The Ringelblum box

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.