An extraordinary cache of documents detailing ordinary Jewish life in the wartime Warsaw Ghetto has been made public after lying hidden under the floorboards of an attic for nearly 50 years.
The collection of 180 items – letters, notebooks, photographs, ration cards, books, medicine bottles, food packaging, cigarettes, clothing and other material – was discovered during renovation work on the building currently housing the Warsaw offices of the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation and other Jewish organizations.
The Lauder Foundation runs a wide range of Jewish education programs, primarily aimed at young people.
The building, next door to Warsaw’s one surviving shul, the Nozyk Synagogue, served as a Jewish clinic before the war. During the war it was inside the Jewish ghetto.
Discovery of the documents was made on Feb. 28 and following days. Workers doing renovation work found a piece of paper with Hebrew writing on it amid a layer of dirt when they took up the floorboards of the attic.
Rabbi Michael Schudrich, director of the Lauder Foundation in Warsaw, happened to look in to check on the progress of the building work just after the paper came to light and, immediately recognizing its importance, initiated a search for further documents and material.
The documents were hastily examined and catalogued by Lauder Foundation archivist Yale Reisner. Working in collaboration with Warsaw’s Jewish Historical Institute, he set up some of them in a temporary exhibition that was unveiled last week for participants in the March of the Living.
The documents are personal papers and memorabilia of the residents of two apartments that also were in the building, the four-member Melchior family and a 20-year-old bachelor, Moses Dov Bursztyn.
Reisner said the discovery was probably the most important discovery of ghetto documents since those deliberately written as eyewitness accounts and hidden by historian Emmanuel Ringelblum, which were discovered after the war.
Of the newly discovered cache, Reisner said, “What makes this new discovery special is that all the documents and papers are so absolutely ordinary.
“Elja Melchior and his wife Ruchla were both about 36 years old when the ghetto was sealed in 1940,” he said.
“Elja was an administrator of the Jewish clinic, and Ruchla ran a little shop that sold vegetables. They had two teen-age children – a daughter, Tauba, who was about 15 and went to a private high school, and a son, Shmuel, who was Bar Mitzvah in August 1940,” he said.
One of the documents in the trove is the first page of Shmuel’s Bar Mitzvah speech – a speech much like those given by Bar Mitzvah boys today, which includes the phrase that “the Jewish path is not strewn with roses.”
The other occupant of the building, Bursztyn, “was a very erudite young man,” Reisner said. “He was a member of the Betar Zionist Youth Organization and a graduate of a rabbinical seminary. Among the items we found were some of his books, in three languages, bookplates and a fragment of a book list of his personal library.”
One of the papers is a Chanukah speech he wrote in the early days of the war:
“A terrible picture appears before us through the fog of hatred and jealousy directed at us. To one side, there is a homeland awaiting its children, its builders and redeemers, but it is closed tightly before them.
“On the other side stand exiled and tortured Jews with packs on their shoulders standing upon the borders of nations, trying to get out, but there is nowhere for them to go,” Bursztyn wrote.
“But the day will surely come when all the evil that surrounds us will fade away like smoke, when Israel’s oppressors will be vanquished and a Jewish people, healthy in body and soul, will be a free people in its homeland, the land of Zion and Jerusalem,” he wrote.
The exhibit is a very moving evocation of the life of a typical middle-class Jewish family as the Holocaust closed in.
Elja was inside the ghetto when it was sealed, but his wife was out of town. The daughter, Tauba, appears to have smuggled herself – and goods – in and out of the ghetto.
“I could write a lot about our lives, but I don’t want to set off my nerves, and my heart and willpower are too weak at this moment to get into it,” Elja wrote to his wife in a letter that was part of the trove.
In the letter he mixed Yiddish and Polish words in an apparent attempt to dodge the censors.
Other items include Tauba’s schoolbooks and notebooks – including her doodles – as well as her class autograph book, full of sentimental verse, and Shmuel’s report card, in Polish and Hebrew. His grades were all simply marked “adequate.”
Yellow ration cards were found, as well as food wrappers. There were also keepsakes, like prewar wedding invitations.
“It was very exciting for the young Polish Jews here,” Reisner said of the discovery. “They began to see the continuity.”
He said it was not known how the documents ended up in the attic, but that probably the Gentiles who moved into the apartments after the war, in 1946-47, simply used whatever they found in the building as insulation.
The latest dated document was a 1946 bill for repairs to the apartments.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
