Will These Words Reach You? The Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto Exhibit Opens
Recovering the Ringelblum Archive beneath the ruins of 68 Nowolipki Street, in the former Warsaw Ghetto. Photo: Władysław Forbert / Polish Press Agency
What if you knew you might not survive—but believed that your words could?
This September, an extraordinary story from the Warsaw Ghetto comes to New York.
American Friends of POLIN Museum invites you to experience Will These Words Reach You? The Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. We hope you will be among the first to see this extraordinary exhibition when it opens to the public on September 18, the 80th anniversary of the recovery of the first cache of the archive.
Will These Words Reach You? The Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto
September 18, 2026 – February 14, 2027
Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust
36 Battery Place, New York City
Plan your visit: Hours and Tickets | Exhibition Information
In the Warsaw Ghetto, historian and activist Emanuel Ringelblum brought together a clandestine group of Jewish scholars, educators, journalists, artists, religious leaders, and young activists. They called themselves Oyneg Shabes, “the joy of the Sabbath,” after their secret Saturday meetings.
They knew that the Nazis were trying not only to destroy Jewish lives, but to erase Jewish history and memory.
So, they documented everything.
Over three years, Oyneg Shabes secretly gathered nearly 35,000 documents—diaries, testimonies, letters, underground newspapers, children's writings, artwork, photographs, ration cards, and other evidence of Jewish life under Nazi rule.
As deportations accelerated in 1942, members of Oyneg Shabes buried the archive in tin boxes beneath the Warsaw Ghetto. They did so, knowing they might never survive.
Their message was simple and profound. Remember us. Tell our story.
The first cache was recovered on September 18, 1946. Today, the archive is one of the most important surviving contemporaneous records of Jewish life during the Holocaust. Recognizing the extraordinary value of this archive to humanity, UNESCO has inscribed the Oyneg Shabes archive in the Memory of the World register.
Produced by the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw Will These Words Reach You? brings this remarkable story to New York through original artifacts—including one of the archive's burial containers—along with reproductions, maps, animated projections, and film footage of the postwar excavation.
For American Friends of POLIN Museum, this exhibition is especially meaningful. The Oyneg Shabes archive is the basis for the Holocaust gallery in the Core Exhibition. Thanks to this archive, visitors are brought face to face with the words of those who recorded their experience in their own voice. This is one the most memorable moments in the thousand-year history of Polish Jews presented at POLIN Museum.
Come and discover the words that were buried beneath the Warsaw Ghetto and how they reached us, eighty years later.
Production of Will These Words Reach You? was supported by Taube Philanthropies and Irene Pletka and the Kronhill Pletka Foundation.