On display for the first time outside of Europe, Underground: The Hidden Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, opens at Melbourne Holocaust Museum (MHM) from 17 November, with rare artefacts from the hidden archive of the Warsaw Ghetto. Underground will be the inaugural exhibition held in MHM’s Alter Family Special Exhibitions Gallery space.
Underground will give visitors an opportunity to see precious documents from the Emanuel Ringelblum Archive coming from Poland. During the Holocaust the archive was secretly buried within the ghetto. Miraculously, a portion of the archive was retrieved after the war from deep below the rubble where the ghetto once stood.
Historian Emanuel Ringelblum initiated an unprecedented campaign to collect material in the ghetto — the collection today known as the Ringelblum Archive. He established the archive in 1940. Already imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto, he knew that the Nazi persecution of the Jews was unprecedented. He was determined to create a historical record for the outside world, and for posterity.
To help him with this enormous project he mobilised a group of Jewish academics, writers and activists. This clandestine group of sixty plus members was called Oneg Shabbat (the Joy of Sabbath). They collected documents during the day, wrote their own notes at night, and met secretly on Saturdays to discuss the progress of the archive. Over a two-year period, up until the ghetto uprising in April 1943, Oneg Shabbat members collated tens of thousands of items documenting life and death in the ghetto.
The archive reflects many aspects of life within the ghetto including the appalling conditions and isolation experienced, with items such as drawings, posters, songs, poems, plays, invitations to events, and even lolly wrappers. These accompanied more familiar representations of ghetto life such as food ration cards and work passes.
Many archive members were caught up in the deportations to the Treblinka death camp 1942. Those who remained continued their work. In August 1942 the first cache of documents, stored inside metal boxes, was buried below the ghetto. The second and third caches were buried in February and April 1943 respectively. Only one of over 60 members of the Oneg Shabbat, who knew where the archive was buried, had survived the Holocaust.
One of the metal boxes unearthed will also be on display in the exhibition. This specific box included the final will of David Graber, a teenager who helped bury the archives. An excerpt from his will, dated 3 August 1942, reads:
We have decided to write our wills, to collect our little material about the deportation, and to bury it all. We must hurry because we are not sure how much time we have. We felt the responsibility. We were not afraid of taking a risk. We were aware that we were making history. And that was more important than our lives.
Like a time capsule, Underground tells a never-ending, arduous, harrowing but ultimately successful attempt to write the story of the Holocaust from the perspective of its victims. It also represents the first attempt to directly document the German-initiated mass murder of European Jews as it was unfolding. In this context, creating the archive was an act of resistance, and a commitment to post-war justice.
The exhibition also features a uniquely Melbourne perspective, featuring artefacts and first-hand accounts from survivors who immigrated to Melbourne after the war.
Melbourne Holocaust Museum senior curator Sandy Saxon said: “Presenting a precious selection of documents from the Ringelblum Archive, on loan from Poland’s Jewish Historical Institute, provided the museum with an opportunity to highlight local Holocaust survivors’ lived experiences of the Warsaw Ghetto. More than 8,000 Polish-born Holocaust survivors immigrated to Australia within the first decade after WWII. Most settled in Melbourne, including approximately 2,000 from Warsaw.”
Underground: The Hidden Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto
17 November 2024 – 30 March 2025
On display at: Melbourne Holocaust Museum
13 Selwyn St, Elsternwick
mhm.org.au/underground/
