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Lauren Grodstein's novel We Must Not Think of Ourselves was inspired by the Oneg Shabbat Project, a World War II archive compiled and hidden by the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto. Established and run by Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, the archive contained a wide variety of documents recording daily life in the Ghetto.
Ringelblum was born in Buczacz, Poland (now part of Ukraine) in 1900, and after graduating from Warsaw University he taught high school history. He was known as an expert on the history of Poland's Jewish community from the late Middle Ages onward and was a frequent contributor of scholarly articles on the subject.
He was also politically and socially active. As a young man he joined Po'alei Zion Left, a Marxist-Zionist group, and in 1930 became a part-time employee of the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), a Jewish humanitarian organization. In 1938 he was appointed by the JDC to lead a relief team to Zbaszyn, a small border town where some 6,000 Jewish ...
