Emanuel Ringelblum - death and legacy

Today we remember Emanuel Ringelblum - a historian, social activist, founder of the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, patron of our Institute.
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For nearly a year, he hid with his wife and son in the "Krysia" bunker on Grójecka Street, among several dozen Jews crammed into a small room with heavy and suffocating air inadequate ventilation and complete silence.

Due to the denouncing letter, the Germans discovered the hideout in March 1944. They arrested and subsequently gunned down the people who hid in “Krysia”, in the ruins of Warsaw Ghetto.

Emanuel Ringelblum left behind the Underground Archive - an invaluable source of research on the Holocaust - which was added to the UNESCO Memory of the World list as a heritage of global significance. It is a unique collection of documents constituting one of the most important testimonies to the Holocaust of Polish Jews.

The materials, largely unmatched in other archival collections worldwide, bear witness to the lives, suffering and deaths of individuals, as well as entire communities, from cities and towns scattered across Poland.

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