The Ringelblum Archive as the Earliest Historiography of the Holocaust and its Impact on Research

10th Genealogies of Memory – international conference

SESSION 2
The Ringelblum Archive as the Earliest Historiography of the Holocaust and its Impact on International Research
(with Jewish Historical Institute)

KEYNOTE
Omer Bartov (Brown University, Providence, RI, USA)
'Genocide from Below: Rewriting the Holocaust as First-Person Local History'

PANEL PRESENTATIONS
Marta Janczewska (Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw)
'The Ringelblum Archive as a Global Text'

Katarzyna Person (Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw)
'Gender-Specific Violence in the Documents of the Ringelblum Archive'

Luiza Nader (Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw)
'Testimony as a Witness. Visual Artworks from the Ringelblum Archive'

VIDEO PRESENTATION
András Lénárt (Holocaust Memorial Centre, Budapest)
'Photography of the Hungarian Labour Service'

Chair: Paweł Śpiewak (Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw)
Commentary: Audrey Kichelewski (Strasbourg University), Roma Sendyka (Jagiellonian University, Cracow)

Session summary:
The second session, whose main focus was the Ringelblum Archive, was chaired by Paweł Śpiewak. The keynote speaker, Omer Bartov, presented his most recent works dealing with the genocide in the town of Buczacz. Bartov examined how writing history from below and using personal documents from eyewitnesses as primary sources informs Holocaust studies and undermines popular historical narratives that offer simplified visions of reality. The second speaker, Marta Janczewska, gave a presentation on the composition and structure of Ringelblum Archive, emphasising its fragmentary character and treating it as a model for speaking about the Holocaust. Katarzyna Person, the next speaker, examined accounts of gender-specific violence that the Ringelblum Archive contains. The scholar emphasised how she was interested not only in victimhood but also in the agency and initiative of the women depicted in the collection and drew attention to the fact that said experience of women was largely described by other women – the collaborators of the Ringelblum Archive. Audrey Kichelewski provided commentary, stressing how the victims’ narratives are crucial in Holocaust studies, given that postwar history was largely written based on the perpetrators’ documents. Kichelewski also raised the issue of the multiplicity of different voices that the Ringelblum Archive collected and asked about the analytical problems this could present. Roma Sendyka presented comments on the two presentations from a methodological angle, focusing, as did both Janczewska and Person, on the textual content of the archive, but also keeping in mind its multimedia character that poses challenges to scholars.