Emanuel Ringelblum, the Chronicler of the Warsaw Ghetto

Summary

I suppose not many among us here are familiar with the name and work of Emanuel Ringelblum. Recently I asked a class of history students at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem about Ringelblum and the results were rather disappointing. For Polish Jews, and particularly for those who survived the destruction visited on Polish Jewry in the Second World War, Ringelblum has become a symbol. In their eyes, he embodies the creative Jew and human being who refused to submit to the regime of terror which strove to eradicate from the face of the earth both the physical existence of the Jews and their religious and spiritual heritage.

I think there are three figures in the period in question, all of them Warsaw Jews, who have achieved the rank of historical greatness: Mordekhai Anielewicz, Janusz Korczak and Emanuel Ringelblum. If the Jews followed the practice of the Catholic Church, they would certainly have canonized them as saints. But Jews and the Jewish religion do not form an institutionalized church and do not have saints. Even the biblical prophets are not recognized as saints. What is more, all these three heroes were not even observant Jews. In addition, Jews do not erect statues of their heroes. This is why no monuments commemorating them can be found in the squares of Israel.

Mordekhai Anielewicz was 23 years old when he assumed the command of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto in April 1943. According to some he was 24 and not 23. This only goes to show us how little we know about the man. At the time he planned and led a mass Jewish uprising in the last days of the largest Jewish community in Europe, he was just beginning his life's journey.

Janusz Korczak, whose real name was Henryk Goldschmidt, was relatively well known, both among Poles and Jews. He was a physician, a pedagogue extraordinary who had designed an original educational system. He also served as director of orphanages, was a creative writer both for children and for adults, and a popular lecturer as well. In the period under consideration he was already well advanced in age and called the 'old doctor’.