither did Graber or Grzywacz. Of the several dozen people in Oneg Shabbat, only three lived to see the war end.

Hersz Wasser was one of those three survivors, and he also happened to be the only person alive who remembered exactly where to dig. In September 1946, he led a crew to the ten metal boxes, still under the rubble of the school. Four years later, construction workers building new housing in the area struck two milk cans while digging. Thirty-five thousand pages came out of the ground—a detailed record of a community that no longer existed.

The third cache is still down there, and is believed to be under what is now the grounds of the Chinese embassy.

On our last day, we stood where Jews were marched onto trains for Treblinka. A wall nearby carries hundreds of just first names, common ones, because there wasn’t space to carve the full names of all the people who were driven from the Warsaw Ghetto to death camps. Nachum is one of them.

The wall can’t tell you which Nachum. But the archive can. It has his own words, his own name, the fear he felt for his parents. And because of the work he did, it holds the same for thousands of other people too.

I just returned from an intensive week in Poland traveling alongside a group of North Carolina educators to study Holocaust history firsthand, made possible through the generous sponsorship of the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching (NCCAT). I am deeply grateful to NCCAT for their support.

This post is part of an ongoing series exploring what we witnessed on the ground, paired with further independent research, as we carry these hard truths back to our classrooms and communities.

Justin Parmenter
Charlotte, NC

This is part of an ongoing series. See more at Holocaust Education: Reflections from Poland.