ABSTRACT
The members of the Oyneg Shabes archive, founded in 1940 by historian Emanuel Ringelblum, had few illusions about their survival. Indeed of the 60 or so members that Ringelblum recruited to work in this collective project to collect documents and artefacts that would describe Jewish life in Poland under Nazi occupation, only three would survive to see the liberation. But they believed in their mission. Theirs was a battle for memory and their weapons were pen and paper. In Maidanek, Ringelblum's teacher, the historian Isaac Schipper, told a fellow inmate that what was usually known about murdered peoples was what their killers chose to say about them. The members of the Oyneg Shabes did all they could to make sure that the Germans would not have the last word and that future historians would write their history on the basis of Jewish and not German documents.
