Who Will Write Our History

FAIN: TR-254000-17

Katahdin Productions (Los Angeles, CA 90036-3251)
Roberta Grossman (Project Director: August 2016 to July 2025)

Katahdin Productions requests $407,450 for completion of Who Will Write Our History, a 90-minute documentary film about historian Emanuel Ringelblum and the secret archive he created in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. The film is based on the book of the same name by historian Samuel Kassow. Ringelblum’s Oyneg Shabes Archive is regarded among historians as an extraordinary achievement of scholarly self-study in the very depths of hell. The 30,000+ pages of documents including diaries, essays, poems, paintings, photographs, letters, underground newspapers, Judenrat records, and Nazi artifacts, are considered the most important cache of in-the-moment, eyewitness accounts to survive the Holocaust. Despite its power and importance for historians of the Warsaw Ghetto, to this day the Archive remains largely unknown outside academic circles. This film will change that, in the way that only a film can do, by making the story accessible to millions of people around the world.