“WHAT WE WERE UNABLE TO SHOUT OUT TO THE WORLD”
– 1ST PRIZE IN CONTEST FOR THE PERMANENT EXHIBITION AT THE JEWISH HISTORICAL INSTITUTE
The Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, together with its history, are the axis of narration of the permanent exhibition at the Jewish Historical Institute. The so called Ringelblum Archive, added to the UNESCO World Heritage List „Memory of the World”, is a unique collection of documents, being one of the most significant reports on the extermination of Polish Jews. These documents are presented on an exhibition in a historical seat of the Jewish Historical Institute for the first time in history.
The place, where the exhibition is held, gains a symbolic meaning because of its theme, as the Archive was founded in November 1940 by a historian, Emanuel Ringelblum, who had established a secret organization Oneg Shabbat, whose meetings were held in the building which is now the main seat of the Jewish Historical Institute.
The exhibitions is divided into five spaces: the room with two tables with inscriptions – the steel table with timeline and the wooden table with drawers containing short annotations about the members of the group, the corridor made of debris where the central exhibit is placed in the deep – a can, in which the Ringelblum Archive documents were found, the wooden installation – a geometrically abstracted form inspired by the landscape of the ghetto after its liquidation, which includes Oneg Shabat members biographies, the mezzanine with desktops incorporated in the handrails and the space with the cases containing original documents from the Ringelblum Archive.
The whole exhibition is illuminated with soft, twilight light from a suspended ceiling. The narration is maintained through the architectural and sculpture efforts, without the use of plates or signs or any visible inscriptions. The only exception are the quotes from the Archive documents that show up on the walls, made with some letters recessed in plaster.
