History Department Documentary Screening: Who Will Write Our History?
Claire T. Carney Library, Room 206
Carol Hansen
508-999-8301
chansen1@umassd.edu
November 1940
Days after the Nazis sealed 450,000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, a secret band of journalists, scholars and community leaders decided to fight back. This clandestine group, known by the code name Oyneg Shabes, vowed to defeat Nazi lies and propaganda not with guns or fists, but rather with pen and paper.
They commissioned diaries, essays, jokes, poems, and songs.
They documented Nazi atrocities with eyewitness accounts.
They sent reports of mass murder to London via the Polish underground.
Then, as trains deported them to the gas chambers of Treblinka, and the Ghetto burned to the ground, they buried 60,000 pages of documentation in milk cans and tin boxes in hope that the archive would survive the war, even if they did not.
The film honors the Oyneg Shabes members' determination to create what became the most important cache of eyewitness accounts to survive WW II. It captures both humor and despair, their desparation and anger, and their iron resolve to retain their humanity in the face of unspeakable hardship. Ultimately, it has preserved the actions, events and experiences of those who stand up, fight back and, as one Oyneg Shabes member wrote, "scream truth to the world."
Open to the UMassD campus community.