Who Will Write Our History?
Co-sponsored with WALLA
April 14, 2025, 6:30 PM
Maple-Walnut Room, West Lafayette Public Library

A documentary. (1 hour 20 minutes)

Who Will Write Our History tells the story of Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, the secret archive he created and led in the Warsaw Ghetto. With 30,000 pages of writing, photographs, posters, and more, the Oyneg Shabes Archive is the most important cache of in-the-moment, eyewitness accounts from the Holocaust. It documents not only how the Jews of the ghetto died, but how they lived. The film is based on the book of the same name by historian Samuel Kassow.

In 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. Led by historian Emanuel Ringelblum and known by the code name Oyneg Shabes, this clandestine group of journalists, scholars, and community leaders in the Warsaw Ghetto vowed to defeat Nazi lies and propaganda not with guns or fists, but with pen and paper.

Now, for the first time, their story is told in the documentary featuring the voices of three-time Academy Award® nominee Joan Allen and Academy Award® winner Adrien Brody. Written, produced, and directed by Roberta Grossman and executive produced by Nancy Spielberg, WHO WILL WRITE OUR HISTORY mixes the writings of the Oyneg Shabes archive with new interviews, rarely seen footage and stunning dramatizations to transport us inside the Ghetto and the lives of these courageous resistance fighters. They defied their murderous enemy with the ultimate weapon – the truth – and risked everything so that their archive would survive the war, even if they did not.

Website
Facing History & Ourselves: Teaching Who Will Write Our History
IMDB