The Warsaw Ghetto’s underground archive is the main collection of sources on the lives and deaths of Polish Jews under Nazi occupation. Together with several colleagues, the historian Emanuel Ringelblum secretly collected a wide variety of Holocaust records. They wanted – in the midst of persecution and mass murder – to document and analyze their history and the history of many others for posterity. The group of chroniclers collected official documents and posters, private diaries and letters, cultural programs and admission tickets, and numerous other items as a testimony to everyday life there. They also put together their own reports on a wide range of aspects of life in the ghetto, and encouraged many others there to write themselves, including essay contests for children in the ghetto.

This unique underground archive, much of which we still have today and is part of the UNESCO Memory of the World Register, is now to be made accessible to the German-language reading public as an edited selection to be published by the Wallstein Verlag. It is being prepared by the Center for Holocaust Studies of the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History in cooperation with the Arbeitsstelle Holocaustliteratur at the Justus Liebig University (http://www.holocaustliteratur.de/english/).