The Ringelblum Archives Hidden in Milk Cans

Historian Emanuel Ringelblum led an underground project called Oneg Shabbat — a secret effort to document life and death in the Warsaw Ghetto. Over the course of 1939-1942, Ringelblum and his team collected diaries, reports, drawings, posters, tickets, photographs, and anything that might preserve the truth of what was happening. They buried the archive in milk cans and metal boxes beneath buildings in the ghetto. Many of the archivists were killed during the 1943 Ghetto Uprising. After the war, two of the three caches were recovered. The first was found in September 1946 under the ruins of a school building. The second in December 1950 under the site of the ghetto's main rabbi's mansion. The third cache has never been found despite multiple searches. The recovered materials are now preserved at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and serve as one of the most important documentary records of the Holocaust.