Milk Can Memories
There’s a powerful irony at the center of Who Will Write Our History, the remarkable new documentary on the Warsaw Ghetto’s Oyneg Shabes underground archive. The archive consisted of three milk cans (two of which have been found to date) containing tens of thousands of pages, written and assembled at risk of death for the Oyneg Shabes members, who documented life under Nazi occupation. At the end of the war, Rokhl Oyerbakh was one of three surviving Oyneg Shabes members. Her task was to recover the archive from under the ruins of Warsaw.
At the end of the movie, we hear Oyerbakh’s words in voiceover: “The memories of those who survived are often as hurt and broken as their lives. That is why the most believable witness will be the written word from those years which is now in the ruins under the Warsaw Ghetto.”