Holocaust Remembrance Day Film Screening

On Sunday, May 5 from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m., the Jewish Federation of the Berkshires presents a film and program in honor of Yom HaShoah/Holocaust Remembrance Day at the Berkshire Museum, 39 South Street.

The feature documentary Who Will Write Our History tells the fascinating story of a clandestine effort by a band of journalists, scholars, and community leaders who vowed to defeat Nazi lies and propaganda in. After the film, there will be candle lighting and prayers in memory of those murdered in the Holocaust.

This event is free and open to the public.

In November 1940, days after the Nazis sealed 450,000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, a secret band of journalists, scholars, and community leaders decided to fight back. Led by historian Emanuel Ringelblum and known by the code name Oyneg Shabes, this clandestine group vowed to defeat Nazi lies and propaganda not with guns or fists but with pen and paper. They detailed life in the Ghetto from the Jewish perspective.

They commissioned diaries, essays, jokes, poems, and songs. They documented Nazi atrocities with eyewitness accounts. They sent reports of mass murder to London via the Polish underground. Then, as trains deported them to the gas chambers of Treblinka and the Ghetto burned to the ground, they buried 60,000 pages of documentation in the hopes that the archive would survive the war, even if they did not.

Now, for the first time, the story of Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes archive is told as a feature documentary. Written, produced, and directed by Roberta Grossman and executive produced by Nancy Spielberg, Who Will Write Our History mixes the writings of the archive with new interviews, rarely seen footage, and stunning dramatizations to transport us inside the Ghetto and the lives of these courageous resistance fighters.

For more information, call (413) 442-4360, ext. 10.

(press release sent to WSBS from The Jewish Federation of The Berkshires for online and on-air use)