The Ringelblum box
is one of the boxes in which Dr. Emmanuel Ringelblum hid the
underground archive, code named Oneg Shabbat. The archive
includes hundreds of documents, testimonies and wills which
documented daily life in the Warsaw ghetto in its final months. The
individuals who assembled the archive collected all relevant
material that they could procure: secret newspapers distributed by
political parties and youth movements, and testimonies taken from
refugees who came from other ghettos or who escaped from
concentration camps. The underground also took on the role of
research center, initiating papers on different perspectives on life
in the ghetto. In August 1942, at the peak of the deportations from
the Warsaw ghetto, and in February 1943, two portions of the archive
were buried in 10 metal boxes and two milk cans. These were
discovered in 1946 and in 1950, but the third portion - buried in
April 1943 - has never been found (recently, there was an attempt to
find the third portion of the archives in Poland). Currently, some
of the original documents from the Ringelblum archive are stored in
Yad Vashem’s Archives.
The Ringelblum box was given to Yad Vashem in
honor of its Jubilee Year and will be displayed in the new Holocaust
History Museum slated to open in late 2004.