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ABSTRACT
Ruta Sakowska spent her entire professional career at the Jewish Historical Institute (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny; ŻIH) in Warsaw, and her scholarly legacy is inextricably linked to Oyneg Shabes, the clandestine documentation project organized by Emanuel Ringelblum in the Warsaw Ghetto that became the focus of her work. Sakowska belonged to a generation of Jewish youth that came of age as second-class citizens in a newly independent Poland; most of her cohort was murdered during the Holocaust. Although she survived the war in the Soviet Union, she lost many years performing relatively menial jobs and did not receive her doctorate in history until she was in her fifties. Her fraught relationships with her colleagues at ŻIH were another significant obstacle to her professional advancement. Notwithstanding, she made several major scholarly contributions, both in her analysis of the Ringelblum Archive and in her preparations for its publication.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 An article written soon after Sakowska's death included a bibliography of her work that comprised 174 articles and books, the vast majority based on the Ringelblum Archive and focusing on the Warsaw Ghetto (see Bergman, “Ruta Sakowska [1922–2011]”). Although she published many articles in the 1960s that described various aspects of life in the Warsaw Ghetto – the postal service, the theater, the Judenrat, schooling – most of her serious academic work began after she received her doctorate. Among her major works are the 1980 compilation of documents from the Ringelblum Archive, Archiwum Ringelbluma. Getto warszawskie lipiec 1942-styczeń 1943, concentrating on the period from July 1942 until January 1943; the two editions of Ludzie z dzielnicy zamkniętej; and the first two volumes of ŻIH's thirty-six volume publication of the Ringelblum Archive, Archiwum Ringelbluma. Konspiracyjne Archiwum Getta Warszawy. Shorter articles worthy of special mention include “Opór cywilny warszawskiego getta” and “Two Forms of Resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto.”
2 As Tadeusz Epsztein points out, Sakowska made few if any efforts to engage in a comparative study of different ghettos. See Epsztein, '“Wpomnienie o dr Rucie Sakowskiej (1922–2011).” Epsztein (together with Eleonora Bergman) oversaw much of the project to publish the Ringelblum Archive, and his relationship with Ruta was fraught – as was, it should be said, her relationship with the first of the authors of the present article.
3 Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, 120.
4 Vilner tog (13 November 1937). The actual phrase Reyzen used was “di mutershtot fun yidisher gezelshaftlekhkayt.” For more on this topic, see Kassow, “The Mother City of Jewish Public Life.”
5 Sutzkever used the familiar “du” form in addressing her and asked to be remembered to her parents. Archiwum Żydowski Instytut Historyczny (AŻIH), Collection PL 312/S/374: Ruta Sakowska's personal papers (hereafter: RS Papers).
6 Along with the Realgymnasium, the Sofia Gurevich school and gymnasium reflected a dedication to Yiddish education in Vilna that was unrivaled by any other major city in Poland. Although Warsaw had six times as many Jews as Vilna and a much stronger economic base, it did not have a single Jewish secondary school where the primary language of instruction was Yiddish. Vilna had two.
7 In an oral interview conducted in Yiddish, Benjamin Harshav recalled that the school made every effort to encourage individual students to develop their particular passions and interests. He also remembered “trials” at which students studied history by judging specific historical events. At a “trial” of the Cossacks vis-à-vis the Khmelnitsky Uprising of 1648–1649, which was notorious for large-scale massacres of Jews, the young Harshav's job was to present and defend the Cossacks. See online at: yiddishbookcenter.org/collections/oral-histories/interviews/woh-fi-0000401/benjamin-binyomen-harshav-2013 (accessed 9 July 2023).
8 In the wake of harassment by Polish authorities, Gurevich, a renowned pedagogue who had founded the school, left Poland for the Soviet Union in 1932. By the time Sakowska entered the gymnasium, the principal of the school was Dvora Freidkes-Hrushovsky, who continued its progressive pedagogical traditions.
9 Biographical details on Malka Chaimson-Bastomski can be found in Kh.Sh. Kazdan, ed., Lerer yizker bukh, 168–169. Chaimson-Bastomski died in the Vilna Ghetto.
10 Reyzen's arrest caused a great deal of consternation, since he was known as a “progressive” and even as a fellow traveler. Other victims of Soviet terror included Joseph Chernikhov, a lawyer who had defended Communists in Polish courts, and Ana Rozental, a leader of the Bund in Vilna. Reyzen and Chernikhov were murdered in 1941, while Rozental died in prison. See Kaczerginski, Tsvishn hamer un serp, 14–17.
11 Jobs on the newspaper were highly coveted in a city full of desperate refugees, and it is certain that Pups had to undergo a vetting process that weeded out writers of doubtful ideological reliability. See Estraikh, “The Missing Years.” Hersh Smolar, who edited the Bialystoker shtern, mentions Meyer Pups as being part of the group of talented writers he worked with. See Smolar, Vu bistu, Khaver Sidorov? 162.
12 AŻIH, RS Papers, Meyer Pups' autobiographical notes (undated and unpaginated).
13 Only those who had some connection to the regime, and their family members, got a place on that train. Ruta and her mother probably succeeded because Meyer worked for the Bialystoker shtern. The train was heavily bombed on its way to Minsk but eventually reached Saratov. See Nalewajko-Kulikov, Obywatel Jidyszlandu, 129.
14 AŻIH, RS Papers, Meyer Pups' autobiographical notes.
15 Between 1956 and 1960, about 245,000 former Polish citizens left the USSR, among them, about 18,000 Jews.
16 Among those who arrived in Poland at this time were the noted actor Avrom Morevski and the writer and literary critic Shloyme Belis-Legis. See Estraikh, “Escape Through Poland.” Between 1955 and 1960, the Polish government issued 51,000 emigration permits to Israel. See Stola, “Jewish Emigration from Communist Poland,” 177. This included about 14,000 out of the approximately 18,000 Jews who repatriated from the Soviet Union during this period.
17 AŻIH, RS Papers, Ruta Pups to Ber Mark (1 November 1958).
18 Ibid., Ber Mark notation on Pups letter (1 March 1960). The monthly average salary in Poland at that time was 2,000 zlotys a month. See Kichelewski, “A Community under Pressure.”
19 ŻIH was in the same building that had housed the prewar Institute of Judaic Studies and the famed library of the Great Synagogue on Tłomackie Street. In the Warsaw Ghetto, it served as the headquarters of the Aleynhilf, and Emanuel Ringelblum had his office there. It was hardly a coincidence that an extensive interview with Sakowska that was published shortly before her death was titled “An Entire Life with Ringelblum.” See Ciałowicz, ed.,”Całe życie z Ringelblumem.”
20 Tych, “The Emergence of Holocaust Research in Poland,” 234.
21 Ciałowicz, ed.,”Całe życie z Ringelblumem.”
22 A good discussion of this censorship can be found in Person and Żółkiewska, “Edition of Documents from the Ringelblum Archive.” See also Nalewajko-Kulikov, “Dzieje publikacji Kroniki getta warszawskiego w Polsce; “Stach “Duch czasu wycisnął jednak na tej pracy swe piętno.”
23 Mark wrote, for example: “The Uprising was an element of universal liberation struggle conducted by the nation under the PPR leadership; it was a link to the universal struggle of mankind under the Soviet Union's lead against Nazi Germany.” Quoted in Nalewajko-Kulikov, “Three Colors,” 220. Yitzhak Zuckerman would write years later that Mark was a “gifted journalist but a lousy historian.” Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory, 410.
24 “In this 1959 edition, Mark criticized his previous work for giving “a too biased description of the resistance movement forces in the ghetto.” Quoted in Nalewajko-Kulikov, “Three Colors,” 222.
25 As Feliks Tych, a former director of the institute, noted, “As a consequence of the rapid growth of the party membership, the not-so-numerous communist veterans, people mostly alien to antisemitic attitudes and educated in the spirit of internationalism, became a minority group in their own party.” Tych, “The Emergence of Holocaust Research in Poland,” 238.
26 Kichelewski, “A Community under Pressure,” 162.
27 Mark, “Dziennik,” 162.
28 On surveillance of the institute, see Rutkowski, “Kierunki, cele i rezultaty działań Służby Bezpieczeństwa PRL wobec Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego.”
29 Sakowska's favorite photograph of herself showed her as a wistful 17-year-old girl. The inscription she wrote on the back reads: “In spirit I always remained that person who is in this photograph.” She instructed that it be sent after her death to a young Polish historian, Przemysław Nowicki, whom she had befriended and advised. See Przemysław Nowicki, “Wpomnienie o dr Rucie Sakowskiej,” online at sztetl.org.pl/en/node/183538 (accessed 10 July 2023).
30 AŻIH, RS Papers, letter (2 January 1980). Details on her employment history in Vilnius can be found in Trudovaia Knizhka (4 September 1958). This was a summary of her employment history issued in connection with her imminent emigration to Poland.
31 AŻIH, RS Papers, letter to ŻIH director Szymon Datner (31 May 1969).
32 Other sources assert that conditions at the institute left much room for improvement. Stefan Krakowski believed that while Ber Mark was certainly intelligent and a fine literary critic, he was a poor organizer who did little to make best use of ŻIH's resources. There was little effort to organize internal seminars or to train and guide the staff. During the relatively brief period when Polish archives, including party and military archives, were open to researchers, the institute did not take advantage of the situation to conduct proper surveys. Moreover, ŻIH squandered opportunities afforded by the renewal of financial support from the Joint Distribution Committee (Joint) after 1957. The November 1967 accusation by the Supreme Audit Office that too many members of the ŻIH staff lacked proper academic training was based on fact, even though the chief motivation for the charge was to discredit the institute as a whole. See Hebrew University, Oral History Division, interview with Stefan (Shmuel) Krakowski (29 April 1969), tape no. 1503.
33 AŻIH, RS Papers, letter to Professor Maurycy Horn (2 January 1980). In a letter to ŻIH director Artur Eisenbach in early 1968, at a time when the institute was facing an unprecedented crisis, Sakowska noted that by that time she had cataloged and arranged 1,135 objects of art and 256 objects rescued from synagogues; inventoried more than 5,000 photographs from the Holocaust period; prepared, at the behest of the TSKŻ (Social and Cultural Association of Jews in Poland) a special exhibit on the role of Jews in the Spanish Civil War; and written abstracts detailing more than 5,000 different objects and photographs on the history of Polish Jewry.
34 Pups, ed., Dos Lid fun geto. Later on Ruta changed her surname from Pups to Sakowska, similar to her mother's maiden name. Why she did this is not clear.
35 Ibid., 5.
36 The exact number of Jews who left is hard to establish. Anat Plocker cites Dariusz Stola's figure of 15,000, while others give a number of 13,500. See Plocker, The Expulsion of the Jews from Communist Poland, 2.
37 For a good treatment of this subject, see Rutkowski, “Żydowski Instytut Historyczny i jego pracownicy w okresie wydarzeń marcowych 1968 r.” See also the very revealing interview with Stefan (Shmuel) Krakowski (see n. 32), in which he describes the mood of despair and desperation that pervaded the institute.
38 Krakowski interview, 15.
39 In a letter to the then director of the institute, Marian Fuks (8 July 1970), Sakowska reveals that she was driven to take this unpaid leave because she felt angry and hurt by the “brutal” treatment she suffered from her colleagues. She admitted that she had acted in a fit of pique, but that she couldn't help it (“Przegrywam, bo na brutalność reagujȩ wybuchem”). Her colleagues, she believed, treated her ideas with condescension and scorn. She was also hurt that the institute made no move to stop her when she declared that she was taking that leave. AŻIH, RS Papers.
40 In a letter to Professor Maurycy Horn, director of the institute (6 July 1974), shortly before she was scheduled to defend her doctorate, Sakowska wrote: “I find it hurtful that here at ŻIH, I have to make such efforts to prove my status and bona fides as a historian of the Warsaw Ghetto. I find working at ŻIH attractive: the research on Jewish themes, the chance to do editorial work and the availability of sources. I do believe that my modest ambitions – to publish documents and to join the group of other scholars writing about the ghetto – comport entirely with the interests of the institute and your long-term interests as well. So I don't think you should pay much attention to the sulking and pouting of my colleagues whose male chauvinism makes it impossible for them to accept the fact that a woman is also able to achieve something” (emphasis added). AŻIH, RS Papers.
41 In a letter (30 December 1985) letter to Ilja Epsztejn, then director of ŻIH, she thanked him for a recent raise in salary and politely declined his offer to keep her on in a half-time position after her retirement. But she stressed that she needed to continue her research (“the central content of my life”) and that she wanted to maintain her ties to the institute. AŻIH, RS Papers.
42 “ŻIH is not some charitable gift offered up to the Jewish minority. It is an institution that is filling an important gap in the study of the history of Polish society. That's the basis of our usefulness to Polish scholarship … therefore, in our future collaboration with Israel concerning the planned research center, ŻIH must retain its status as a Polish institution. That frees us from a dependence on the vagaries of Israeli–Polish relations. Regardless of our attitude toward the government of Israel or its policies, we are Polish citizens.” AŻIH, RS Papers, letter (28 November 1990) to the director and the academic secretary of ŻIH (28 November 1990).
43 AŻIH, RS Papers, letter to Maurycy Horn (28 January 1980).
44 An excellent discussion of this complex thicket of problems and challenges can be found in Epsztein, “Wstęp do Inwentarza Archiwum Ringelbluma.”
45 These documents now form the Hersh Wasser Collection in the YIVO Archive.
46 In 1948, after the discovery of the first cache but before the emergence of the second, Artur Eisenbach published one of the first important articles about the archive, focusing on its scientific (visnshaftlekh) work. See Eisenbach, “Visnshaftlekhe forshungen in varshever geto.”
47 The first catalog of the first and second parts was completed in 1955 under the direction of Arno Otto Zahler. It was more a list of documents than an accurate catalog describing their contents. See Epsztein, “Wstęp do Inwentarza Archiwum Ringelbluma,” 45.
48 AŻIH, RS Papers (4 July [1974]).
49 AŻIH, RS Papers; in the 1984 work prospectus, this title is given: Konspiracyjne Archiwum Getta w Warszawie (Clandestine Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto).
50 AŻIH, RS Papers, letters to Maurycy Horn (2 and 28 January 1980).
51 AŻIH, RS Papers, report of 1980 (14 December 1980). She wrote in this report that “along with the work that I already mentioned, I have also started to write an overall synthesis, as part of my planned habilitacja on the archive, an analysis of the entire collection focused on overall content and key themes. I have started to analyze how the members of the archive collected material, for example, how they formulated the questions they posed to people that they interviewed. I have also begun a formal analysis of the testimonies, biographical sketches of the members of Oyneg Shabes, and other things as well.”
52 Ibid., 28.
53 Ibid., 27.
54 Sakowska, ed., Getto warszawskie lipiec 1942–styczeń 1943, 27.
55 “Shops” was the generic term for all German enterprises in the ghetto. Many of them were managed by Jews.
56 Sakowska, ed., Getto warszawskie lipiec 1942–styczeń 1943, 28–29.
57 The planned book was to be edited by Kermish and published by Yad Vashem, with the help of a special committee that included Yitzhak Arad, Israel Gutman, Gideon Hausner, and Vladka Meed. These remarks were only published many years later in English, in a brochure that appeared in 1983.This brochure was found in Sakowska's home after her death. It should be noted that in the 1950s, Ber Mark had authorized the sending of microfilms of the archive to Israel.
58 Kermish, ed., To Live With Honor and Die With Honor. Sakowska first read Kermish's anthology around 1992 (perhaps this is when she first received it) and shared her extensive criticisms with the leadership of the institute. She had many objections: a lack of chronological order within the sections; overly verbose and even “banal” introductions to sections and documents; and a failure to indicate the original language of a document. In addition, the headings of the various sections reflected a confusing combination of criteria, at times based on formal genre, at other times on substantive content. Sakowska was particularly bothered by the apparent failure of the editors to note the “the difference between the author of a document – an Oyneg Shabes member conducting an interview – and the informant, who often had no idea that he was providing information based on a set questionnaire.” AŻIH, RS Papers, no date (1992?), seven-page note addressed to Director Daniel Grinberg and the academic secretary, Alina Cała.
59 Kermish, A Commemorative Symposium in Honour of Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum and his “Oneg Shabbat” Underground Archives, Yad Vashem, (Jerusalem 1983), 10. He listed the following themes:
The OS Archives – its establishment and activities
Diaries and notes on life and daily struggle
Monographs and studies on specific topics
Monographs and inquiries on Jewish communities and settlements
Jewish participation in the September 1939 campaign
Forced labor (incl. factories, shops), forced labor camps
Judenrat policy and social tensions
The Social Self-Help and its institutions (incl. House Committees)
The life and fate of children
Religious life
Resistance in several forms:
cultural activities,
schooling – various levels,
economic (smuggling),
resistance initiative and uprising.
Jewish-Polish relations
Moral defense and resistance in the literature
Nazi policy of eradication and total extermination
Ideas on destiny and existence.
60 It is noteworthy that Sakowska felt it necessary to include a section on photography (IX). When she began her research into the archive in the 1970s, and perhaps when she devised this initial outline, there were more photographs than there are now. One should also remember that in the last year before the outbreak of the war, Sakowska was a student at the Photography Lyceum in Warsaw, a state institution that was founded in 1928. Once she started working in the museum section of ŻIH in 1958, and even later, after she had begun her research in the Ringelblum Archive, she often wrote evaluations of various exhibitions and focused on their visual element. She may have intended to write extensive commentaries on the photographs in the archive.
61 Eleonora Bergman’s private collection, copy received from Ruta Sakowska in 2002.
62 Ringelblum's last work, written in hiding in September 1943, was titled Polish–Jewish Relations. It was first published in Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego in the original Polish in 1958 and 1959, and in English translation in Jerusalem in 1974.
63 One might regard this as a continuation of Ringelblum's approach that regarded the history of Polish Jewry as an integral part of Polish history.
64 On August 10, 1992, she wrote to Daniel Grinberg, then director of the institute: “I do not want to take on the task of being the director of a program or the director of a workshop because I fully realize that I am not suited for the task of supervising people and all such efforts until now have failed” (AŻIH, RS Papers, 1992).
65 In his introduction to the first volume of the series, Tych wrote that “organizers of the archive did not impose an a-priori structure. … Therefore the editors of this series decided on a combination of organizational principles: principally by theme, in some cases by geographical location and, lastly, within the context of these first two rubrics, by chronology … . In the introduction we call this an academic edition because we applied two fundamental principles: publication of the entire text and publication in the original language. Each text is linked to a photographic reproduction of the original document … . In this Polish edition, each text that was originally written in a language other than Polish was accompanied by a Polish translation … . ŻIH is determined to make every effort to include in this publication project all the materials of the Oyneg Shabes archive that have been preserved” (emphasis added). Tych, “Przedmowa,” in Sakowska, ed., Listy o Zagładzie, vi, viii, ix.
66 Ibid. More than half of those letters had been included in the 1980 anthology, although they were mostly listed rather than published in their entirety. (See Sakowska, Getto warszawskie lipiec 1942–styczeń 1943, docs. 85–158). During 1980, Sakowska also gave a lecture in the Evangelical Academy of West Berlin titled “Farewell Letters from the Ringelblum Archive.” Thus, one can assume that when she published the first volume, she was already working from a well-thought-out plan.
67 Sakowska, “Wstęp,” in ibid., xxiv, xxiii.
68 Even in the second half of the 1990s, ŻIH still did not have available computer-based editing. Therefore, Hebrew texts could be corrected only by hand, as one can readily discern in the published text. New developments in technology later eliminated these difficulties. In the second edited volume of the series, Children: Clandestine Education in the Warsaw Ghetto, Sakowska omitted transcripts of interviews, and they did not appear in subsequent volumes in the series. This was unfortunate, since in many cases they would have prevented errors in translations. Not long ago this idea was again considered during the course of discussions on how best to present the documents of the archive electronically. In any event, texts written in Latin and Cyrillic letters, or even typed or hectographed texts, were often difficult to read. Therefore, transcripts would be useful in any case.
69 Sakowska, ed., Dzieci. She mentioned the topic as early as 1990 in her annual work report.
70 Ibid., vii. VII.
71 See Epsztein, Wspomnienie o dr Rucie Sakowskiej, 295. Eleonora Bergman adds this personal comment: Although I agreed with some of Sakowska's criticisms and reservations, I could not accept the way she attacked Epsztein in our various encounters. But now that's all water under the bridge.
72 The Israeli edition of the clandestine press was based on chronology; all newspapers, regardless of political affiliation, were published according to the month in which they appeared. While this made it easier to look at the development of events from various perspectives, by the same token it made it harder to gauge the political and social profile of a given issue. For this reason, the Warsaw team took the decision to publish the press in separate volumes organized by political and ideological orientation. Sakowska, with support from Feliks Tych and Paweł Szapiro, fervently supported the Israeli approach; it seems that she very much favored the didactic qualities of Yad Vashem's publication and was unmoved by rational arguments concerning such matters as where to place newspapers that were undated. The decision to organize the volumes by political/ideological orientation led to a worsening of relations with Epsztein.
73 Epsztein, Wspomnienie o dr Rucie Sakowskiej, 289.
74 Datner and Pieńkowska, eds., Instytut, 164.
75 Letter of Sakowska to Daniel Grinberg and Alina Cała (6 July 1990). AŻIH, RS Papers.
76 One need only compare the relevant chapters in Ludzie z dzielnicy zamkniȩtej with Havi Dreifuss' Geto varshah.
77 Sakowska, Dwa etapy, 15.
78 Sakowska, “Opór cywilny getta warszawskiego,” 87.
79 Sakowska, annual report on her work (14 December 1980). In this letter Sakowska, who refers to herself as an “Adiunkt ŻIH,” notes that she was planning to write a study of the Ringelblum Archive for her habilitacja. AŻIH, RS Papers.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Samuel D. Kassow
Samuel D. Kassow is the Northam Professor of History at Trinity College and has authored several articles and books on Russian and East European Jewish history. His translation of Rachel Auerbach's Warsaw ghetto memoirs will appear in 2024.
Eleonora Bergman
Eleonora Bergman worked as a researcher at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw from 1991–2020 and served as director of the institute from 2007–2011. From 2007, she has been the co-coordinator (with Tadeusz Epsztein and Katarzyna Person) of the Ringelblum Archive publication project. She has authored or co-authored numerous works on the conservation of Polish historic towns and monuments of Jewish culture.