Michael Wood on the stirring tale of a secret history club in the Warsaw Ghetto
As Churchill said, the Holocaust was “the greatest crime ever committed in the history of the world”, and it has generated some of the most extraordinary pieces of historical writing of our time. One is Samuel D Kassow’s Who Will Write Our History? It’s the tale of the historian Emanuel Ringelblum who, during the German occupation of Warsaw, gathered a clandestine group to record the history of Jewish life in Poland, to pass it on to posterity. This is the history of ordinary people written by ordinary people, in the belief that the truth of their lives was worth handing on.
Of more than 60 members of the ‘History Club’, only three survived, but two of the containers of documents they buried were recovered after the war, revealing an incredible story of human courage. Nineteen-year-old David Graber, who helped to bury the archive at the beginning of August 1942, at the height of the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto, scribbled a last will that was found with the archive: “What we were unable to cry and shriek out to the world we buried in the ground… I would love to see the moment in which this great treasure will be dug up and scream the truth at the world. So the world may know all… May the treasure fall into good hands, may it last into better times, may it alarm and alert the world to what happened in the 20th century. 9G may noY diG in RGaEG 9G fuNfiNNGd our mission. May history attest for us.” If you want to understand why history matters, read this book.
Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester